This question comes up more than you’d think. There was a time where I couldn’t imagine operating inside a product company and not having the ability to easily story tell and create content across all stages of the buying journey. How do you even drive demand without ample, in depth product knowledge?
But marketing has changed over the last decade-ish and the major disciplines inside the function have gotten more complex, to the point where a unique set of skills and priorities are required. Whether you’re a small team at a startup or a larger, scaling org, you need experts by discipline and the two main disciplines are growth and product marketing.
Growth and the digital journey
With a higher number of digital touches and ever more channels to engage in, a growth marketer needs to know where to experiment but also have a deep understanding in how to measure by channel, starting with deciding which channel is the best-fit and which goals or KPIs to track.
Why has growth marketing become its own discipline?
Savvy buyers are harder to reach and usually conduct research on their own before engaging in a trackable way.
Reach is costly and most teams don’t have deep pockets or the luxury of time to prove out.
Program marketing dollars need to show ROI, and be reliably data-driven.
There is no single tech that growth marketers rely on to inform buyer intent signals, by journey stage.
And last but not least, growth teams inform customer journey phases and that then informs the broader GTM approach.
Product marketing is in the long game
Perhaps you are still proving out product-market fit or maybe you’re on the cusp of figuring out the best GTM-fit. Tae Hae Nahm’s book on this interesting topic of “The Missing Link For Enterprise Growth” is summarized in this Medium post and tells us there’s a lot more work, even after you reach product-market fit. It’s important, yet peripheral to this post.
Product marketers are always context switching. One minute they’re focused on macro-level initiatives around positioning or how to communicate vision and roadmap to say an industry analyst. The next minute they’re pulled into an important sales call to share how a new product release should work.
There’s little time for a busy product marketer to create content touches for campaigns to convert to pipeline. Sure, they can enable the broader GTM team with playbooks and core messages but executing by producing a cadence of email touches, landing pages and paid ads is no longer possible for a busy, nimble product marketer.
AI has already changed the growth game
The good news is that growth teams can do some interesting hacks or fast-tracks with established AI tools. Executing programs quickly is an everyday pressure the growth team faces. The beauty of digital is you see results in a matter of minutes. The classic bell curve informs; “is this working and should we experiment further or move on?”
That isn’t to say you don’t invest in all campaign elements before diving in. Once you validate that you’re reaching the right audience, develop a succinct message that’s relevant and of course valuable, you can start to get the program off the ground. This upfront lift is an area many teams don’t invest deeply enough to validate the experiment in the first place.
AI tools can fast track some of this lift to get a campaign executed faster. Using ChatGPT or tools like Jasper will create on-message content faster or newer tools like Clay that can find the best fit accounts and personas to reach with tailored content, according to your ideal customer.
Give experiments your best shot
In order to give campaign experiments the best shot, work closely with product marketing to guide you and stay aligned as one GTM team. One of the first things to document together is the buyer (or user) journey and the most important part of this exercise is to do it from the actual user’s stance. In other words not your view or what you desire it to be.
Ask Yourself. Do you know your typical buyer journey steps today?
If you have product analytics, you’re already off to a good start. Like most orgs, you likely have many systems and therefore many data points you need to collect and reconcile. Here’s some report recommendations that will help to “bread-crumb” all touches and hopefully draw a picture of the journey stages.
What touch? Where to collect data?
Contact’s original source? > Hubspot / Google Analytics
The first asset or CTA engaged? > Hubspot / Google Analytics
Contact + Account info > Clearbit (optional, of course)
Campaign + asset when MQL > Hubspot, assuming scoring
Product signup (trial etc.) > Hubspot + Product tracking
User activities, post sign-up > Product tracking
Support calls or chat > Intercom (or similar)
Sales meeting > Hubspot “contact us”
Opportunity created > Hubspot + Salesforce
CS meeting (onboarding etc.) > Salesforce + Zendesk, CS tool
Time to close won/loss > Hubspot + Salesforce
Deal size > Hubspot + Salesforce
Complexity varies depending on ASP, model and degree of touch , automated or human-led. If you have several quarters or more of data for a deep-dive look-back, that’s great. You can then segment by customer type or deal size.
What does the growth team learn?
The best source to find new customer accounts
The highest performing assets and which channels
Latency from contact create > MQL > Opportunity
Key activities first-time users do in product
What does product marketing learn?
What compels a user to sign up? Best CTAs, Landing pages and channels.
Conversion from early sign-ups to opportunity creation.
Friction or drop-off during user signup flows.
Conversion from initial sales touch to opportunity created.
By doing the simple act of documenting a user’s journey, you create open dialog on where to invest, divest or improve.
Stay in your expert lanes but follow the same journey path
With a product marketer’s long-game view, they take market feedback to product management, who can adjust or perhaps reduce friction. At the same time, the growth team adjusts within the quarter and can choose different channels to experiment with or adjust campaign ingredients whether CTA or perhaps creative for a paid ad.
The different lenses and priorities help both teams equally and keeps everyone tracking along on the same journey path with shared team KPIs and goals.
I’d love to hear your feedback and comments, check out my site and let me know
https://marketingengine2.com/