How Marketing Supports Product-Led Growth

Companies that use product-led growth are twice as likely to double their year-over-year revenue compared to their sales-led counterparts. In a product-led growth strategy, the product takes center stage. That requires a clear vision of the value you’re offering and a whip-smart development team to pull it off, but it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Your product still needs the support and advocacy of a savvy marketing team that knows how to grab attention in an oversaturated B2B SaaS marketplace.

By collaborating with and supporting marketing, product managers stand the best chance of achieving success with a product-led growth model.

Product Marketers Communicate Your Product’s Value 

Product marketers tell the story of a product and communicate its value in a way that resonates with customers, drives adoption, and inspires word-of-mouth advocacy. They own go-to-market strategy, product positioning, and messaging. 

Product marketers often sit at the intersection of product, sales, and customer success–  collaborating and checking in with those departments to make sure their strategy aligns matches company needs.

Their work focuses on several core areas:

• Showing the product’s value in every customer-facing communication and campaign produced.
• Reaching the right customers through in-depth market research, audience segmentation, and persona targeting.
• Addressing customer pain points by showing how the product can solve their problems.
• Driving product adoption and retention by giving customers the information and tools they need to succeed with the product.
• Analyzing the competition to better position the product against the other offerings on the marketplace.

Product Management vs. Product Marketing

While product marketing and product management share the same inherent goal: to deliver exceptional user experiences that address their customers’ needs, they differ in their areas of execution. As competitive intelligence software Crayon explains it, “Product marketers are experts in the communication of value; product managers are experts in the creation of value.”

While marketing is concerned with their core focuses, product management is hard at work guiding the path of the product so it can be successful and valuable. As a product manager, you act as the internal voice of the product, while your marketing team acts as the external voice. You develop the product vision (while product engineering executes it), and marketing promotes it to your audience. 

Marketing Understands Your Customers and Knows How To Reach Them

Because your product marketing team understands your customers’ motivations, they know the best strategies for reaching them. Those strategies come into play during promotion: when marketing spreads the word about your product across social media, on your blog, through paid ads, and via other channels. 

Product marketing’s understanding of how to reach your customers can also inform how you introduce new users to your product—for example, choosing to offer a free trial or using a freemium model for customer acquisition. Product marketing understands the important role that customer experience plays throughout the buying process. As a product manager, tapping into that knowledge can help you achieve a more favorable time to value (TTV) for your product.

A crucial component of promotion is market research, or gaining an in-depth understanding of the size of your market and who is included. That knowledge lets marketers segment your audience into specific groups so they can tailor your product messaging to best fit each one. With that targeted messaging, marketing generates leads and guides prospects through the customer journey until they’re ready to purchase. 

You’re a Crucial Part of the Conversation

While marketing is handling promotion and lead generation, product management is collaborating every step of the way. Because product managers hold the most in-depth knowledge about their product, their insights and feedback are essential to crafting messaging that properly articulates the benefits and functionality of the product. 

At UserVoice, we collaborate cross-functionally with regular meetings to sync up on our projects. We discuss our timelines, share insights, and connect on our goals. As a result, all teams stay up to date on our progress as a company, and we each get the opportunity to support other departments in their work. 

Collaboration between departments is necessary for following a flywheel model in marketing (and the flywheel is a great fit for product-led growth). The flywheel relies on delighting customers so much that they naturally promote your product. For this to work, your entire organization needs to understand how to meet your customers’ needs. For marketing, that means partnering closely with product managers and customer-facing teams to make sure our messaging is on point, particularly in how they relate to different product use cases.

Marketing Knows the Market and Can Position Against Competitors

Marketers understand your product’s target market and the competitive landscape surrounding it. 

If you haven’t done so already, partner with your marketing team to complete an in-depth competitive analysis, and create an ongoing process so you can try to keep ahead of changes.

After researching the competition, your marketing team positions your product against them. If the leading competitor costs more, product marketing can highlight a better price point, for instance. If competitors’ products lack certain features that customers value, marketing highlights those. Your marketing team knows how to best differentiate your product from others—as long as they have the intel into your market. 

That differentiation and positioning are also carried through to your branding. Marketing owns the strategy and execution behind the way your brand is perceived, and they ensure it’s consistent across all channels. Clear, compelling branding helps show your customers that you understand who they are, what they need, and that your product is the right fit for them.

All of this work is intended to help you stand out. If you’re in a crowded niche full of similar products, differentiating yourself from your competitors can influence your ability to grow your customer base. 

You Have Data That Informs Product Positioning

As a product manager, you can help differentiate your product by sharing the information you have on your competitors, your market research, and the customer conversations you’ve recorded in the course of your work. The information you’ve learned during product validation is valuable as well: customer preference rankings for different product features, for instance, tell your marketing team which features they should highlight in campaigns and messaging. 

Marketers can use that data to make informed strategy decisions that line up with the reality of your market and with what your customers have told you about their needs. 

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