Why Your Next Rockstar Product Marketer is a Content Marketer

TL; DR Summary

• Changing Role of Product Marketers: Traditional product marketing focused on product features and sales support. Now, digital strategies, content creation, and customer engagement are key.

• Content and Data Focus: Product marketers need to use diverse content types like videos and social media while relying on data to track performance and engagement.

• From Sales to Customer Focus: Product marketers now support the full customer journey, creating content that guides customers from awareness to purchase.

• Content Marketers Fit the Bill: Skills in storytelling, personas, and SEO make content marketers ideal for modern product marketing roles.

In the ever-evolving landscape of B2B marketing, the product marketer's role has undergone a significant transformation. Pre-pandemic strategies centered around traditional techniques like in-person events and print collateral are giving way to digital-first approaches that prioritize content and customer engagement. Today, the ideal product marketer is not just familiar with these changes—they lead them. Enter the content marketer as the new rockstar product marketer.

Pre-Pandemic Product Marketing

Focus on Product Features

In the not-too-distant past, product marketing was centered around launching new products and releases into the market. The mix of materials was brochures, datasheets, and flyers that communicated product features and technical details. 

While sole dedication to "feeds and speeds" has long since fallen out of favor in marketing, traditional product marketing practices focus on the technical aspects of what a product or service does and how all customers benefit by making money, saving money, or simplifying workflows.

Focus on Sales Enablement

Sales enablement was another major focus for product marketing managers. Often serving large, geographically dispersed sales organizations, Product Marketers needed to focus on developing sales materials and training to prepare their sales teams to confidently deliver the product's value propositions to the customer. 

Focus on in-person events

The last major function of traditional product marketers was leading content development at industry events, staffing the booth, and filling speaking slots on panels and breakouts.  Product Marketers were also a choice as support for sales on customer visits when Product Management was unavailable. 

Post-Pandemic Product Marketing

Emphasis on Digital Strategies

With travel restricted due to the pandemic, the role of Product Marketing had to change.  The challenge became figuring out how to make webinars and virtual conferences more engaging.  These attempts failed miserably because attendance at these events was low, engagement was poor and staffing a virtual booth so visitors could download a PDF that they could easily download from the company website was a waste of time.

Emphasis on Content Development

Coming out of the pandemic, the expectations of product marketing expanded.  Move beyond the static tables of a datasheet, limit the verbosity of brochures, and redefine what qualifies as a product launch.  As a result, new feature releases went from hosting webinars to an explainer video embedded in a blog.  Instead of a press release to make an announcement, it became a series of social media posts and an email campaign to prospects and existing customers.

Emphasis on Data Analytics and Decision Making

Where once a sign of success for a product marketer was a completed checklist of published assets, the evolution from static to dynamic content meant the introduction of new engagement metrics like click-through rate, time on page, views, downloads, and organic search ranking.  Now, product marketers care more about their work performance than ever before and using that data to inform future content creation instead of using traditional launch packages.

Changing Marketing Strategies

From Sales-Enablement to Customer-Enablement

It's nothing new to say that organizations do their research now and are more than halfway to a purchase decision before starting conversations with vendors, but what has changed is the diversification of the research function within the organization.  When leadership discovers a problem in an organization, junior staff may conduct the initial research and report it through the organization, where leadership may engage with different content and make recommendations to executive leadership, who will engage with other marketing content. Inspiring a customer to advocate for your product internally simplifies the close for your sales team.

From BOFU to TOFU

While product marketers still need to get to the brass tacks of what the product does, customers need help scoping and scaling the impact of their problems better. So, providing access to testimonials and case studies that align with prospect business objectives and challenges helps the customer by giving them the language to describe their problem in the context of how you sell solutions. 

Historically, product marketing has engaged at the bottom of the funnel. Still, this upward pressure on customer content, like solution guides and reference architectures, directly results from increasing customer needs for education and insightful content.

From Customer Decision to Customer Journey

Today, product marketing must be more engaged in campaign activity.  Understanding the customer journey from suspect to marketing prospect, to lead, to opportunity, and being more involved in the design of assets along that journey is a requirement.  Product marketing can't wait for a qualified sales lead to get engaged anymore.  Rich, diverse, interactive content pieces personalized for customers in a particular vertical or geography is essential.

The Content Marketer as a Product Marketer

Storytelling as the Critical Skill

Technical understanding is still essential for product marketers, but a scan of job descriptions for current product marketing roles lists storytelling as a critical skill.  The philosophy for some hiring managers is that they can teach skilled storytellers the necessary product knowledge.  With the need to produce multi-faceted, diverse content across the marketing funnel, organizations expect product marketers to envision the entire portfolio story and demonstrate how their product marketing content maps to the broader narrative the company is weaving in the market. With product marketing more involved throughout the customer journey, the responsibility for them to be great storytellers increases.

Customer Personas as the Ideal Customer Profile

Remember when I said messaging is the foundation of marketing and content development?  It's true, but if messaging is the foundation, customer personas and ICPs form the foundation's bedrock.  Today, few companies have well-defined personas and ICPs. It's just expected that people know what ITDM or C-Suite means as a target audience.

While a good, well-thought-out ICP will never go out of style, a clear understanding of personas helps marketers consider individual motivations and intentions when creating content that connects. Where the traditional product marketer only needed to engage the reader's analytical mind, the modern product marketer must go beyond and inspire the imagination as well.

Optimization, Not Completion, as the Measure of Success

As previously mentioned, data analytics has become a function of post-pandemic product marketing. Yet traditional product marketers struggle with modern SEO concepts like defining keywords and understanding how search ranking affects traffic to product and solution pages.

A library of published assets is no longer the measure of success.  Understanding traffic numbers, time on page, A/B testing results, engagement metrics, and downloads are metrics that content marketers live and die by, and now, so must product marketers.

Find a Content Marketer for Your Next Product Marketing Role

The landscape of product marketing has irrevocably changed. Content marketers bring a wealth of skills perfectly aligned with the demands of modern product marketing. Their expertise in storytelling, audience personas, and data analytics makes them invaluable assets in a digital-first B2B environment.

Embracing a content-centric approach not only meets the evolving needs of customers but also positions your brand as a leader in the industry. So, when searching for your next rockstar product marketer, look no further than the content marketing experts who are already shaping the future of customer engagement.