Product Marketers, You’re More Than the Content You Create.

When was the last time you paused to ask yourself why you’re creating content? 

It’s an age-old predicament – marketers create a plethora of content, but the majority of it goes unused by the sales team and unseen by buyers. 

The truth is your sellers and buyers don’t want more content. They want better content. Your salespeople yearn to communicate differentiated value so they can win more deals, and your buyers long to understand what you do, how it's different, and what that means for them so they can make decisions with conviction. Bombarding people with content reaps confusion instead of clarity.

My message to product marketers – get out of the content development business and into the confidence development business. 

While it’s true that content is a fundamental aspect of what you do, product marketers bring so much more to the table. You have the potential to become an insights engine that powers the actions of teams across the business, instilling confidence in both your internal and external audiences. 

Here are three key areas to shift your attention to: 

Compete Positioning: Know how your product is different, better than, or behind your competition, and what leads to one of the biggest deal killers of all – closed / no decision. 

Value Realization: Understand through buyer conversations what features add the most value, decide how to package those features, and create a world in which your buyer finds value in the best offering. 

Product Launches: Take all the awesomeness that your team builds to market in a way that excites everyone from your salespeople to your customers. 

Product marketing uniquely sits at the intersection of product, sales, and marketing. As a product marketer, you’re a unicorn blend of all three functions, and therein one of your superpowers lies in understanding the customer, the buyer, and the market. By focusing on the three aforementioned areas, you gain a powerful bank of insights, and you can then manifest those insights through effective content that makes a tangible difference for your teams. 

Let’s consider an example. For compete positioning, you will be listening to win/loss calls, talking to your sales teams, and researching competitors. Over time, you’ll develop a body of valuable knowledge. These insights will enable you to create content that connects buyers’ questions to sellers’ answers. Once you bridge that gap, your content gets used, because it’s doing exactly what your buyers and sellers want – empowering them to confidently execute. 

If your content doesn’t map to important inquiries, it begs the question why you’re writing it in the first place. 

Effective content connects the dots between buyer questions and sellers’ answers. If nobody’s asking, don’t spend your time answering. Instead, prioritize the activities that generate insights, inform your content strategy, and enhance your product marketing superpower. Doing so may mean you don’t churn out hundreds of content pieces –– but the pieces you do create will count.