Product Marketing: Increasingly Important

Product marketing is misunderstood. When most people think of “marketing” they don’t think of product marketing – they think of branding and communications or advertising. However as companies increase their spending on social media and digital marketing it may be time to invest more in product marketing. Here’s why:

Product Marketers have deep market knowledge – Prospects are looking for helpful information online and do not want to be “sold to”. Product marketers have a deep understanding of the problems that people in a market face and are great at creating content that can educate and help prospects.

Product Marketers have deep solutions knowledge – One of the key things that separates Product Marketing from other forms of marketing is the depth of understanding of products/solutions. This deep level of understanding is critical when it comes to working with customers in a more interactive way like through social media. It’s not enough to just have to skills to communicate canned messages, you’ll need someone who can answer questions, react on the fly and generally be as helpful as possible. Product marketers are great at this.

Product marketers focus on customer value, not technology/features – this is the part where I pick on traditional product managers, who often officially “own” product marketing but ignore it. Product management is a big job and often product managers can be so focused on feature development they can’t put themselves into the shoes of the customer when it comes to communicating why someone should buy. Customers don’t care about features or technology or anything else that represents how you do what you do. What they care about is how you going to improve their lives. Good product marketers nail this.

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