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Product marketers are the driving force behind new product (and feature) launches and their ongoing success. As the market evolves, they need to stay up to date with ever-changing technology and tools that help them excel at their work.
Rather than scouring the web trying to find the best ones, I’ve done the legwork for you. Read on to discover my list of invaluable tools that are essential to product marketers’ success.
What is product marketing?
Product marketing is the process of bringing products to market and strengthening their adoption. It’s a strategic way of building up the value of a product by generating demand, improving onboarding, and helping customers realize the benefit of that product.
Product marketing teams handle everything from initial market research to product positioning, go-to-market flow, and promotion.
Product marketers answer the question, “How are you going to get your product in front of the right customers?” Through meticulous research and planning, they take ownership of the product positioning, messaging, and branding to elevate adoption.
But product marketing isn’t a one-man show. You have to work closely with product and sales teams to position and promote products through every stage of the product life cycle — from conception through retirement or update. This cross-functional approach bridges the gap between user needs and product functionality. At every stage of that journey, there are several tools marketers can lean on to improve product performance.
Curate a powerful stack of product marketing tools to maximize your marketing efforts and stay at the forefront of all product, market, and user changes.
What do product marketing managers use tools for?
Product marketing managers need a diverse set of tools to pull on at various stages of the product life cycle. Their tech stack has to help them:
- Discover new trends and ideas
- Create relevant and compelling content
- Distribute content
- Increase adoption
- Communicate with customers
- Collaborate with internal teams
- Analyze product performance and usability
36 Product marketing tools to boost adoption, activation, and optimization
The tools in this article will aid in your role as a product marketing manager. I’ve included a variety of options for each category so you can explore different tools and find the best ones to meet your needs.
Idea discovery tools
Research informs many product marketing decisions and strategies. Product marketing teams are responsible for presenting new products in the best possible light, and they rely on data-backed information to guide their actions.
Idea discovery tools help product marketers plan the product vision, identify product and consumer trends, and transform insights into innovative product marketing strategies.
1) Productboard
Productboard is a product management tool that helps product teams better understand their customers’ needs.
It allows users to build product roadmaps, prioritize features, collate customer feedback, and validate ideas. These features help product teams work together across product development, sales, and marketing to create offerings their customers will love.
Teams can also plan launches by tapping into product features and customer feedback. With Productboard’s features, you can make sure your marketing material aligns with customer needs and highlights a product’s strengths.
2) Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics is a trend analysis tool that uncovers the latest market opportunities, trending topics, emerging technologies, and up-and-coming start-ups. The tool analyzes millions of online searches, conversations, and mentions to uncover rising trends before they hit their peak.
Tap into Exploding Topics’ insights to stay at the forefront of rising trends and capitalize on their popularity. Product teams can position their products for lucrative gains by understanding what piques customers’ interests. Upcoming trends can affect the success of launch campaigns, marketing strategies, and product messaging, so consider Exploding Topics to ensure you ride the right current.
3) Google Trends
Explore Google’s database of online searches and uncover popular search queries with Google Trends. You can browse currently trending searches, search by country, and view trend performance over time for specific keywords.
Google Trends enables product marketing teams to:
- Validate whether certain products are really back on trend
- Identify trending topics for marketing content and product messaging
- Uncover the best time to promote products based on seasonal trends
- Research new product expansion opportunities
This free tool offers a trove of data to support your product marketing efforts.
4) BuzzSumo
While on the subject of trends, BuzzSumo is another great option for uncovering trending topics. This content marketing tool showcases top-performing content in real time so product marketing teams can identify the strongest pieces in their niche.
BuzzSumo can also help generate content ideas, monitor performance, and discover influencers. The content opportunities within BuzzSumo are a must-have for product marketing teams that aim to prioritize content in their product launch strategy.
5) Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a robust SEO tool that’s mainly used to analyze website performance, keyword rankings, and SEO opportunities. However, it also functions as a competitor analysis tool, making it a valuable asset for product marketers wanting to gain the upper hand in their market.
Product marketing teams can use Ahrefs to analyze their competitors’ most popular content, review their keyword rankings and backlinks, and observe their overall organic performance. Then, they can use that information to craft a product marketing plan that surpasses the competition.
Content creation tools
Content marketing sometimes falls within the responsibilities of the product marketing team. While they may take the lead on thought leadership content, product marketers should be responsible for developing product-centric content that emphasizes the product experience to convert prospects into customers.
A well-honed content marketing strategy exhibits product advantages effectively to nurture prospects along every step of the customer journey. To enrich the quality of your product-centric content, adopt any of the following content creation tools.
6) Bazaarvoice
Engage customers on a global scale with the shopper engagement tool Bazaarvoice.
Bazaarvoice draws on user-generated content (UGC) to strengthen product positioning and nurture brand advocates. From product sampling to brand activation, customer feedback, and content distribution, this tool is overflowing with UGC features geared to assist product marketing teams. It offers tons of actionable insights on brands, competitors, and products.
Whether you’re looking to launch new products or elevate your existing product ranges, Bazaarvoice can enhance your product marketing performance before, during, and after launch.
7) Ceros
Ceros is a collaborative, real-time digital canvas where designers can create and publish interactive content without the need for developers. This no-code design tool is a powerful content creation option for product marketing teams.
With Ceros, you can transform digital content from landing pages into product demos, microsites, resource hubs, and quizzes. These interactive capabilities are excellent for engaging customers with enticing, product-centric content.
8) Bloomreach
Support go-to-market strategies with Bloomreach, an intelligent commerce experience suite. Bloomreach offers a range of content, customer engagement, and product discovery products that drive personalization and growth.
You can orchestrate unified omnichannel experiences, personalize web content based on customer behavior, or drive engagement with marketing insights. Bloomreach gives product performance a boost by crafting personalized customer experiences.
9) Wistia
Video content is arguably the best way to show off your products and spotlight their features. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a million.
Wistia is an all-encompassing video marketing platform. On it, marketers can produce, host, market, and analyze videos. It lets you host videos live, embed them on your site, or edit them to perfection. You can even collaborate with internal teams on video projects.
Wistia also allows product marketing teams to integrate high-quality video content into product marketing campaigns. Create explainer videos for product pages, promotional videos for product launch campaigns, and more, then use Wistia’s analytical tool to review their performance.
10) Unbounce
Unbounce is a customizable landing page builder focused on helping marketers increase conversions.
With over 100 high-converting landing page templates to choose from, product marketing teams can easily construct effective landing pages for their product campaigns — without relying on design, development, or website teams. Whether you need targeted landing pages to use alongside paid advertising campaigns, product launch landing pages, or “coming soon” holding pages, Unbounce has you covered.
You can also leverage pop-ups and sticky bars to make product announcements. However you choose to use it, Unbounce is a helpful tool for product landing page creation.
Content distribution tools
Product marketers have a lot of content to share, including launch content, reviews, social media posts, landing pages, and email marketing. Distributing content can be time-consuming, but the right tools can make it a seamless process that yields lucrative results. These are largely one-way communication tools, from your brand to your audience.
11) CoSchedule
CoSchedule keeps content organized: Product marketing teams can use its marketing calendar to plan, schedule, and distribute content. This cross-functional tool provides visibility across all projects and campaigns.
Marketers can centralize their product publishing and promotion strategies. If you’re working on multiple product launches at once, this calendar is perfect for gaining a top-level overview of them all.
Other tools within CoSchedule include the Headline Studio (for optimizing content headlines), a marketing suite of agile tools to coordinate marketing teams, projects, and processes, and the Actionable Marketing Institute, where marketers can expand their marketing knowledge and expertise.
12) Outbrain
Outbrain is a web recommendation platform where marketers can advertise their products online. Consider using it to capture beta testers, or reach new audiences that you’d like to gauge product and messaging response from.
Its targeting capabilities land products in front of the right people. Using Outbrain, product marketing teams ensure their products reach customers at every stage of the buyer journey.
Additionally, Outbrain amplifies product visibility by advertising across media platforms like CNN, The Washington Post, and Le Monde. Advertisers can create ads that mimic editorial stories so their product ads fit seamlessly into surrounding media content.
13) ActiveCampaign
ActiveCampaign is a customer experience tool that lets users send transactional and marketing emails and build automated sales and marketing funnels.
Its email marketing capabilities push product marketing emails to the right audience at the right time. Ranging from broadcast emails to autoresponders and triggered to targeted emails, ActiveCampaign distributes product messaging through a variety of email formats.
Product marketing teams can also tap into user behavior to construct automated funnels through the tool. These funnels bridge the gap between sales and marketing as they guide users along the customer journey, putting users in touch with sales teams at the right time.
14) GetResponse
Email marketing is crucial for keeping new and existing customers informed about upcoming product releases, offers, and other news. However, GetResponse stretches beyond email marketing to reach your customers.
Along with traditional online communications, GetResponse users can create landing pages and automate their marketing to boost performance. The intuitive marketing automation platform’s push notifications allow product marketers to send new product offers and updates to customers while they browse online. Teams can further amplify their product messaging with SMS marketing automation as well.
GetResponse’s Conversion Funnel product suite is a dream for product marketers wanting to automate content distribution throughout the buyer journey. They can nurture customers with personalized email campaigns, automatically recommend new products based on previous purchases, send automated abandoned order emails, and more. With GetResponse, product marketing teams can reach customers when it matters most.
15) OneSignal
Push notifications are a simple yet effective way to keep customers engaged. OneSignal capitalizes on them to strengthen customer engagement.
Use OneSignal to reach customers with push notifications on their mobile devices, web browsers, or in app. The tool helps product marketers curate relevant and timely notifications that encourage customers to reengage.
From promos and updates to user messages, transactional notifications, and conversion drivers, OneSignal offers a variety of notification types to spark action and encourage user engagement.
Product adoption tools
Everything product marketers do is geared toward one main objective: increasing product adoption among customers.
Higher product adoption goes hand in hand with a higher customer lifetime value, which contributes toward healthy revenue margins.
To expand product adoption and retention, product marketers continually need to improve the product, engage with users, and enhance the full product experience. Thankfully, there’s a collection of marketing tools specifically designed to accomplish these tasks.
16) Appcues
Refine and polish the customer experience by designing personalized experiences with Appcues.
Appcues’ software is geared toward improving adoption of SaaS products, and every product marketer should have it in their arsenal. Product marketing teams can create in-app experiences without the need for a developer or designer.
Build personalized onboarding flows that guide customers efficiently to conversion. You can then nurture those consumers and increase feature adoption with Appcues’ range of engagement features, which include slideouts, A/B testing, segmentation, and more.
17) UserTesting
UserTesting collects audience feedback so product marketers can craft richer product experiences.
The software lets you engage members of the company’s contributor network or your audience to complete user research surveys and tasks. Ask them to answer or perform anything that gives you an insight into the customer experience. Then, watch their experience as you learn how people engage with your product and how you can expand adoption by making that experience more emotional and functional.
18) UserGuiding
UserGuiding is a product marketer’s secret weapon for crafting product walkthroughs that increase adoption.
Build onboarding experiences, in-product messaging, product redesign walkthroughs, announcement bars, product usage hints, and more. UserGuiding offers a treasure trove of features to boost and maintain digital product adoption.
19) Moxo
Source: https://www.moxo.com/product/overview
Moxo is a client interaction management tool. In simple terms, it helps client-facing companies accelerate performance and adoption.
Product marketing managers can use Moxo to automate routine service processes, onboard clients, and personalize the app experience. Automating routine processes presents users with a seamless experience.
You can thus strengthen customer relationships, make it easier for them to complete tasks, and keep note of any customer interactions to improve product features. By making your product easier to use, Moxo facilitates stronger product and feature adoption.
Customer feedback tools
A surveyed 78% of SaaS marketers see frequent, proactive customer communication as a vital component of their customer retention strategy.
Keeping customers informed and engaged is a surefire way to foster trust and guarantee satisfaction. But customer communication entails more than a simple phone call or email. To reach your customers, you need to be active on several platforms. Remember to solicit feedback and analyze customer data regularly.
Make conversations with customers central to your product marketing strategy by embracing these customer communication tools.
Unlike in the content distribution tools section, these are largely two-way communication tools, designed to facilitate open conversations between your brand and your audience.
20) Canny
Customer feedback is one of your most valuable resources when it comes to formulating a product that truly helps execute your target audience’s JTBD.
Canny helps product marketers form better offerings by accurately and efficiently gathering customer feedback. Use their various feedback request templates to gather actionable feedback, prioritize it on your product roadmap, and keep users informed about new releases.
Some of their tools include a new feature voting board, customer feedback segmentation, project management tool integrations, and changelog updates.
21) Intercom
Intercom is on a mission to make customer communication personal. It unites lead generation, customer support, and marketing in a centralized customer messaging platform.
Product marketing teams leverage Intercom to interact with customers through chatbots, WhatsApp, push notifications, emails, and more. Any messages sent between customers and team members can be accessed in an easy-to-use inbox. You can even automate routine workflows such as assigning conversations to the right team member.
What’s more, you can also build personalized customer journeys that keep customers connected across multiple channels.
22) Freshdesk
Created by Freshworks, Freshdesk is customer service software that aims to simplify customer communications.
With it, product marketing teams can generate meaningful customer interactions. Additionally, Freshdesk’s Support Desk lets customer service teams deliver faster customer service with less effort thanks to its ability to bring various teams together when responding to tickets.
Similar to Twilio Engage, Freshdesk’s Omnichannel Suite lets users engage with customers across several platforms in a centralized location while also automating repetitive customer service tasks. The Field Service Management feature is also a great opportunity to help customer-facing teams effectively connect with customers in real time.
23) Gorgias
Gorgias is an all-in-one customer service solution designed specifically for eCommerce stores. It offers a host of intuitive features that aim to score greater profits from customer service.
Gorgias can centralize cross-channel interactions to one location, automate repeat customer service tasks, measure customer service performance, and empower support teams to go the extra mile by giving them access to valuable customer and product data.
24) Segment
Twilio Segment is a customer data platform (CDP) that lets you collect, clean, and activate your customer data. You can then funnel this information to every team in your organization for collaborative product and user optimization.
Although not a communication tool per se, Segment can help target the right customer segments to gather feedback from, then analyze that feedback. Product marketers can use Segment to view customer behavior across multiple touch points and deliver personalized experiences in real time.
Twilio Engage, a subfeature of Segment, allows product marketers to deepen customer relationships by conducting omnichannel interactions from one central platform. Use Twilio’s scalable and flexible email and SMS channels to reach customers anywhere and measure ROI to see which communication channel performs best.
Internal collaboration tools
While excelling at customer service is important, your internal communication also needs to be robust. Enabling your internal teams to converse, share ideas, and collaborate effectively is crucial for delivering a stellar product experience.
To open up clear channels, you’ll need a tool stack that empowers information sharing, engagement, promotion, interaction, and management between different team members and departments.
25) HubSpot
HubSpot’s CRM makes it easy for internal teams to share customer insights.
Communication is key to any relationship, be it between a brand and customers, coworkers, or managers and their teams. As a comprehensive sales, marketing, and CRM suite, HubSpot lets product marketing and sales teams consolidate their efforts.
Keep all teams on the same page by ensuring everyone has access to the same customer insights and data. Product marketing teams can leverage HubSpot to glean customer information for marketing purposes, then the sales team can use this information to interact with customers throughout their life cycles. Together, both teams can gain a strong understanding of customer needs, challenges, and opportunities and work collaboratively to streamline the marketing-to-sales process.
26) Asana
Asana is a project management platform that helps cross-functional teams stay organized and work together on projects.
It enables product marketing teams to manage cross-team projects while looping in product teams, sales managers, and web developers and designers. View the product roadmap and plan marketing campaigns and activities according to the schedule. With Asana, you can run your product launches without a hitch.
27) Notion
Notion is an innovative note-taking workspace. Featuring a minimalist design, it lends itself to a myriad of uses like improving knowledge-sharing between cross-functional teams.
While Notion can function as a project management tool, I recommend using it as a knowledge-sharing platform. Build a knowledge management system in Notion so all teams associated with the product life cycle can seamlessly collaborate on product projects. Notion-based knowledge management systems can be as granular as sharing user research documents, product roadmaps, product launch processes, and more.
28) Slack
Slack is an instant messaging tool for organizations. The platform unifies cross-team communication and collaboration in one place, making it ideal for product teams.
Slack fosters open communication between teams and streamlines daily tasks with real-time conversations. Create dedicated channels for collaborating across various functions and goals of wider product projects.
Product marketing teams can take advantage of Slack to discuss ongoing projects with all involved parties, share product updates and knowledge, and gain insights from adjacent teams.
29) InVision
InVision is an all-in-one collaborative online whiteboard that helps teams work together on projects.
Product marketing teams often participate in marketing and web designs, such as building new product landing pages, launch announcement pop-ups, or product feature assets. InVision allows them to brainstorm ideas, plan product launch campaigns, and collaborate with designers.
Designers can share their planned workflows and designs with the product marketing team, who can then leave feedback and share their thoughts. You can even use InVision on video chat to formulate ideas and edit designs as a team in real time.
Analysis tools
Research and analysis are crucial facets of product marketing. Collecting data, analyzing user behavior, identifying marketing opportunities, and reporting on performance are just some of the ways analysis shows up in a product marketer’s role.
Data should be the cornerstone of all product marketing decisions, and analysis tools help obtain that support. While the following analysis tools may seem similar, they differ in their approach, and what works for one organization may not be the preferred option for another. The right tool for your team depends on your analysis goals and experience.
30) Mixpanel
Unlock valuable customer insights with the product analytics tool Mixpanel. Product marketing managers can dive into user behavior and generate interactive reports with it. Segment users into personalized cohorts to analyze how people interact with your products so you can improve engagement going forward.
31) Snowplow
An analytical tool focused primarily on behavioral data, Snowplow lets users tap into behavioral data to enrich product experiences and optimize products for conversion and retention. The tool enables product marketing teams to understand how users interact with their products throughout the entire user journey.
Incorporate insights gleaned from Snowplow to personalize user journeys, customize marketing messaging, and elevate your best-performing product marketing materials. For example, eCommerce product teams could use Snowplow to recover abandoned carts, while SaaS product teams could leverage insights from it to upgrade their onboarding experience.
32) Amplitude
Amplitude is a product analytics tool that deepens product marketers’ understanding of their users, optimizes product experiences, and strengthens customer adoption and retention.
A popular solution among leading brands across retail and SaaS, product marketing teams can employ Amplitude to uncover valuable customer insights. View user conversion journeys and easily spot drop-off points to identify key marketing channels, landing pages, and campaigns. Learn from this data to refine the user journey and increase retention.
33) PostHog
An open-source product analytics platform, PostHog broadens product teams’ knowledge of user behavior through a variety of analytical features.
In the product analytics section, product marketers can dive into user funnels, explore paths, discover trends, and create custom dashboards. Together, these features reveal which aspects of the funnel work well, impart learnings with the wider product team, and help product marketing teams make improvements.
User behavior features such as heatmaps and session recordings provide first-hand insight into how people engage with your product. Quickly uncover roadblocks and share information with development teams to debug product features and optimize performance.
34) Google Analytics 4 (GA4)
Google Analytics 4, commonly known as GA4, is Google’s cookieless analytics platform. Using an event-based approach, GA4 tracks on-site user behavior across the web and mobile devices. It then simplifies data by providing a single dashboard of analysis widgets, which users can drill down into for more in-depth information.
Product marketing teams can use the platform to determine which on-site content performs best and improve future content marketing efforts. They can also see which channels drive users to the site and learn how these sources work together to increase product conversion and engagement. Product marketers can then dive deeper into eCommerce analytics to better understand buying behaviors.
35) Heap
Heap positions itself as being the “only digital insights platform that gives you complete understanding of your customers’ digital journeys” — a gutsy claim.
It deviates from competitor tools by focusing on in-app experiences and events rather than lead sources and acquisition channels. Embrace Heap to drive product-led growth by learning how customers use your product.
Thanks to automated data science, Heap offers features that are missing from other analysis tools: For example, it auto-captures user interactions with no need to tag events manually. With Heap automatically uncovering hidden insights to fill any data gaps, product marketers can easily view the bigger picture. Additionally, the integrated session reply makes it easier to pinpoint how users engage with the product and marketing site.
36) FullStory
FullStory is another analysis tool focused on optimizing digital experiences. It captures product analytics and session insights, as well as provides full data coverage of user behavior without compromising their privacy.
With FullStory, product marketing teams can delve into user behavior to understand why people took the actions they did. Action-oriented insights such as “rage clicks” help identify user frustrations so marketers can work with the development team to debug and hone the product experience. Plug FullStory into other tech tools to construct a powerful ecosystem of insights.
Wrapping up — Optimize your customer experience with a robust product marketing toolkit
A first-rate, comprehensive product marketing tool kit will depend on your goals, products, and capacity. Experiment with a few tools in each category to find the ones that best fit your requirements and objectives.
This list presents some product marketing tools that can assist with multiple facets of your role as a product marketer. Whether you’re looking for a solution that eases internal collaboration or you want to focus on developing ideas, you’re bound to discover a winning option within this list of product marketing tools.
Choose one to start or build an aligned tech stack of tools from each category. If, for example, you want to improve product launch campaigns, you may want to opt for ProductBrain, Unbounce, and CoSchedule to manage the campaign from ideation to distribution. Then, bring in your chosen analysis tool to review performance.
Take your time with your adoption. Obtaining the best results requires tools that accommodate your business’s needs.
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