Stop marketing content & Start marketing products

It’s all the rage … you know, the terms we use in marketing:

- Digital Marketing
— Infuencer Marketing
— Email Marketing
— Content Marketing
— Social Media Marketing

It would be hard to read any marketing related article or book, without someone telling you which of the above is the one to focus your efforts.

I’m not going to argue the tactic — each and every one of those marketing areas needs some level of mastering in our world of always on, always available, anywhere, anytime. We are a mobile world, we are highly connected, and as Gordon Geko said “Money Never Sleeps”.

But don’t start telling me to replace my profession of Product Marketing, with a tactical implement of Content Marketing. I wonder how many customers are buying your content? Has one customer come to you and asked to purchase your lastest white paper? Maybe they want to bundle up and all your blog articles, and they offered you a handsome sum of money? Does the revenue received from getting a quote from a Gartner analyst buy anything for your company? Or pay someone’s salary? How about all those tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram photos or LinkedIn updates? Did it pay the light bills last month?

Now, how about your products? How many of those did you sell last year? How much revenue did they generate? How many salaries, vendors, community projects, families did the actual sales of products produce?

Your customer’s are not buying your content. They are buying your products. If my professional peers focused more on Product Marketing — I’m talking the full spectrum of Product Marketing from identification and definition of markets, through the sales cycle, all the way to having happy customers — there would be much less debate about the “best” tactics, and more energy put towards the “right” tactics to product more sales and generate more revenue.

I love my profession. I love being a “product marketing guy”. I love new ideas, being technical, understanding how to research, how to analyze, how to translate, how to write, how to talk business, technical or operations. It’s fun to test new marketing tactics — but believing those tactics are more important that the “product” is completely foolish.

So go ahead, market your content — I’m going to be over here marketing my product. Let’s see who makes the cash register ring.

Originally published at Marketing Circus.