At a B2B start-up or even a scale-up, the first thing founders/CEOs typically think of when they build a marketing team is about hiring a "growth marketer". Growth marketing is typically understood as scaling lead generation for your products and solutions quickly by hacking marketing channels, optimizing the funnel and the customer journey using innovative approaches (including content strategy) and technologies (usually digital) to get more out of your marketing investment. However what is often missed in this picture is the "meat and potatoes" of growth-drivers i.e. product marketing.
So how does product marketing drive growth? Before I answer this question, let's take a step back and revisit what product marketing does. In a nut-shell, Product Marketing is a function within marketing that works closely with Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Success to launch products and maximize in-market success. This includes planning the go-to-market approach, collaborating on packaging and pricing, creating positioning and messaging, creating mid- and bottom-of-the-funnel as well as sales enablement content, co-ordinating cross-functional activities, running product enablement trainings and formulating strategies to maximize adoption and life-time customer value. Arguably, some of this work is taken on by Product Management in early stage companies, but as a company grows, these activities can be easily transitioned into the Product Marketing function, opening up more time for the product management teams to focus on innovation.
If growth marketing represents the techniques you would use to quickly capture as many customers as you can in your target market, product marketing ensures you are approaching customers that make the most sense to go after, with the right story, and ultimately the right offering. "Where to play" and "how to win" are two key areas that product marketing helps determine through market and segment research, competitive analysis, voice of customer insights and bringing it all together to feed into areas such as product roadmap and vision in addition to lead generation activities. I couldn't agree more with Roger Martin as he suggests in a recent article - that it is time to accept that (product) Marketing IS business strategy, as it takes into account both the customer and competitive focus. If you're aiming in the wrong direction, or worse, looking in the wrong place, no matter how smart or innovative you are with your growth hacking or how many marketing dollars you spend, success will elude you.
So what should a CEO or CMO at a start up or scale up do to mitigate this risk? I say, take a leap of faith and hire a product marketer with an analytical mindset and a passion for customer empathy. Someone who can provide an unbiased, outside-in perspective for your products, identify your unique strengths relative to competitors and customer needs, and finally deliver clear and compelling messaging required that makes it easy for customers to understand the value they will receive from you. While it might seem like a more longer-term approach and seemingly something that doesn't produce "instant" results, feeding this into a growth-oriented lead generation engine will amplify pipeline outcomes while also empowering your sales teams to win more deals and even close deals faster.
With so many choices now available to customers when it comes to finding software to address their needs, it is more important than ever before to ensure you are putting your best foot forward when approaching customers. You have one shot - and you need to get it right the first time or you risk losing that opportunity for several years, if not forever. This can only be done through consistent and active listening, being relentless in building the voice of the customer into your product development processes, delivering your product offering in an easy-to-consume manner and finally articulating your value in no other terms than what the customer cares about. All this and more - is all in a day's work by a strong product marketer. Don't miss this important lever in your fast-growth strategy.
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