How your team can prioritize product marketing for growth? – PART 2

D. How does product marketing complement traditional marketing?

Traditional marketing teams focus on demand generation; they are the drivers behind generating leads and supplying a wealth of hot, qualified leads to your sales teams. However, their resources need to come from somewhere, this is where product marketers come in.

Product marketing teams work alongside traditional marketing teams to better position the product within its target demographic. They create content and provide insights for content creation to ensure the product is communicated accurately and is highlighting its most useful features for the audience.

It’s good to think of product marketing as the backbone to any marketing team. Without them, there would be no content to drive leads, and a marketing team runs the risk of miscommunicating a product or losing time in creating content to accurately convey it. A product marketing team provides the material; the marketing team innovatively distributes it.

Product Manager versus Product Marketing Manager

Two very similar sounding roles, with some crossover, but very different purposes:

• A Product Marketing Manager looks after product positioning and communication.
• A Product Manager looks after the product, its features, and its evolution.

The two managers may often work from the same data points, but what they do with this data is very different.

For example, if a product was producing a high churn rate on day three of user onboarding. A Product Manager may look at what is happening with the physical product on that day; perhaps there’s a bug, perhaps it’s not performing as promised, or maybe there’s room for improvement.

Whereas a Product Marketing Manager will look at the user onboarding journey and the information a customer is or isn’t receiving that could be a catalyst to them leaving. They may also look at user expectations and decipher if a product is not meeting them because of inaccurate messaging.

It’s so important that these two roles work side-by-side. Not only because they’re sharing data but also because each will have access to data that the other won’t, yet will certainly benefit both of their work.

E. Why should you prioritize product marketing?

If you’re still unconvinced that your business needs a product marketing team, then we’re about to change your mind. There are a ton of benefits to prioritizing product marketing for business growth.

Get to really know your customers

Traditional marketing teams have toolkits that can give insights into your online brand sentiment and popularity: Social listening tools, Google Analytics, and data visualization platforms all help gauge how people feel towards your business. At the same time, product teams have resources to understand how someone interacts with your product, like heatmaps, in-app surveys, and user recording tools.

Yet product marketing teams have insights into how people feel about interacting with your product. Using a collection of customer interview techniques, user research, and in-product feedback tools, product marketing teams have the power to conduct and act upon valuable data to help win, retain, and understand your customers.

Ensure your positioning is right

Product marketers are in the prime position to ensure your personas resonate with your brand messaging. Using customer development surveys, they can understand how valued your product is with users and transform this data into actionable ways to better position your product in the market.

Improve your sales and revenue

Businesses that have prioritized product marketing have proven to grow revenue by up to 50% a year. That’s a massive step up for your product sales and overall business growth. It’s reassuring to know your expenditures on product marketing can pay themselves back within the first year of implementing a product marketing strategy.

How can product marketing take revenue up by such a drastic amount? In short, it can help find gaps in sales enablement content that will better equip your sales team with the resources they need to convert leads.

Learn about your competitors and your strengths

Using in-depth competitor research, product marketers can identify the areas your product and communication falls short in comparison to competitors. However, it’s not all doom and gloom; they’ll also be able to highlight where you’re winning.

If communicated well, this feedback will allow a multitude of teams to either position themselves better when facing customers or identify areas within their work that have room for growth.

Look at your product marketers as your direct reference point for consumer feedback and as your competitor knowledge hub. They can be a vital resource for more than marketing.

Align product, marketing, and sales

It’s not uncommon for businesses to have product, marketing, and sales teams that work in silos. Each team looks after its responsibilities, and perhaps can be a little too quick to point the finger should company KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) not be met each quarter.

« Well, marketing didn’t provide us with hot enough leads ».

« Yeah, but sales don’t showcase the product accurately ».

« Actually, product didn’t tell us about the new feature, and now it’s too late ».

Haunting, finger-blaming statements that hopefully you haven’t witnessed and shouldn’t need to, but also help to make the point.

A product marketing team builds bridges between these three departments; they can help drive product changes, advise sales on strategic content and wins, and help marketers focus their efforts to get more leads. They can do all of this with a holistic view on business growth goals, and tie team KPIs to each other, uniting wider goals and their teams.

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Read the rest of the article:  How your Team Can Prioritize Product Marketing for Growth? – PART 3