As a product marketer, your job is tough: you’re the point person between multiple cross-functional teams, and it’s up to you to weave together a cohesive company story. Here are the biggest challenges you’re likely facing:
- You have multiple external audiences who you’re looking to reach, but you need to consolidate your messaging to a one-size-fits-all strategy
- You have multiple internal stakeholder that must be aligned on messaging
- You’re buried under frequently asked questions from external audiences and internal teams
- You need to tie together perspectives from sales, engineering, and marketing to create a cohesive narrative
The biggest challenge with these goals is that you’re often wrangling abstract ideas and concepts. In addition to explaining what you see, you need to build a story for your company’s future. How do you make sure that you’re communicating the value proposition that is more on-point with your sales goals?
Enter content marketing.
When you publish bite-sized resources ranging from blog posts to eBooks, case studies, and product overviews, you create micro-touch points with your audiences. To understand this concept, take a look at the following research from Think with Google. The company consistently finds that interactions online are fragmented: brand experiences are the sum of many independent micro-moments.
How Product Marketing Benefits from High-Quality Content
Your content strategy, behind the scenes, can help connect the dots between the many different interactions that audiences have with your company online and offline. Here are three ways that product marketing teams benefit, as a result:
1. Increasing Touch Points with Customers
As a product marketer, your core responsibility is to develop high-level messaging for your customers. You are a connector of dots and product storyteller. And most likely, you rely on customer feedback to drive some of your messaging and decisions. The challenge that you’re facing, however, is that you may not have the time and resources to sit down with your target audiences, individually, to collect feedback on a consistent basis. What you need to do, instead, is to make this data-gathering process part of your routine.
Use the blog posts, one-sheets, case studies, and other content assets that you’re creating to study the needs and interests of your target audience. What information are they finding valuable? What topics are popular? Use this data to inform your high-level, long-term value proposition and messaging.
2. Saving Time across Your Entire Company
If your company is growing, your teams are likely slammed. Content can help alleviate these pain points by simplifying and streamlining communication. One quick tip: Take inventory of the frequently asked questions, internal or external, that your team members receive on a daily basis.
Turn their answers into topics for content that you can use on an ongoing basis. That way, your team members will have a repository of go-to resources when they are time strapped. You’ll save time and increase efficiency across your organization, as a result.
3. Helping You Wrangle through Tough Concepts
Smart product marketers know how important it is to balance ideation, in-depth brainstorming, and execution. The challenge is that most companies are often strapped for time and always need to be executing.
Smart product marketers know how important it is to balance ideation, in-depth brainstorming, and execution.
One way to strike the right balance is to continuously invest in content. The more you practice communicating your value proposition, the better positioned you’ll be to improve upon your messaging, continuously and over-time.
The Bottom Line
Treat every content piece that you create like a mini-product in itself. What marketing goals do you need to fulfill? What does your content need to do to be successful? Use content as a tool to accelerate your product marketing.