For B2B companies, product marketing should not be underestimated. It brings your products to market — and ensures that they stay there. So that your company can overcome barriers to growth, you should go to The power duo of product marketing and product management Set.
Hardly any other development in software marketing is as important today as that of product marketing. This can already be seen from how highly sought-after product marketing managers (PMM) are right now. Companies are fighting for these specialists and hiring as many as they can. Why is that so?
Product marketing has points of contact with all important departments in the company. This includes digital marketing content marketing, sales, customer success (or service at traditional companies), and product management with their developers. It creates the connection between your product and the market and therefore plays a decisive role in success:
If you want to be strong in this discipline, you need to understand the interplay of product marketing and product management. Leaders in this area have a keen sense of the brand, the product, the target group and the optimal positioning in the market. They help you get the product off the ground successfully.
Only when you connect and share product marketing and product management can you overcome the problems with your growth strategy.
1. Product Marketing vs. Product Management: Not the Same, but Similar!
Before you can even think about making the best possible use of the symbiosis of product marketing and product management for you and your company, I first have to clarify what the differences and similarities between the two disciplines actually exist.
To get straight to the point: Your product marketing team takes care of communication, product positioning, and growth. Your product manager, on the other hand, brings together all teams involved in the development of the product.
The Areas are Clearly Defined
Product managers typically have strong technical knowledge. These are essential as they are closely linked to the product and interact daily with team members who are involved in product development. Appropriate expertise is therefore essential.
In contrast, the work of a product marketing manager (PMM) starts at a later stage. The product is already developed and ready for the market. The main task of the PMM is to successfully introduce the product to the market. These experts must be able to clearly communicate the product benefits to the target group.
There are Similarities, but the Goals Differ
Product managers and PMMs have one thing in common: They represent the connecting element between customers and internal teams. This is important, for example, to forward feedback to the right place. However, both are pursuing a different goal. The PMM has focused firmly on sales and ensures that your product proves to be a stable revenue generator over the longest possible period of time.
The product manager, on the other hand, is responsible for implementing customer requirements following up on the roadmap and ensuring that the product is ready on time. The PMM can communicate the benefits of the product in the most convincing way. However, the energy of the marketing machine fizzles out when the product does not have the promised properties at all.
2. The Responsibilities of the Product Marketing Manager
Misconceptions of a concept mean that you can use it suboptimally for yourself. This applies in particular to PMM. It is always amazing to see the different ideas about the tasks and goals of PMM among those responsible in companies.
But what if the ideas about PMM aren't wrong at all, but simply different? And there may be a valid reason for that. That could be because product marketing can mean something different for every company. And that is exactly the case in practice.
These are a few examples of what roles a PMM can fill for you and what tasks it can take on:
- Product positioning and communication
- Product launch
- Content marketing planning
- Customer onboarding and communication
- Documenting storytelling in playbooks
- Product roadmap management
Don't Rely on What Others Think About PMM
Many other points can be listed. The bottom line is that a PMM isn't the same for every company. And you should understand that in order to be able to use these specialists profitably in your own company.
What a PMM should do for you depends, for example, on the industry, the product, and your company. It should also be noted that PMM is a relatively new role in companies. The process of precisely defining tasks and responsibilities is therefore not yet complete.
Set Priorities
It is important for your success that you set the priorities of your PMM in your interest. There is no point in copying the approach of your competitors in this regard. Because no two companies are the same when it comes to product marketing.
However, there is another decisive point. How you can interpret product management depends on the interpretation of the role of the PMM. As we saw in the first section, the product manager and PMM depend on each other. They complement each other perfectly and develop their full potential as a duo.
For this to work, however, responsibilities must be clarified. Since there is a dependency here, it is even more important to precisely set the task priorities for your PMM. Clarify responsibilities so that you can get the most out of the symbiosis of PMM and product management.
3. Process Design Designed for Collaboration
You can't invest early enough in the good and fruitful relationships between PMM and product management. In the product planning process, it is therefore crucial to establish a connection between the two areas as soon as possible. And you should make sure you avoid the typical pitfalls that lurk here.
Avoid These Mistakes
It is the same problems over and over again that disrupt the interplay between product marketing and product management and prevent this duo from reaching peak form. I've identified a few points for you that you should definitely consider in this context:
- Marketing teams don't have all the information they'd like: The product managers have all the information about the product, marketing would just like to have it. This is a typical problem in many companies. Counteract this and ensure that your marketing teams receive all data as early as possible. To do this, you need the right system that distributes the data to all relevant parties.
- Work with different metrics: This point is particularly exciting. Product marketing and product management often take a different approach to measuring success. Marketing focuses on lead generation and brand recognition. The product manager, on the other hand, is focused on customer feedback and user reviews. However, people who work with different metrics often argue with each other. This not only has a bad effect on business growth but can also slow down sales.
- Responsibilities not clearly defined: We have already raised this point. If responsibilities overlap too much, this creates confusion and disrupts cooperation from the outset. Product marketing and product management should work together and not go against each other.
- Departmental objectives overlap corporate goals: Some departments are so focused on their operational goals that they completely lose sight of the overarching strategic goals. For optimal collaboration, it is important to regularly check whether everyone is still on track with their work.
So that A power duo of product marketing and product management can arise, the conditions must therefore be right. You can achieve this, for example, by establishing a corporate culture that supports collaboration. Communication between the two departments is the be-all and end-all here!
4. Product Marketing and Product Management: Two Different Ways of Looking at Customers
Your company develops products, introduces them to the market and sells them to your customers, for example from industry. You can look at these customers in two different ways: You either see them as users or as buyers. And that is exactly what product marketing and product management do and sets the two disciplines apart from each other. If you combine both perspectives, you get an all-round view of your customers.
The following views of Product management and product marketing are decisive in this context:
- Product management looks at your customers as users.
- Product marketing looks at your customers as buyers.
It is impossible to overestimate the dramatic difference that makes. And from these considerations, it is immediately obvious why product marketing and management absolutely belong together.
Use the Different Points of View
The product manager works across functions and must determine what kind of product your company wants to produce and why you want to design it in a particular way. What are the user requirements? Do the product features match the goals of the users and at the same time with your company goals? These questions need to be answered.
Product marketing, on the other hand, deals with the buyer, with the questions of the right product brand strategy or packaging and product positioning. The PMM must convince buyers of the value of the product and build a bridge between the sober product features and their marketing.
Only when both perspectives come together can you answer all the essential questions on which the success of your product depends. This concerns the following three points:
- Product positioning: Product managers help you understand what your customers' goals and pain points are. The PMM ensures communication that addresses exactly these needs and thus enables optimal product positioning.
- Packaging: Product managers can tell you exactly what a product is and what it isn't. The PMM communicates this in a way that appeals to your target audience.
- Product introduction: The product manager can answer any technical questions about the product. And the PMM can convey the added value that creates for your customers.
5. Create a Content Strategy that Connects Everything
Your PMM and product managers provide you with everything you need to develop a successful content strategy. But do you also use the data? According to HubSpot State of Marketing Report 2021 A full 82 percent of marketers use such a content strategy. So if you want to keep up with the competition, you need to consider this strategy. Marketing automation can also help with this.
Who Is the Target Group and What Does It Think?
Before you can tailor the content to the target group, you first need to identify them. Investments in market research are therefore required. Who is your ideal customer, which target market do you want to serve, what are the product requirements, and what are the essential functions? But you also want to find out what customers think about your company and its products and what they like or dislike about it.
What are the reasons why customers chose your company and not the competition? Where do your customers see the biggest potential for improvement with your products? Without this information, content creation is just a guessing game. Don't start writing content until you've developed a clear idea of the buyer persona.
Have the Right Content for Every Purpose
A clever content strategy prepares you for various scenarios. In some cases, such as on social media, content can inspire and draw attention to your brand. Other content, such as info texts on your website, is aimed at those who already know your company and want to learn more about a specific product. Whatever your customers want, you need to have the right content ready at the right time.
A content hub can effectively help to address both existing customers and potential prospects and retain them in the long term. He regularly provides the target group with new, relevant content, which makes it easier to build trust.
To design the content hub, use in particular the insights of product managers, who can provide in-depth and valuable content. Product marketing managers (PMMs) are the right people to contact for emotionally appealing content that puts your products in the spotlight.
When working with Content Hubs, I often use the following rule of thumb: Invest 2h in the briefing for a content writer, 2h for the review and correction and another 2h for the distribution of the article via Content Hub on the website, social media and email marketing systems. In other words, one-third of the time is spent preparing, revising, and distributing.
6. Scale Product Marketing Through Marketing Automation
With Product marketing automation I don't mean the options that Have product descriptions generated automatically - Product data from the CMS can be used for product marketing - I rather mean the options for successfully designing and efficiently implementing your content strategy. Thanks to marketing automation, articles, images, and data previously categorized in the Content Hub can be distributed automatically.
Marketers have relied on marketing automation tools for quite some time now, making it impossible to complete everyday marketing tasks without them. From lead generation to email workflows to lead scoring, the uses of marketing automation tools are endless.
And with almost 5 billion people in the world's population now using the Internet, marketers need even more powerful digital tools to reach customers and maximize their opportunities online. But how are marketers now planning to use marketing automation for their tasks?
One Ascend study has shown that 40% of marketers used them for email marketing activities in 2022, while 39% used automation for social media management. Landing pages (26%), campaign tracking (23%), and content management (22%) are also high on marketers' priority lists. As companies continue to rely on marketing automation tools, here are 10 key trends we can expect in the coming years.
Increasing Use of Behavior Analytics
If you want to know how powerful behavioral analytics is, check out Netflix, Google, and Amazon — companies that have built their empire on customer data and analytics. Behavioral analysis will continue to be very useful in the future to better understand customer needs, concerns, and limitations.
Using behavioral analytics can help companies get more leads, retain customers, and provide better value. As hyperpersonalization increasingly defines customer experience (CX), using real-time data from customer interactions and events is also more reliable than traditional CX methods based on surveys.
For example, a study found that only 16% of CX executives believe that survey-based CX measurement systems enable them to address the root cause of performance issues. At the same time, only 13% thought their organization could respond to CX issues in real time (McKinsey, 2021).
As competition gets fiercer and companies try to get their share of new prospects and loyal customers, we can expect marketers to use behavioral analytics to develop more meaningful and relevant products, services, and promotions in the coming years. This is also reinforced by the fact that CMOs and marketers rate customers as the most important influencing factor for their marketing strategy (Salesforce, 2021).
Use First-Party Data to Understand Your Customers
Marketers have been using third-party cookies for decades to collect customer data to personalize and create tailored customer experiences. But with Google's efforts to eliminate third-party cookies in Chrome from the second half of 2024, we can expect marketers to use other methods of data collection. One of them is the use of first-party data, i.e. information provided by customers themselves and owned by the company.
Using first-party data is also less expensive and provides a good ROI. A study has shown that brands that use first-party data for their key marketing functions were able to increase their revenue by 2.9 times and reduce their costs by 1.5 times (Think with Google, 2021).
The challenge, however, is collecting personal data from customers while ensuring that your company complies with current data protection regulations, such as GDPR, CCPA, etc. This is where marketing automation tools can really help companies. It is expected that more and more marketers will depend on marketing automation software that includes multi-layered security protocols, SSO logins, and security badges. Platforms that also include features that help companies comply with GDPR and other regulations will also be preferred.
Manually using security protocols to comply with data protection regulations costs unnecessary time and resources that you can better use elsewhere.
Achieve Your Goals with a Strategic Content Plan!
Setting up a content strategy is important. But you also have to implement them in a second step. A content plan helps you do this. Such a content plan creates liabilities, helps participants to align themselves with the set goals and simplifies the organization.
A crucial point: Product marketing and product management measures are often designed for the long term. This is especially true for complex and expensive products that cannot be introduced to the market overnight. The content plan also helps to tailor the creation of content over the long term and to ensure that everyday business tasks do not gradually subordinate themselves to it, for example when designing the content hub and their requirements.
Conclusion: Collaboration Between Product Marketing & Product Management Is Essential!
If you want to optimally combine product marketing and product management, you should use all options such as marketing automation or a content plan. Think about optimal product positioning and develop a content strategy that optimally supports your introduction to the market and maintains the conquered position.
From the above considerations, it can be seen that product marketing and product management are always strongest when they act together. As a duo, the two disciplines are unbeatable and help you reach even more customers with your products.
This allows you to overcome barriers to growth, attract more customers, and close more sales. Also, use marketing automation tools to give yourself a decisive advantage over the competition. Because many product marketing tasks can be automated today, you can save valuable time for other tasks and achieve your business goals at the same time!
