Product marketers utilize customer insight to craft the appropriate messages across branding channels, while growth marketing involves testing and refining strategies along the customer journey in order to accelerate business expansion.
Both teams share similar goals; however, their perceptions of moves made by competition and market trends differ drastically.
Product Strategy
Product marketing describes how a product or service supports the overall strategy and goals of a company, by determining its features to develop, their interaction, positioning in the market, as well as creating a roadmap and aligning development team activities to that roadmap.
An effective product strategy drives conversion, acquisition and retention. For instance, if data shows that first-time users are creating free accounts but failing to convert into paid subscriptions or sales, the team may decide it’s time to implement conversion optimization tactics to increase form submission rates.
Product strategies provide support for traditional marketing teams in positioning the brand and attracting new customers, through thought leadership messaging and key differentiators that differentiate products from competitors. Furthermore, competitive analysis may also assist sales teams with winning more deals.
Target Audience
Product marketing requires understanding its target audience in order to meet customer demands, gathering data on demographics, pain points and other criteria to create compelling value propositions in different markets. Furthermore, this process necessitates analyzing competition and devising differentiation strategies in order to distinguish themselves within that market.
Growth marketing, on the other hand, is an inbound-oriented strategy designed to optimize and measure metrics such as customer lifetime value (LTV) and average revenue per user (ARPU). Growth marketers utilize collected data from multiple sources in order to implement product adoption campaigns.
Due to their inbound focus, growth marketers often work closely with acquisition-oriented teams such as sales and marketing. Product marketers may even need help from them in making sure experiments are measurable and scalable; in this way, growth marketers can maximize efforts while making smart decisions using real customer data. In turn, this approach helps companies achieve sustainable competitive advantages by using user-centric tactics which deliver valuable experiences to their customers – increasing retention rates as well as revenues.
Messaging
Marketing products and services is something every business needs to do, yet not everyone understands that different marketing methods work better for different objectives. Simply having an amazing product is not enough – your brand must also reach the appropriate audiences at the appropriate times, driving customer growth for success.
Product marketing’s messaging strategy seeks to educate the market on its capabilities, differentiation points and value proposition. Product marketers collaborate with stakeholders such as sales, UX/design and customer success teams in crafting an educational message that resonates with target customers at each point in their customer journey.
Growth product marketing specializes in inbound activities that focus on user activation, retention and referral. This approach involves trying different tactics and analyzing data in order to optimize marketing strategies throughout the customer journey. Growth product marketers use customer insights gathered during research to craft outward-facing messaging that directs users toward key growth actions – this way achieving product-market fit while driving long-term revenue is made easier!
Go-to-Market Strategy
Product and growth marketing are two complementary strategies that can work in concert to achieve business goals. Product marketing emphasizes product improvement while communicating its value to target audiences; on the other hand, growth marketing employs data-driven experiments and customer-focused tactics to accelerate company expansion.
Product and growth marketing are both essential to businesses, yet each is driven by different principles and has specific responsibilities. Product marketers are charged with finding a product-market fit and crafting messaging to distribute across all channels; while growth marketers use every available means and channel to acquire high-quality customers and grow revenue quickly.
Though some companies may choose to separate their product and growth teams, it’s crucial that both collaborate on marketing initiatives for an optimal customer journey experience. By understanding the difference between these approaches and creating an effective marketing plan that leverages them both together – whether an eCommerce startup or more established brand – here are some helpful tips that may help determine which approach is the most appropriate fit.
Measurement
Growth and product marketers both possess similar responsibilities; however, their skillsets often overlap. Both take part in market/user research, collaboration, testing/iterating processes to discover strategies that resonate with their target audiences.
Growth marketing teams may use metrics like churn rate, average revenue per customer (ARC), and lifetime value to assess whether their efforts are producing the maximum return for their businesses. However, unlike product marketing teams who focus on continuous experimentation and optimization processes to see results more quickly.
Which strategy should a business use in the long run? Ultimately, that depends on their goals and desired timeframe. Product marketing might be best suited for immediate impacts surrounding product launches/re-launches while growth marketing can provide sustainable scalable success – some of the most successful eCommerce businesses rely on both approaches!
