CONNECTING PRODUCT MARKETING & DEMAND GENERATION

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1 CONNECTING PRODUCT MARKETING & DEMAND GENERATION As a product marketer, you nurture your relationships with your company s product and sales teams, which help you to excel at launching your products into the market. But, unless you re also working closely with your company s demand generation team to nurture prospects and customers, you may be missing an important opportunity. The reality is that no product or service can be successful without solid demand generation support. By helping companies acquire new audiences and nurture them with relevant messaging, demand generation is an important way to drive product and brand awareness. At a time when product announcements are ubiquitous, partnering with your demand generation team will allow you to find better ways to communicate with your market. A comprehensive demand generation program spans numerous channels including , social communications, retargeting and PPC campaigns, news releases, and online resource centers, to cite just a few components. Each of these channels represents a distinct opportunity to interact with customers and prospects at each stage of the buyer s journey, feeding them targeted content that s designed to move them deeper into the sales funnel. WHEN COMBINED WITH YOUR DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR USERS NEEDS AND PAIN POINTS, THE DATA THAT YOUR DEMAND GENERATION TEAM PROVIDES CAN HELP YOU CREATE MORE FOCUSED, TARGETED, AND ENGAGING CONTENT TO SHEPHERD YOUR CUSTOMERS AND PROSPECTS DOWN THE PATH TO PURCHASE. And, since your demand generation team can provide you with a lot of useful data from their programs, you ll have new insights that will help you create more effective content. In fact, when combined with your deep understanding of your users needs and pain points, the data that your demand generation team provides can help you create more focused, targeted, and engaging content to shepherd your customers and prospects down the path to purchase. For example, a demand generation team can analyze program data such as page views, open and click rates, and social shares, to determine which channels are most effective for reaching your customers and converting prospects. Product marketing and

2 demand generation can then decide how to optimize campaigns and content for better results. In many ways, a relationship with your lead generation team is a symbiotic one. They provide you with the data you need to create better content and target it more effectively. In exchange, you provide them with the content they need to build more successful lead generation programs, which in turn leads to more effective product marketing and better business results. Yet in order for this relationship to work properly, you need to be aligned with demand generation. That requires good communication that s underscored by common goals and supported with the right tools. COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY TO GOOD RELATIONSHIPS AND WHEN IT COMES TO PRODUCT MARKETING AND DEMAND GENERATION, THE TRICK IS MAKING SURE EACH TEAM HAS ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION IT NEEDS. HOW TO FOSTER GOOD COMMUNICATION BETWEEN PRODUCT MARKETING & DEMAND GENERATION Communication is the key to good relationships and when it comes to product marketing and demand generation, the trick is making sure each team has access to the information it needs. For example, the demand generation team needs to know what s coming up on the product roadmap. They ll want to know what new products are launching and which product upgrades are rolling out, as well as which product features are being phased out and when. In addition to the timing of these events, demand generation needs to know what campaigns and programs you have planned to communicate them. Conversely, as a product marketer, you ll want to see any relevant information the demand generation team can provide to help you shape your communication strategies. For example, are certain content offers performing better than others? Are people reacting well within certain social channels and not others? The more insights you can glean about performance and optimization, the easier it will be for you to communicate effectively with your market. So how can you facilitate better communication between these groups? The first step is to share your goals with each other to ensure that you re aligned. Both of your teams need to be working in tandem, so it s important to consider each other s goals as well as the organization s overarching objectives. 2

3 Utilizing the right tools is also critical. These might include: A team calendar to help keep people aligned around key dates A common shared drive or storage space that everyone can access for easy knowledge and document sharing A marketing campaign management platform to not only help keep people and projects on track, but also ensure the coordination of a variety of details, such as which nurturing tracks to put new leads in and how existing leads are going to be notified of new product developments Multi-channel campaign reporting tools for sharing the results and data from the demand generation team s efforts Importantly, even with these tools, product marketers and demand generation team members have to take care to find the right balance of data sharing. Since your ultimate goal is to drive the actions necessary to generate business outcomes, you should be focused on the data points that illustrate whether you re surpassing, meeting, or falling short of your business goals, rather than getting hung up on other less meaningful details. PRODUCT MARKETERS AND DEMAND GENERATION TEAM MEMBERS HAVE TO TAKE CARE TO FIND THE RIGHT BALANCE OF DATA SHARING AND BE FOCUSED ON THE DATA POINTS THAT ILLUSTRATE WHETHER YOU RE SUR PASSING, MEETING, OR FALLING SHORT OF YOUR GOALS. A PARTNERSHIP THAT GETS RESULTS As a product marketer, a solid demand generation strategy should always be a part of your overarching product marketing strategy. Creating a strong relationship with demand generation that s underscored with good communication can be mutually beneficial, resulting in better outcomes for both teams and for the business as a whole. 3

4 Demand Generation & Product Marketing: A Working Example At PR Newswire we recently released an enhancement to a media monitoring and targeting platform for communications professionals in the USA. We knew that by working across marketing teams solutions, strategic communications, demand generation, events, digital acquisition we would have greater success in reaching our target market. Our campaign included many elements, from valuable content and PPC, to a news release and media outreach, all providing ways to track activity into our demand generation program. To examine how this works, let s take a look at just one element of this program, the news release. We announced the enhancement using a multimedia news release, which presents content and audience engagement points in a landing page and distributes it via our industry-leading network. We were able to include many campaign components video, infographic, white paper, tweets with trackable URLs for each. With these data points, we follow activity all the way through the buyer s journey, traveling from the announcement/awareness, through demand gen efforts/conversion, into the CRM/opportunity, and ultimately all the way to reporting on revenue. 4

5 About the Expert: Eva Rohrmann Eva Rohrmann is the director of solutions and customer lifecycle marketing for PR Newswire, CNW s parent company. Eva designs integrated programs for communicators across the PR, marketing and IR spheres. CNW Services With CNW s portfolio of services and solutions, you can achieve your communications goals from building awareness and gaining media pickup, to managing reputation and inspiring investor confidence by sharing, targeting, tracking and enhancing your unique content to make the most of your content investment. Our many offerings include: News Release Distribution Share your message via the most trusted and comprehensive network in the industry with national distribution, or laser in on a city, province, region or industry. Visibility Reports Get detailed reporting on the reach of your content by media type, region, and by individual asset. MediaVantage Our comprehensive communications management platform, MediaVantage gives you the ability to monitor global media coverage and extract actionable intelligence for your campaigns. 5