Speaker: Marcus Andrews, PMM, HubSpot
Should product marketing own content marketing?
Marcus Andrews: marketing? I think at a startup, it's probably fine for product marketers to own content marketing. At least at first. I think that product marketers should really be content creators and have that kind of muscle inside of them to be doing a lot of writing and creating external content. The best product marketers I know are all people who want to create content and that's part of how they operate. It's just something that do anyway. I think it's ok at a startup. I think that as you grow and as you get bigger, it's when you really want to resource that team, and make sure that you have a dedicated group of content marketers to power your blog and offers and really be pull in that organic SEO. But, I think at first it's OK for product marketing. to own it, but as you grow, hire those content marketers, hire good ones, too, it's really important. And hook them up with the PMMs. So you have those two teams talking to each other and really, really tightly aligned.
How do you develop messaging that resonates with your target audience?
Marcus Andrews: I think there are three pieces of advice I would give everyone here to really develop really good messaging or, you know, words on your website and your sales deck, that really, really resonate with your target audience. The first is to just constantly be, a student of human behavior and to be always studying the change in the world. The founder of HubSpot likes to say that, he's a cultural anthropologist. He's constantly watching humans and seeing how they interact with each other and their behaviors and the things that they do. And I think that this is really, really smart for any company, for their space and for their audiences that constantly trying to understand what people do. So that's number one. Number two. I would say invest in really good product marketers. Who can do excellent product positioning, do that research to develop great product positioning that informs good messaging, Then three, I would say: test it. Take your messaging, talk to people, talk to customers, talk to prospects, get that feedback coming in and create that feedback loop. You're going to create much better messaging.
How do you balance what your audience wants versus what the business wants?
Marcus Andrews: These two things have to be aligned otherwise you're going to fail. If your business and your audience don't want the same thing or some versions of the same thing, you don't really have product market fit. I think there's always at least from a content perspective or marketing perspective. You can create content and ideas and stuff that your audience wants that's not really aligned with what your business needs. Product marketers bridge that gap, right? The product is what you want to sell to your audience and product marketers are that connection from taking, "Hey, this is your product and we're gonna turn into something interesting, that's a marketing asset" where other marketing teams sometimes, think more about what the audience wants and maybe more about, bigger picture stories and ideas.
How do you develop messaging that contributes to pipeline?
Marcus Andrews: So I think that you can have great, interesting messaging that's persuasive and interesting. That doesn't have too much to do with the product and therefore really doesn't tee up sales to have good conversations. So I think that if you want to create messaging that contributes to pipeline and create deals and closes deals, it should be product driven, right? So it should be interesting and persuasive and exciting. but also tee up your product in sales. You're setting it up so that they can knock it down and that you create the narrative or the story or the ideas in the mind of your buyer. And then they come to sales team, then they talk to sales team, who then closes deals. So yeah, I think messaging should absolutely contribute to pipeline
How “real” are buying journey maps and should you trust them?
Marcus Andrews: I think they could be a great tool for your business if you develop your buyer's journey yourself. I think almost the process of developing a buyer's journey is more helpful than maybe the map that comes out of that. The map is great. You can take the map, can share it. But I think the process of just mapping out the buyer's journey and the customer journey, really not just the buying journey, the entire customer life cycle journey or the ideal journey of your customers can be enlightening for leadership. And do it with marketing, product marketing, the product team and sales. Sit down as a group and go through this exercise. I've seen it be really effective in kind of uncovering, gaps in the buyer's journey or friction. I think you do the buyer journey, exercise and then look for places of friction and how you can address them.
