Proactive Product Marketing v. Reactive Product Marketing
Why proactive product marketing is essential
Many companies fail to invest in product marketing — and pay for it long-term.
It’s not difficult to create marketing material and content and launch them into the world.
What is challenging is creating a Go-To-Market (GTM) toolkit and engine for how product + marketing + operation + business strategy fit together and how it lands with customers for the long term. This takes strategic thinking, awareness, technical acumen, creative knowledge, communication, diplomacy skills, and discernment.
Short term growth is easy. Long-term sustainable growth takes thoughtfulness, planning, and inter-discplinary thinking.
I’ve noticed a lack of knowledge around packaging and positioning products, and how offers should be structured, maintained and communicated. Many companies rely exclsuive on online ads and demand generation strategies for growth. And yet, if a company relies exclusively on online ads for growth, they won’t leverage the entire product marketing strategy and funnel when it comes to repeatable growth.
Product teams, Product Marketing teams, and Marketing need to collaborate together on a strategic vision, rather than work in silos. If customers are dropping off along the funnel, that might be due to a product (feature set) problem, or a marketing (communication) problem, and it’s important to know the root cause of drop-offs early one.
In short, Invest in product marketing. It will save you countless months or even years wasted. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen small miscommunications erupt into massively expensive and time-consuming fire drills because there was no company go-to-market plan.
Slower is faster. Slowing down allows companies to create a sustainable, long-term foundation for bridging the worlds of product, operations, business and marketing into one streamlined vision.
If you found this useful, and you’d like to learn more about Product Marketing, stay in touch!
My latest book, The Launch: A Product Marketer’s Guide, is now available on Amazon. I also wrote the book “Product Marketing Debunked. The Essential Go-To-Market Guide” which you can purchase on Amazon.
If you’d like to become a member of Medium to get access to awesome content, you can check it out here. If you are serious about learning about the go-to-market process, check out my go-to-market workshops.
