I like to think of digital marketing as the pre-requisite class to product marketing.
From GTM to adoption, no product marketing strategy is complete without leveraging digital channels.
I'm a former digital marketer and after studying product marketing, talking to a lot of product marketers, and doing an internship, I started to see a lot of parallels between the two roles.
Let's take the recent launch of Pendo AI as an example.
The team used digital ads, landing pages, blogs, and social media to drive beta registrations
There was a pre-launch webinar for customers explaining Pendo AI that was accessible on-demand
The team communicated the CEO's vision of Pendo AI through social media as a launch video... and so on
Of course, I'm not trying to say that digital marketing = product marketing.
Product marketing is closer to the product, knows the customer in and out, and collaborates with sales and customer success. It provides a lot of the background research such as buyer personas, competitive intelligence, product briefs, goal of the campaign, etc. to digital marketing teams.
In fact, there were many more aspects of the Pendo AI launch such as pricing and packaging, in-product promotions, etc. that weren't part of a digital strategy.
But you have to admit, in today's digitally connected world, digital channels are taking over. And who is better at leveraging these channels and measuring their performance than a digital marketer?
Here are 3 more reasons you might consider giving a digital marketer the chance to become a great product marketer:
They work in a B2B2C environment. That means B2B AND B2C. Most product marketing hiring managers need B2B experience and may overlook digital marketers, especially if they have worked with more B2C brands. But here's the scoop - the main audience digital marketing agencies are catering to are their customers, i.e., other businesses. It goes without saying that a lot of end customer and competitor research goes on to come up with an impactful digital strategy. Account managers and business development strategists have to go beyond that research and balance the needs of the end consumer and the preferences of the client. This has a waterfall effect on the rest of the teams from social media to ads. No one understands persuading customers on their vision using data more than digital marketers. Sound familiar to certain product marketing responsibilities like stakeholder management, competitive intelligence, sales enablement, customer research, and customer-facing asset creation?
My personal experience translating digital marketing skills such as understanding end customers and agency customers to a sales enablement setting
During my internship at VMware, creating assets for sales enablement felt almost second nature to me. I immediately knew that I had to strike the balance between content that communicated benefits and potential use cases to customers and something that would be easy and quick for the sales team to use. This was so similar to balancing a client's preferences and their end customer's needs for a digital strategy or even a simple social media post.
Using this insight, I created 10+ sales enablement assets such as a solution brief, one-pagers, partner enablement presentations, FAQs, email templates, call scripts, and more within a month without too many edits from my manager.
They collaborate.
A lot. Internally and externally.
Social media collaborates with design and copywriting, email marketing collaborates with content marketing, content marketing collaborates with the SEO team, and so on and so forth. Ultimately, all these teams collaborate with each other during brainstorming sessions to send a unified message and brand voice for a campaign across all channels.
All the teams also create campaign strategies together for existing customers. This translates to collaborating with the customer as well.
And finally, if the digital marketer is in house, they are already collaborating with product marketing/brand mangement too.
Cross-functional collaboration skills are easily transferrable. Even though digital marketers may not have direct touchpoints with sales or customer success, they are experts in collaboration.
In fact, as a product marketer with a digital marketing background, it becomes infinitely easy to not only understand internal team needs, but also to manage your organization's agency(ies). They know exactly which KPIs to track and how it connects back to the objective in an OKR. They can also be invaluable in setting up digital marketing monitoring processes to guage how your digital marketing agency is performing.
My personal experience translating working at an agency to managing one as a product marketer
I personally felt this ease when I was managing agencies as part of my internship at VMware. I suggested leveraging LinkedIn, initiated the KPI tracking system for the lead generation campaigns, provided feedback to the agency's work, and even went back to analyze the historical data provided by the agency for previous campaigns. This resulted in a much more accountable system than before.
They are scrappy.
The one big difference between digital and product marketers is the fact that digital marketers work with multiple products and brands at a time.
A lot of hiring managers see that as a weakness because digital marketers don't go deep enough. But let's recognize it for what it is - a secret strength.
Digital marketers have an uncanny ability to drink in knowedge about a completely new concept quickly. They learn about different industries within weeks, sometimes days. Enough to be able to think about what the customer wants and what the competitor is doing.
If they are showing interest in product marketing, it means they want to understand the product, customer, and industry deeply. And if they can grasp concepts that quickly, imagine how soon they can start adding value to your team conversations.
The scrappiness doesn't stop here. It goes beyond in the way they deal with budgets too. They have had customers with big and small budgets thus learning to be creative and resourceful in using every penny. Whether its leveraging free channels like slack and facebook groups or optimizing Google and social media ads, they know just how to identify the right channels, reach the most number of right people, and get the most bang for your buck.
My personal experience translating creativity and scrappiness for social media and digital strategy to using them for creating a sales tool
At VMware, I created a old to new SKU mapping tool for sales reps. I was asked to create a simplistic excel sheet. But I had a different, creative vision for the tool that involved spreadsheet modelling. This would make looking up the required information a less than 2-minute activity for sales reps vs the 5-10 mins they were currently spending doing it.
Even with my MBA excel skills, I didn't exactly know how to get the end result. So I had to be scrappy. I watched some YouTube videos and gathered feedback from sales every step of the way through demos. It took me two weeks to make this tool.
This felt extremely similar to times in an agency when a client from a completely new industry wanted a digital strategy or the time I volunteered to learn Facebook Catalog ads for a client when I had zero idea how they worked and I had to learn quickly.
Using the tool, the sales team could check box the old SKUs that customers were on and the features they most required and get a suggestion for the best new SKU for the customer from the spreadsheet model.
After my final presentation to all the marketers in my department, another product marketing team took this project as inspiration for an online tool for their sales team. This tool had already reduced information look up time for sales reps by 50% while they were on customer calls.
I know what you're thinking. Yes, digital marketers are wizards! And you want to hire one.
TL;DR: Digital marketers are uniquely placed to understand your customers, internal teams, agencies, and key stakeholders. There is absolutely no doubt that they will bring resourceful solutions to the table and fit into your product marketing team seamlessly.
Shameless plug: if this article inspired you to at least ask a digital marketer to put their hat in the application ring, I hope you consider my profile.
Either way, wishing you success with all your campaigns and hopefully, a digital marketing addition to your team!
I highly value feedback and would love yours.
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About Priyanka
Priyanka has 4 years of digital marketing experience. Right before her MBA at USC, she was a marketing head for a B2B company in the enterprise mobility and digital marketing industry. During her MBA, she interned as a Product Marketer at VMware. Currently, she is a Product Marketing Volunteer at a mental health non-profit called TogetherWell.
Her marketing mantra is to provide as much free, valuable content to potential customers as you can to help them and build credibility at the same time.
When she is not thinking about marketing, she is thinking about dogs, cats, and dumplings!
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