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8 best product marketing tools to drive demand and adoption

Product marketers have mile-long task lists, from managing launches to developing personas and messaging. The secret to getting it all done without stress and overwhelm? Product marketing software.

Curating a stack of product marketing tools saves you time while ensuring you achieve your goal—a successful product that customers can’t get enough of.

Summary

With the right digital tools, product marketers work smarter, not harder, to streamline their day-to-day tasks. 

Try out these eight product marketing platforms:

  1. Hotjar lets you understand what users do and why with surveys, recordings, heatmaps, and interviews

  2. Appcues improves onboarding and feature adoption to keep customers around longer

  3. Crayon gathers the competitive intelligence you need to accurately position and price your product

  4. Paperflite lets you create, organize, and share beautifully designed sales enablement content 

  5. Aha! offers roadmapping and collaborative whiteboards to facilitate teamwork between product marketing and dev teams

  6. ActiveCampaign gives you the email marketing and automation tools you need to segment users and personalize campaigns to promote your product

  7. Asana is a collaboration and project management software that promotes cross-functional communication and organized workflows

  8. VWO lets you run A/B tests to see which version of your landing page or content performs better

1. Hotjar 

Hotjar is a product experience insights suite that helps you fill in the gaps that web analytics tools (like Google Analytics) leave behind. With Hotjar, you learn more about user behavior to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience to drive product demand and usage.

For product marketers, Hotjar offers

  • Surveys to get a quick pulse check on what users think about your product—and how you can improve it. (👉 Check out our customizable survey templates to get started in seconds!)

  • Recordings to watch individual users’ mouse movements, clicks, and scrolls as they navigate your site or web app

  • Heatmaps to visualize aggregate data about what engages users (and what leaves them cold) when it comes to your site or web app

  • Interviews to engage in back-and-forth conversations with your target audience about how they use your product. (Need participants? Select from our diverse bank of over 200,000+ people.)

💡 Pro tip: launch Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) surveys to spot unsatisfied customers before they churn, and find your happiest customers to encourage them to spread the word about your product.

With an NPS survey, you ask a single question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product/company to a friend or colleague?”

The results let you quantify and track how changes you make to your product or service impact customer experience (CX) and loyalty.

Gather insights that shape your marketing plan

Add Hotjar to your product marketing tools to deeply understand your users and meet your product goals.

2. Appcues

Product marketing managers are more than just launch specialists—they want new customers to get value from their product and stick around long-term. Onboarding and feature adoption platform Appcues helps you prevent customer churn and improve customer retention

Appcues lets product marketers

  • Create a smooth and engaging onboarding experience with personalized tours and checklists, reducing time to value (TTV) and ensuring your product looks good from the start

  • Segment users by persona or plan tier for targeted messaging and onboarding flows

  • Announce product features in-app, guide users through them with tooltips, and track adoption metrics to discover what works and what doesn’t

3. Crayon

Crayon is competitive intelligence software that helps you better understand the market and your product’s place in it. You learn how saturated the landscape is, see how competitors have priced similar products, and find market gaps.

Crayon helps product marketers

  • Keep close tabs on competitors by gathering info on product and feature releases, customer reviews, social media updates, and landing page changes 

  • Create battlecards—visual aids that give your sales team the messaging and stats they need about your product and competitors’ offerings to close deals

  • Share intel with colleagues on Slack or Teams, or embed battlecards in your sales reps’ favorite platforms, like Salesforce or HubSpot, with the click of a button

💡 Pro tip: look for tools that fit seamlessly into your existing tech stack. When checking out a potential platform, stop by its integration page to learn which other apps it communicates with. Integrations save product marketing teams a lot of time—and make it easy to keep other functions in the loop about metrics, messaging, and customer needs.

Hotjar has dozens of native integrations with popular software—and thousands more through Zapier

4. Paperflite

Paperflite offers content creation and sales enablement software that lets you build custom microsites and organize them so it’s easy for your sales and marketing teams to find the information they need about your product.

Paperflite lets product marketers

  • Create appealing content on microsites, which reps can tweak to give buyers a personalized experience 

  • Track content marketing performance as it gets shared across channels to see what drives revenue and what doesn’t

  • Help your sales team to close more deals—its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven tools suggest the best enablement content for a specific situation

5. Aha!

Often used by product development teams, Aha! lets you collaborate with product managers on strategic roadmapping to align your goals and release plans for the product or new features.

Aha! Roadmaps helps product marketers

  • Build interactive, visually appealing roadmaps to communicate changes to stakeholders in real time and ensure on-time launches 

  • Design on-brand presentations that make it easy to showcase your roadmap

  • Create collaborative digital whiteboards to brainstorm ideas with cross-functional peers, sketch out the customer journey, or conduct a SWOT analysis on your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

💡 Pro tip: build a solid foundation for your tech stack with multi-purpose tools. 

In addition to roadmapping, Aha! offers a plethora of other features and functionalities that let you create a high-level vision, build out buyer personas, and generate reports. 

Hotjar is another product suite that offers cross-functional features, like Funnels that let you click from quantitative launch metrics into qualitative user data in Recordings—so you limit your number of subscriptions and save employees from jumping between platforms.

Hotjar Funnels lets you switch effortlessly between quantitative and qualitative data in a single platform

6. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one email marketing, marketing automation, and customer relationship management (CRM) tool that lets you reach your target audience while minimizing manual effort. 

ActiveCampaign helps product marketers

  • Design customized automations to send nurture emails, track customer engagement, and notify sales about highly engaged leads

  • Monitor your marketing automations across every channel, like text messaging and live chat, throughout the customer lifecycle. Check reports to see how campaigns perform, and make quick and responsive tweaks. 

  • Create list segmentation to send your users digital marketing assets and email sequences. No need to send completely new content to each group—you can easily swap out the parts of text or images to make communications more relevant to your potential customers

7. Asana

A project management and collaboration tool, Asana helps you plan and execute marketing campaigns. Break complex projects into smaller tasks in a visual, organized way, and automate your processes to save time. 

Asana helps product marketers: 

  • Collaborate on campaigns with other team members—for example, you can notify sales representatives or copywriters about changes in messaging

  • Have a single source for project communications so no one misses updates about delays or pivots

  • Track progress toward marketing goals in a centralized location to encourage accountability

💡 Pro tip: connect Asana to Hotjar for an extra boost of efficiency. Say you notice an uptick in survey feedback that your website’s font is tough to read. Create an Asana task on the spot with the Hotjar-Asana integration, asking your dev team to look into a fix. Just follow this three-step process: 

  1. Click on the three dots at the top of a survey response

  2. Select ‘Create an Asana task’. The resulting task automatically includes a copy of the survey response and a link to the relevant recording if available.

  3. Add the task to the right workspace and project, so it’s queued up for a fix

Create an Asana task from a Hotjar survey so you remember to address a task later

8. VWO

An A/B testing platform, VWO lets you compare two versions of a landing page or product guide to see which one performs better. By running experiments, you get data that helps you optimize your site and content to better meet users’ needs.

VWO lets product marketers

  • Create variations to test with a drag-and-drop editor, making it easy to change text or graphics 

  • Adjust your test audience, getting specific with parameters such as their operating system (OS) or the amount of time they spend on the page

  • See detailed charts that highlight how much conversions improved over the baseline, alongside predictions of which version might perform the best

Use the right tools to achieve product success

To choose the right product marketing software for your needs, evaluate your day-to-day workflows, looking at where you spend the most time and what tasks frustrate you the most. 

The best tools help you carry out your product marketing strategy with more ease and confidence—and keep the user at the forefront, helping you dial into who they are and what they need. This enables you to create an amazing user experience (UX) for them, increasing conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Gather insights that shape your marketing plan

Add Hotjar to your product marketing tools to deeply understand your users and meet your product goals.

FAQs about product marketing tools