What is Product Positioning
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Product marketers are responsible for product positioning, but how many really understand what that means?
I spent the last year as the Global Head of Product Marketing at a tech startup called Near which just announced its IPO. Prior to that, I spent 2 years as the Head of Marketing at a product-led SAAS startup. I learned a lot about Product Marketing during this journey. Now, I’m sharing everything I learned here.
Introduction
Welcome to product marketing, where you have lots of responsibilities and terms are often poorly defined. To succeed as a product marketer, one key concept you need to understand is product positioning.
What is Product Positioning?
Product positioning is a common internal job for a product marketer.
The goal of product positioning is to articulate why your solution is better than the alternatives that are out there. But don’t fall into the trap here of listing features. Product positioning is specifically about the pain points of your target audience and how your product solves those pain points.
Product positioning is about understanding and articulating the underlying value of your product and the forming a strategy to demonstrate that value to your target audience
By “internal job” I mean that the results of product positioning are used widely within the company but are not actually public facing. This is where it’s important to differentiate between product positioning and messaging.
Product positioning is internal because it informs things like messaging but is not actually the refined outward-facing content that makes up product messaging. For example, a new sales team member may review internal product positioning documents to understand the value of your product, but when talking to customers about the product they would instead refer to the messaging materials.
At its core, creating product positioning documents is you documenting where you have product market fit, with which audience, and why.
