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[upbeat music] Hey everyone, Alex here. Let me tell you about Userp. That's U-S-E-R-P.io.
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Userp has spent 10 years helping some of the biggest SaaS, fintech, and healthcare brands in the world turn organic search into a legitimate customer acquisition engine, and now they're doing the same for AI search.
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They helped monday.com go from 600,000 to 1.2 million organic visits leading into their IPO.
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They built hundreds of high-authority links and content assets for EarlyBird, a fintech app driving over 20,000 acquired users before EarlyBird was acquired by Acorns.
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And they've helped Onboard rank for 13,000 more keywords in their space, tripling their organic pipeline value in a single year. What makes Userp different is they don't just publish content and hope for the best.
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They engineer content assets that rank and convert, backed by links on sites like HubSpot, Gartner, and G2. Here's the deal for Superpath.
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Mention Superpath when you book your strategy call at U-S-E-R-P.io, and they'll add five bonus high-authority link placements to your first month on top of your package. That's userp.io.
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Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, Eric, Chloe, and I are talking about product marketing. I'll give you just a quick background.
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Uh, we cover this in great detail in the podcast, so I won't waste your time with a long intro. But basically, I spent about three months as a product marketer at Reforge, uh, prior to the company being acquired by Miro.
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It was an awesome experience. In addition to just having a ton of fun with it, I learned a bunch, and so we talk about those learnings on this podcast.
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And then we really shift the conversation to focus primarily on what content marketers can learn from product marketers, from the practice of doing it, from the value they provide to the company, and also the money that they earn.
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Like, product marketers do tend to earn more money than content marketers, and so we get into all of that stuff. So hope you enjoy this conversation. As always, a reminder to check out Superpath Pro.
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We have a 30-day free trial. We have tons of good stuff going on. There's conversations like this happening in the Slack community every single day. There's also tons of programming, monthly one-on-ones.
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There's workshops focused primarily on AI. There's group calls.
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Uh, there's always something going on, and Alex, CEO, sends out an email every Monday with a list of all the things that you can participate in or listen in on each week.
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And every week, there's a couple things that are just such an easy thing to add to the calendar because it's interesting. You know you're gonna learn something and meet some cool people.
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So really encourage folks to go check it out. I'll get out of the way now. Enjoy this conversation with Eric, Chloe, and I. Hey everybody, Jimmy here with another podcast. Today we've got Eric and Chloe on.
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How are you guys? Doing good. Someone stole Chloe's garbage bin, so that's the talk of, of the town. Yeah, some neighbor drama, but you know, it's fine. [laughs] Chloe's also wearing an awesome Superpath hoodie.
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One of a kind, actually. I think it's the only one of that color and style in existence. It is, because I didn't like your peach color. [laughs] Chloe, that's one thing I like about you, that, like, Chloe will never...
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And I really appreciate this about you, Chloe, like you will never be like, "Oh yeah, sure."
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Like, that's why we like having you on the podcast, because like often when Eric and I like start getting a little crazy, I'm like, "AI is gonna replace everything," and you say, "No."
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And then when we're like, "Let's sh- let's send you a hoodie," you were like, "No. [laughs] Not this one."
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[laughs] Yeah, keeping my own opinions and inside thoughts was never one of my strong suits, so I feel like this is a good outlet for that. [laughs] That's why we appreciate you, Chloe.
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So today we're gonna talk about product marketing. So I, I'll just give like quickie overview of like why this is so top of mind for me.
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So last summer I got this marketing role at Reforge, where I was primarily working on thought leadership content. Reforge was kind of right in the middle of this pivot towards SaaS.
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So traditionally had been a company that sold, uh, membership for training and education for product and growth people, had been building SaaS products and was finally ready to release them.
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And so product marketing emerged this very immediate need, and we didn't have anyone else to do it. So the founder was doing it himself, at least in the very, very short term. So anyways, I took on product marketing.
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I did it for a couple months, and then Reforge got acquired, which I didn't necessarily see coming, but also kinda like closed the product marketing chapter of my career.
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So I had three glorious months- Three glorious months... as a product marketer.
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[laughs] And now I'm back to working on content marketing, which is like, that's my like, that's my comfort zone and like I, I really enjoy that. But
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I learned a lot, and I got to, uh, you know, it's kinda like this perfect middle ground of like using skills I already had and being really challenged to take on new ones as well. And so there's like some takeaways here,
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just like that maybe I can run through quickly, but I also, I just feel like the product and content marketing discussion has changed quite a bit, largely because of AI, I think, and just like the way that marketing teams are thinking about this right now.
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And also each of you have very different perspectives based on the type of work you do and the types of companies that you work for.
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You know, I think size is definitely like a, a significant factor here in the way that companies divvy up content and product. So maybe does it make sense to like run through some quick learnings? I can be brief.
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Like I'm not gonna go nuts on this. Go for it. All right. The couple things I learned, one important one was that product marketing is a lot closer to the action.
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And I had a very similar experience when I was at Animals and got to work on sales there.
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And, uh, once I started working on sales, I was like, "Oh, this is like the most important thing that's happening at the business."
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And I like kinda had a similar feeling when I started working on product marketing, not that the, the product marketing was the most important thing, but that the product and engineering was the most important thing, and like my job was to support them and like kind of he- like make their work shine and kinda like yell it from the rooftops about how cool this stuff was.
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I felt like in each case it was like a healthy reminder to me that like content marketing is a means to an end rather than the end itself, you know?
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And I feel like s- that, at least for me, I find that that is sometimes easy to forget because I enjoy-The craft of content, of the strategy and the creation, and just like an enjoy-- Like I, I find satisfaction in it, and I find it's a little easy to kinda overlook, like the why are we doing this, and kinda like how is it supporting sales or, you know, how is it supporting the features that we're launching or, like, a-all these other things.
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Because the practice of content itself is rich with all these factors that are just sort of fun to focus on. So that was the first thing.
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The work felt meaningful and important and urgent also, because, like, the company is making this pivot, and the team is shipping cool stuff, and so, like, you know, like the entire company's attention is, like, very focused on we are now a SaaS company.
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And so my role in that was-- It was elevated basically, like, kind of quickly, even though I, like, only sort of knew what I was doing. [chuckles] So that was the first thing.
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Uh, the second was there is so much more coordination required among the team. You know, like, content marketers, they don't always run on their own schedule.
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But, like, if you're working primarily on, like, increasing your organic reach or you're working on a thought leadership campaign or something, like, you're not really tied to the product schedule.
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And I found this to be, like, probably the most overwhelming part of it was you got PMs, you got engineers, you have designers, and then you have product marketing, and everyone has to be on the same page.
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So, like, I need a certain amount of lead time to put together the marketing materials.
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Like, I'm working on a version of the product that is not actually released yet, so sometimes I would actually forget that, that like, the feature is still actively being worked on.
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And sometimes I would, like, make a tutorial video only to realize, like, "Oh, this isn't even gonna be shipped. I have to, like, redo this now because there's another version coming."
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And, like, sometimes I would find out the morning of, like, "Oh, we found a bug. We can't ship today."
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You know, so, like, kind of the team aspect of, like, getting everybody on the same page and keeping the schedules going and, like, making sure the marketing hit when it was supposed to hit was-- I mean, I guess it's sort of like project management 101, but, like, I just typically as a content marketer have kinda worked on my own, my own schedule and, like, just wasn't really used to that.
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The other side of that coin is that there's much more camaraderie, I found, because each person is contributing a very different component to the final output. Code, design, the PM-ing, the marketing, et cetera.
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And so, like, it actually felt like a real celebration when everything got out the door and the marketing hit and you see the numbers going up.
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Like, it was awesome, and that camaraderie was probably my favorite part of the whole experience.
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And then maybe not surprising, one other thing I learned is that Claude is extremely helpful, especially if you kinda only halfway know what you're doing.
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[chuckles] You know, like I kinda mentioned, there's, like, this sweet spot of, like, I kinda get the basics of product marketing, but I don't have, like, a ton of experience actually doing it. But I can write.
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I get how to write a blog post, make emails. I can make a video. You know, I can whip up something. It's not gonna be amazing, but I can do it.
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And obviously, I got, like, pushed quite a bit to learn new things, and Claude helped me a lot.
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And so if you want, I can run through, like, a couple of quick things that I use, some of which we've actually talked about on this podcast.
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The first was I created a Claude project that I would use for all of the product marketing, and I just loaded it up with tons of context.
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And actually, most of that context was screenshots from Slack, where, like, the team is talking about the feature that is being worked on, and I would just be, like, grabbing that, throwing the project.
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The team used Linear as the tool to track all of the work. It's like the Asana for product teams, basically. And so, like, I was able to get stuff out of there.
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And then sales, we had decks and a bunch of other sales enablement stuff I was able to pull from. And then our founder actually put together an amazing messaging and positioning guide that went in there as well.
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Then the next thing was creating a custom style in Claude, which I think it's, like, the easiest, simplest, and, like, best thing you can do to make the output of Claude writing better.
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Our founder had already made one for himself, and I kind of borrowed that and tweaked it for stuff that was gonna be published on behalf of the company and not him specifically.
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Uh, I also have an article that's going up on this. I have a link in here of, like, how to make your own style guide if you haven't done it already.
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It makes such a massive difference when you're creating marketing materials to run it all through a, a custom style in Claude. Another one which we have talked about on the podcast was the, a Notion connector. So
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I got really sick of, like, talking to Claude and then taking the output and copying and pasting it somewhere, so I connected it to Notion.
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Claude helped me create a template, so anytime I wanted to create, we needed to kick off a new product launch, there was actually a Claude scale in place that would copy the template, and then we'd work there.
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And then, like, as I'm talking with Claude, instead of responding to me directly in the chat, it's going into Notion.
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And then as I make edits there, Claude can see those edits so much easier, and the threads become so much more condensed, so it's much easier to navigate if you have to scroll up and down a bit.
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It's not really, like, a product marketing thing, but it just made, like, the work itself so much easier because I was relying so heavily on Claude.
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One last thing and then I'll get out of the way because I've been talking for a really long time.
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One kind of, like, marketing learning I had from this is that I felt that my role as a product marketer was to basically get out of the way. Like, the marketing is basically just showcasing the product.
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I didn't want it to feel like the reader has to go through the marketing to get to the product. I wanted to, like, eliminate the middleman essentially, right?
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So I wanted the marketing to feel basically invisible, so that when someone, like, clicks the email, sees it in LinkedIn or, um, X or wherever else we were posting stuff, that what they were seeing was the product itself in a way that made it really easy to understand what the feature did, why it was valuable, and why they should give it a go.
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Rather than, I think there is a tendency in content marketing, and, like, certainly I do this, where, like, there is the reader hitting the content and then there's some additional step to be taken maybe then, but probably later on, and I wanted this to be much more direct.
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So I tried to, just really tried to keep the marketing, like, invisible is, like, the word that comes to mind, but kind of, like, quiet in a way. You know what I mean?
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It's like we're sort of yelling from the rooftops that we have this thing, but I wanted people to see the thing, not the marketing for the thing. Does that make sense? It does make sense, yeah.
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Yeah, I think I find when I'm doing... Like, I do a lot of product launch blog posts or emails at Dock, and yeah, there's, like, a different voice you take that it, it's like, "Here, I'm just showing you.
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I'm just showing you this new thing. I'm not trying to sell you on it. Like, if this is the right thing for you, then it's already-... resonating.
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Like, if this is the product you actually need versus, like, when you're in content mode, you're often, you are feeling [laughs] like you're doing more of a sales job or having to tell a story.
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Even though that's not like... I do think there's a lot of areas of product marketing where you are, like, crafting the story, but I, I feel like when it comes to, like, product launches specifically, that's when you...
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I do agree with that feeling of, like, trying to get them get out of the way.
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There's maybe a touch of, like, telling people why they should care, but you want it to feel easy and natural and like you sort of slipped it in there.
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Yeah, I think I always try and think about, like, also have this, I don't know if it's controversial. But it's like, I do believe that your product should be in your content.
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Like, I don't think that you should be smacking readers over the head with it, but I think, like, content marketing in general, I feel like some companies that I've worked at, there's two sides of the spectrum in content, and getting into that, like, sweet spot is where a company should be.
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And the two sides are a ton of thought leadership that you read and you have no idea what the company does, and you don't understand why you're supposed to work with them or, like, what they stand for or what they're offering.
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And then the other side of the spectrum is, like, five reasons why you should buy us yesterday.
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And, like, I think that is part of content marketing's job and part of product marketing's job to, like, find that sweet spot because, like, product marketing kind of helps develop that, the narrative and the why and the validation and the positioning, and then content is like, okay, great, what are the actual pieces of content that run from this?
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And, like, your product is going to, in my opinion, like, organically run through that. Like, you're gonna mention and talk about a feature. You're gonna talk about a use case. You're gonna have a client story, right?
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Like, you're not gonna have those things in every single piece, but I think a lot of times, like, the drift between content marketing and product marketing is almost too wide of- Mm...
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of a gap because I think that you should be constantly thinking of the things that your product marketing team is actually thinking about, and that's how you kind of stay a little bit more in sync.
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That was a great point. I like that a lot.
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One of the things I actually found myself working on, or probably the most time-consuming thing I did, was create videos, like tutorial style videos for each feature, and it was time-consuming 'cause, like, there's a learning curve for me to, like, figure out how to use Descript, and, like, I haven't made a lot of videos, and now I've, like, there's a little bit of pressure to, like, make one that's good.
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But one thing I found was that it was so refreshing to just be like, "Hey, we launched a new feature. Here's how you use it." [laughs] Versus- Yeah...
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like, you know, trying to come up with, like, catchy blog post titles that will, like, get someone's attention. Like, I didn't have to do that. I was just like, "Here it is."
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It did make me think, like, huh, I would like to have this feeling, this kind of refreshing, like, sort of simplistic approach to the marketing, like, a little bit more often. Yeah, I'd love to comment on that.
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I think, 'cause, uh, maybe half my job at Doc now is product marketing, I would say. We have a lot of product velocity, so we have lots of things to launch, which is also becoming an interesting...
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There's another impact of AI, is just that there's, our team is using Claude Code and things like that to ship product faster, so there's just way more to talk about more often, and that's causing another sort of marketing bottleneck for me because if I talked about everything we launched, I would be doing nothing but product launches as a one-person team.
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So that's created one challenge, but I think what I like about product marketing that's sort of the flip of content marketing that you got to is that there's, like, a calendar of, like, "Kate, we're gonna launch this on this date."
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I have a list of things I need to do for each launch. You know, there's, "I'm gonna make a blog post. I'm gonna make an email. We're gonna do a couple LinkedIn posts."
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Like, there's a checklist I can just go through, and it, like, slots nicely into a schedule, and I can know, like, "Okay, this time every week, I'm gonna have to work on this," versus content marketing being so open-ended.
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The flip side of that being that, like, there's, like you said, there's more time pressure. There's more time crunches. There's, like, more stakes it feels like.
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And so it's nice to be able to oscillate back and forth between both. I don't know if I'd be cut out for product marketing all the time.
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To your point too about, like, having to reschedule things because the product changes, like, one thing we just started doing at Doc is we release the product, and we wait, like, three weeks, and then we announce it.
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Oh, interesting. [laughs] Because we have a customer base of, you know, a few hundred accounts.
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If we had millions of accounts, we probably couldn't do this, but we'll just, like, sneakily launch something, wait for bugs to show up, wait for features that we decide need to change, like, once real people are in there, and then we do the product marketing launch, and that's when we, you know, so we don't end up repeating so much work on the marketing side.
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So I don't know if that could apply to... Obviously, you're done now. Your stage is over now, but it's been really useful for us, yeah.
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I think that's, like, a very deliberate decision, though, in terms of trying to figure out, like, what tiers of product launches you have as well because, like, the more things that go into a product launch, the higher probability of one of those things not, you know, not being the best that it can be is, like, there might be an inaccuracy in a blog post that translates to an inaccuracy in a video, in a sales enablement piece, in a one-pager, whatever.
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So it's like you kind of have to think about all of those moving pieces together and make sure that, like, not a single step gets missed.
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But that's why I think, like, I rely on product marketing to be like, "Okay, how big of a splash are we making about this?" Right?
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Because we might have something that's just a feature release, and the one thing I'm trying to, you know, to continue to educate is, like, just because we have a feature release doesn't mean we have a blog post on it.
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Just because we have a feature release doesn't mean we have a social post on it. Like, again, that should kind of flow a little bit more, like, organically within what we're doing.
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Like, is there content we should be updating instead that makes sense to do? Or if it's something brand new, like, yeah, okay, how do we make a big splash about it, and how do we do, like, the lead up to it?
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So again, I think it's, like-The two teams really working in parallel. Like, I think your product marketing team should be, like, your content marketers', like, best friends. Yeah. You know, that's a great point.
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I feel like I've either worked at really small companies or really large companies, and I just, like, haven't really crossed paths with product marketers that much.
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Either the company was too small to have someone dedicated to the role or was so big that, like, I wouldn't have even known where to find them. You know what I mean?
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I also find just, yeah, like, in that Medium world, Jimmy, that you're talking about, though, I've worked at companies that has, like, a product manager who is doing a lot of the work of a product marketer. Mm.
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So like, so they're helping figure out what product should be built. They're making the internal argument why, and then, like, that's naturally...
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They also end up responsible for kind of the messaging around the product because they're the ones who basically made the argument for it internally. So for those who haven't worked at a startup, it's like they'll...
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Someone... They're basically a project manager slash sort of, like, product visionary who understands the customer really well.
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They work closely with customer success to understand, like, what features people are requesting, and they're kind of just, like, the voice of the customer internally to...
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And they interfaces with the product team to get the thing built.
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And then I've been in a relationship where they sort of, like, not necessarily throw things over the fence to me, but they say, "Okay," like, "here's our product roadmap. Here's what's releasing.
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Here's why we built this and why." And then in the world where we didn't have, like, a product marketer, they would sort of hand, like, the information to me, and then I just had to make assets basically.
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Like, they told me the story, and I do assets. I think at Doc there's been times, like, our CEO is basically our product manager, and so me and him kind of share product marketing responsibilities.
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But I've also been at companies where we had a product marketer, and it was like then they went around telling the story to the whole company. "Here's what we're building. Here's why.
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Here's what our competitors look like in this space. Here's the messaging. You know, here's a demo." And then, like, as content marketing, I got handed it, like, more downstream. It's like, "Okay, here's...
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Now just write the email," right? Yeah. And so there's sort of, like, a timeline of responsibilities when it comes to building a product or launching a product, like, or go to market if you wanna call it that way.
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And there, like, the line where content comes in or product marketer comes in is just sort of shifts along that timeline, and there might be more handoffs depending on how many more people there are.
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But I feel like the life cycle is kind of consistent, and you, like, you just have to figure out, like, where you fit in that life cycle.
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I think there's also, like, a missed opportunity for content marketers when you have such a heavy product marketing presence, and that can be exactly what you just said, Eric.
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Like, being able to talk to the product manager and really get in the weeds of the product because that's where a lot of the ideas can come from when you're listening to someone say in their own words, like, "Here's why we created this.
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Here's the, you know, the trials and tribulations, and I've been with this company for 10 years, and our clients have always wanted this, and we finally built it, and we're excited about it."
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It's almost like the product marketer gets to experience that because they're the ones that are in the weeds talking to all of these different stakeholders.
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And so, like, the fact that content marketing, in theory, gets a nice little pretty package at the end to then go figure out what content assets and all that sort of stuff we wanna stem from it is nice.
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But yeah, there's, like, something missing where I'm like, "Oh, man, I wish that, like, I could do a little bit more of that product marketing work," but I can't because I have a shit ton of work to do myself.
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So [chuckles] it's like you don't feel, like, as close to the business, I think, as a product marketer does. I... just personally. Yeah. I would agree with that.
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One other interesting thing I found was that it was interesting to think about, like, growth a little more holistically and understand, like, where I fit into it.
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So, like, as an example, like, I get on a call with, with the PM and the engineer leading a f- a, a new feature, and, like, they're already talking about how the feature itself will support growth.
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Like, for example, there's a template library within the product. Okay, now the template library can be shared with the team. Like, where does the share button go? Like, what's the copy like?
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H- how do we make it super easy for people to, like, invite a team member? And then, like, how does the billing work if that person... Can they view only for free? When do they start charging?
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Like, they're already thinking about all this, and then, like, the sales folks wanna get on that call because they're like, "Oh, once this is out, I'm gonna go to a couple of my accounts because I know that they'll be interested in using this.
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So, like, help me, like, make sure I know how to explain this to them." And then it just sort of helped me figure out, like, okay, I have a role. It's not, like, my sole responsibility to drive interest to this thing.
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Like, everyone is thinking about this from a different perspective.
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And I found that to be, one, comforting 'cause I'm, like, amongst a group of people who are all kinda, like, thinking about the same goal from slightly different perspectives and then, two, like, tried to help...
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It helped me sort of, like, narrow the focus a bit on, like, the best way that I could help the team be more successful. Can we talk about messaging?
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'Cause before this call, we were just vamping a little bit, and I think one of the lessons that Jimmy had and something I had is that, like, content marketers' relationship with messaging, like your product messaging, and your ICP, your ideal customer profile, is you're, like, a little more distant from it, and the stakes are kind of lower of getting it wrong.
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So, like, I'll give you an example.
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Normally, when I'm writing a blog post or even let's say, like, I'm handing a blog post to a freelancer, I'm like, "Your ICP is a head of sales, uh, and when they're reading this blog post, they're, like, frustrated with their CRM or, you know, whatever the story is."
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And, like, and that's enough kind of, right? Like, then they take the topic, and they can write a blog post.
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And you have to roughly understand, like, how senior the person is or something like that, but whatever point you're trying to make, you can still make it, and it's fine if you don't understand the customer 1,000%.
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But for, in product marketing, I found, like, I was partially tasked with basically redoing all of Doc's messaging around, like, okay, we're a digital sales room, but now we're a sales enablement platform.And then it was like, "Okay, I have to make sure I'm not saying the same thing about Doc that all of our competitors are saying about themselves."
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Like, our story needs to be really tight. It actually needs to resonate with the audience. So if, like, if I'm wrong, we're not gonna make any sales, 'cause this is gonna go in our sales pitch.
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And so, like, it has to be very... Chloe used the word before the call, it has to be validated. You know, I actually have to test that there's demand here.
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You kind of have to, like, go intern into your sales team and be like, "Is this BS?" Like, "Is this the real story?"
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And there's a lot more, like, stakes in it, I found, and you just have to have, like, a tighter relationship.
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Everyone says know your customer, know your audience, and, like, you can get away with kind of fudging it in content, but in product marketing, I feel like, like, it has to be true.
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Like, it's your product market fit and your, all that is, like, super tied to your messaging. And so I just found the stakes were higher.
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I don't know if that resonates with you, Jimmy, in your brief time doing product marketing. Definitely. I found that especially... Well, I think maybe helpful context is we were, like, a relatively new software company.
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You know? Like, the team had been building stuff for, I don't know, months, not years, you know? And, like, now we're, like, finally ready to, like, tell the world.
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And so, like, we were doing much of this for the very first time, so, like, I'm also doing product marketing for the first time myself for a company that is doing product marketing for the first time.
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And we just ran into so many questions that were really messaging and positioning questions that, like, forced us to have very productive conversations.
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Like I mentioned earlier, like, our founder was really, really good at this, and, like, he had, like, a very strong vision for the software, and so, like, he was very, very helpful in this.
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But, like, I found, like, even tiny little things, like- like, do we capitalize the name of the feature? And if so, we have to make sure that's consistent everywhere.
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Like, and there's tons of, like, tiny questions like that were not answered because they had never been asked before.
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And then Claude is, like, really helpful, 'cause once you answer those, you just, like, put it in Claude and then it's always right after that, which is really nice.
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I think it's really interesting, though, because it's like, is that the product marketer's decision or is that the content marketer's decision, right?
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Like, do product marketers care about capitalization as much as a bunch of content nerds? [laughs] That's a good question. Uh, maybe because I am a content nerd, that was why I cared.
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[laughs] I have those debates with our customer success team all the time, like, do we call the doc library, like, capital L? Do you call it, like, the content library? Yeah.
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I do wanna give an example in my story, 'cause I just thought of it after I, I spoke.
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A really good example is, like, so we went out and we were like, "Okay, we're repositioning Doc as, like, the AI sales enablement platform," right? Everyone's doing that right now.
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And so we said, "The old way you're doing it is wrong.
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You used to have, like, static content libraries, but now, like, your reps are going to be able, with AI, to have, like, basically things, like, put on their lap and their lives are gonna be so much easier."
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And I, like, made a pitch deck and went internally to our sales team and presented this, and they're like, "Yeah, no, like, customers don't care at all about that." Like, no. Oh, interesting.
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Like, if I had written an article about whatever, content management, and, like, pitched the value of AI, like, I, I'm sure that article could have converted and got some leads.
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But, like, it doesn't really matter that I wasn't, like, hitting the nail on the head, versus our sales team is like, "You know what?
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Like, the customer cares about, like, the product we're trying to rip and replace, like the big incumbent platforms. They're like so many clicks to get to where you need to go. Like, that's what annoys them."
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Or, like, they have to have a whole admin person taking care of it, and, like, Doc, like, someone can spin it up in like one day, and it's just so much more lightweight.
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Or, like, those are all built for enterprise and, like, anyone who's not enterprise can't use them. And so, like,
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all, like, the real stories I completely missed because I was going about it sort of as a, in the wrong way. Like, I wasn't thinking in, like, a true product marketer mind.
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I was thinking more like, "What's the story I wanna tell as a content marketer?" So that was just sort of a concrete example of maybe the difference. Maybe that just makes me, like, a crappy content marketer, too.
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[laughs] I don't know. But- No, I think it's like a chicken and egg thing, though, too, right? Yeah.
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Like, it's like sometimes as content marketers, like, we can get so caught up in making it sound good and making sure that we have a content thread for it and making sure that it aligns with, like, our keywords and all this nitty-gritty crap that product marketing doesn't really understand or care about, which is fine.
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But I think the most complex but fascinating part of product marketing is they have to be able to distill it into, like, the simplest terms for us to then build upon, right?
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Like, it's not in so much about, like, why say it in 30 words when you can say it in 6?
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It's more just, like, what is that core thing that we are trying to get across in our messaging in, like, why our product versus this other one, and taking that from, like, 17,000 different inputs to distill it into one takeaway.
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And that is... I give product marketing a lot of props for that.
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Like, when I was in my kinda, like, career transition, whatever, unemployed, whatever you wanna call it, sure, I debated, like, going into product marketing because I felt like I was really close to it in a lot of ways.
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There were a lot of things that I really liked and I was like, "I think I could be good at this." But then thinking about, like, all of the other tenets of product marketing, I was like, "I don't know.
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I don't know if my brain works this way. Like, I think I'm a content girly. Like, I think that's just where I live." [laughs] So it's just a very different way of thinking. Totally.
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One of the challenges I've found is, like, there's so much output in content, and other than product launches like I talked about, where you have a calendar, like, the messaging thing, like, you can spin your wheels forever on, like, how do you know that you've landed on the right messaging?
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In marketing, I'm like, "My blog post is done. It's SEO optimized, and it's published, and now I'm getting rankings." For product marketing, you're like, "Is this the right messaging?" Right. Like, okay, are...
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Like, did we say the right thing on our homepage? Should we change it again? Should we change it next month again? Like, you're just constantly... There's even more, like, self-doubt, I've found.
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Part of that comes from not being as much of a, quote-unquote, "expert" in that area.
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But I, I found, like, the end points were harder to figure out.That's interesting, Eric, and I actually think it's probably a good segue to talk about money, too. Mm-hmm.
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Because I feel like in, in general, product marketers earn more than content marketers. That's a broad statement, but I...
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The data would support that kind of on average product marketers earn more than content marketers. And I think, actually shout out Sierra. She used to work at Superpath.
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She wrote an article on the Superpath blog titled, "Why Do Product Marketers Earn More Than Content Marketers?" And I went and reread it recently, and I think it still holds up.
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And I think probably the number one thing is it's just easier to tie ROI to product marketing activity than it is content marketing activity.
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Like, despite the fact that it's harder to say, like, when is it done, it just like, in general, like, kind of the metrics you're looking at are easier to tie to the work than content, which is kind of constantly suffers from this kind of indirect attribution problem, which is, y- you know, kind of just, like, inherent to content marketing, I think.
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And I think it's what I said at the top of the call, too, which is just that product marketers are inherently just closer to the business. Yeah. Right? Like, they have to be.
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Like, I always say, even when I'm talking about content goals, it's like you have your business, your product, your sales, your marketing, and then your content, but it's like product marketing actually sits in this, like, connecting back to your business goals, to your sales goals, understanding the product roadmap.
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So, like, the way that I think about laddering content up to everything, I think product marketing has to do that in a much more substantial way, right?
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Because, like, they're the ones that are putting the stake in the ground in terms of here's the actual messaging we're going out to market with, and here are the actual people that we're targeting.
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And like you said, Eric, it's much more dangerous to be wrong as a product marketer than it is as a content marketer.
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Because when you get to, depending on the type of business you work for, like, by the time it gets to the content marketer, in theory it's all been validated. It's all been like, "Okay, yes, this is our source of truth.
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This is great," and then we need to go build a content strategy for it. So, like, I do understand why product marketers make more. Like, I'm okay with that.
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[laughs] And to your point before, too, Jimmy, I think you talked a lot about the internal collaboration that happens, and so I think, like, a lot of content marketers struggle with getting internal visibility and appreciation of their work, like, whether it's due or not, and I think because of there's so much, like, inherent internal visibility built into the product marketing role, you're probably working with every single team in the organization- Yeah...
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more or less, right? You're working with developers, you're working with sales, you're working with customer success. Like, everybody knows what you're up to kind of at all times.
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You're doing a lot of, like, internal trainings, launches, so you have so much visibility, and so you're probably, like, valued more.
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Like, whether it's deserved or not, like, probably, but you're valued more than a content marketer who's like, "We're doing a lot of, like, external facing stuff."
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And so, like, it's possible you're, like, appreciated more by the outside audience than internally, which is an interesting dynamic. I'll give you example quickly.
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Like, I do a lot of QA for Doc things while I'm doing the product videos, like you mentioned. Like, I'll be doing- Oh, yeah...
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clicking through something, and I'll be like, "Oh, found a bug, found a bug," and I probably get more, like, internal praise.
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Like, there's a joke that I'm, like, the QA lead at Doc, and, like, maybe I spend one hour a month on that.
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But, like, a lot of people in the organization are like, "Oh, Eric's great at QA," and like, "He's so valuable for that reason."
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And, like, I wouldn't really have that visibility with a developer, for example, if I was, like, the marketer making the podcast, doing my arts and crafts, right? Like, that's- Yeah...
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th- like, there's a different, like, appreciation and relationship that the rest of the team has with me when I'm doing product marketing things. I wonder how product marketers feel about content marketers. Like [laughs]
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we need the flip side of this. Yeah. I have some thoughts on that. I mean, I, I sort of think back to, like, when I was at Animals working on sales and previously been working on marketing, and I was kind of like,
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"Wow, marketing isn't doing anything to help." [laughs] Like, there's all these sales pro- We could make so much more money if we could just improve all these things with the sales process. Like, we could just refocus.
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A- also, I was the person doing marketing, so I was only throwing shade at myself. But it was just, I found it to be, like, really interesting to find that, like, oh, if you improve sales, you just make more money.
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Like, it's that easy, or not that easy, but that simple. Yeah. You know? And I, I wonder, I don't know.
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Like, during my stint at Reforge, like, I was working on content marketing for three months, and basically the only person I worked with at the company was the founder.
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And then working on product marketing, now I'm working, like you said, Eric, with a whole bunch of different people, and I think I was, like, a little intimidated by that, because I'm like, "I, like, kind of know what I'm doing, but, like, hey, like, look, my job here is to, like, make your work shine."
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And I think people really appreciated that, 'cause they'd been working super hard on the stuff. Mm-hmm.
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We're, like, finally ready to launch, and it was an awesome way to, like, build rapport and, like, get to know the people on the team, and I think they liked me, because I would, like, talk about how great the work they were doing was, you know?
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[laughs] Who wouldn't like you, Jimmy? It's interesting that you say that, though, because that's actually the same advice we would give about just working with subject matter experts as content marketers, right?
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Like, that's, like, a line that I've said several times when people are like, "How to work with subject matter experts?"
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And I'm like, "Tell them that you exist to shine a spotlight on all the fricking awesome stuff- Yeah...
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that you're doing, and you also want to try and make their job as easy as possible by just taking their outputs and figuring out how to package it up," right?
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So it's like this is where I feel like this line between product marketing and content marketing can get blurred, in a good way, because a lot of the skills are transferable, I think, in order to be good at both of those things.
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Definitely. Like, I found I was able to pick up product... I'm not saying I was, like, the greatest product marketer in the world, but, like, I was proficient within, like, a month.
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But because I had spent all this time in content marketing, and now I'm back in content marketing, and, like, that transition was, like, 15 minutes. There was nothing. You know?
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So I think you're totally right that the skills are highly transferable. You just sort of work in a slightly different context.
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Yeah, and the lessons are good for content marketers who wanna earn more money, like, get more internal visibility, like, go talk to more teams. Like- Absolutely...
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you get a closer relationship with your sales team, your customer success team, like, all... Figure out how to, like-Get your hands in the rest of the organization and, like, have an influence.
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And yeah, and make them, like Chloe said, make them feel amplified, and I think you'll create more earning power for yourself, and you'll just become a better content marketer. Yeah. Definitely. Cool.
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I feel like that feels like a very nice place to wrap up- Beautiful... this conversation on product and content marketing. I'm taking a screenshot of us. Of our colors.
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Yeah, the audience should know that the green sweater that Chloe is wearing is the exact same green that I have on my sweater. I also have yellow on my sweater, and Jimmy, I believe, is wearing a yellow T-shirt.
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So we- Yeah... we're a beautiful color palette right now. [laughs] Didn't plan it. And actually, Jimmy, you ran the Boston Marathon. I feel like we kinda buried the lede here. Can you talk about that for our listeners?
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Sure. I mean, yeah, yeah, I'm wearing my Boston Marathon hat right now. Pretty cool. Chloe took a screenshot, so this will all make more sense when you see it. It was... Yeah, I mean, I like running.
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Like, I've been a runner for almost my entire life, basically, and I've always wanted to run the Boston Marathon. It's like a lifetime bucket list.
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And I finally did it, and it was, like, the greatest running experience of my life. It was just so much fun, and the race itself is incredible.
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Like, the fans, the energy, it's all amazing, and the running gods smiled on us and gave us this, like, absolutely perfect- Really good weather... weather. Oh, it was amazing weather. It was so good.
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Like, Boston, it could be, like, 33 degrees and pouring rain. It could be 80, and you could just be baking out there.
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And we had, like, 48 degrees and a tailwind, which is, like, the most perfect weather you could ask for. So it was great. Yeah, it was w- it was so much fun. Congratulations.
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And I think the lesson for the audience is join Superpath, and you might become an elite athlete. [laughs] Yes. Yeah, running and fun is definitely not something I would put in the same sentence. So
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I don't know if I'll be joining that club anytime soon, but I appreciate all the work you put into your [laughs] marathon training. [laughs] Congratulations. That is a massive, amazing feat. Oh, thanks.
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Yeah, it's kinda like, like, if you're into running, you should go to the Boston Marathon. It's just like a... Even if you're not running, just go 'cause it's amazing.
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And if you're into content marketing, you should join Superpath because similarly- There we go... you'll be surrounded by a bunch of other enthusiastic peers who are dealing with all the same challenges that you are.
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And, you know, this product versus content marketing thing is sort of an example of, like, the type of conversation that people are having all the time as they navigate their careers and, you know, kinda fine-tune the work they're doing on a day-to-day basis.
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So was that a good segue? Spoken like someone with three months of product marketing expertise. I love it. [laughs] Awesome. Well, thank you, guys. Superpath.co, obviously go there. A 30-day free trial.
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Come kick the tires, see if it's for you. And if you do join, say hi to us in Slack. We're always there. Chloe, Eric, thank you guys, as always. Thanks, folks. Thanks. See you guys.
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They helped monday.com go from 600,000 to 1.2 million organic visits leading into their IPO.
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Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, Eric, Chloe, and I are talking about product marketing. I'll give you just a quick background.
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Uh, we cover this in great detail in the podcast, so I won't waste your time with a long intro. But basically, I spent about three months as a product marketer at Reforge, uh, prior to the company being acquired by Miro.
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It was an awesome experience. In addition to just having a ton of fun with it, I learned a bunch, and so we talk about those learnings on this podcast.
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And then we really shift the conversation to focus primarily on what content marketers can learn from product marketers, from the practice of doing it, from the value they provide to the company, and also the money that they earn.
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Like, product marketers do tend to earn more money than content marketers, and so we get into all of that stuff. So hope you enjoy this conversation. As always, a reminder to check out Superpath Pro.
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We have a 30-day free trial. We have tons of good stuff going on. There's conversations like this happening in the Slack community every single day. There's also tons of programming, monthly one-on-ones.
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There's workshops focused primarily on AI. There's group calls.
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Uh, there's always something going on, and Alex, CEO, sends out an email every Monday with a list of all the things that you can participate in or listen in on each week.
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And every week, there's a couple things that are just such an easy thing to add to the calendar because it's interesting. You know you're gonna learn something and meet some cool people.
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So really encourage folks to go check it out. I'll get out of the way now. Enjoy this conversation with Eric, Chloe, and I. Hey everybody, Jimmy here with another podcast. Today we've got Eric and Chloe on.
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How are you guys? Doing good. Someone stole Chloe's garbage bin, so that's the talk of, of the town. Yeah, some neighbor drama, but you know, it's fine. [laughs] Chloe's also wearing an awesome Superpath hoodie.
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One of a kind, actually. I think it's the only one of that color and style in existence. It is, because I didn't like your peach color. [laughs] Chloe, that's one thing I like about you, that, like, Chloe will never...
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And I really appreciate this about you, Chloe, like you will never be like, "Oh yeah, sure."
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Like, that's why we like having you on the podcast, because like often when Eric and I like start getting a little crazy, I'm like, "AI is gonna replace everything," and you say, "No."
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And then when we're like, "Let's sh- let's send you a hoodie," you were like, "No. [laughs] Not this one."
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[laughs] Yeah, keeping my own opinions and inside thoughts was never one of my strong suits, so I feel like this is a good outlet for that. [laughs] That's why we appreciate you, Chloe.
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So today we're gonna talk about product marketing. So I, I'll just give like quickie overview of like why this is so top of mind for me.
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So last summer I got this marketing role at Reforge, where I was primarily working on thought leadership content. Reforge was kind of right in the middle of this pivot towards SaaS.
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So traditionally had been a company that sold, uh, membership for training and education for product and growth people, had been building SaaS products and was finally ready to release them.
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And so product marketing emerged this very immediate need, and we didn't have anyone else to do it. So the founder was doing it himself, at least in the very, very short term. So anyways, I took on product marketing.
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I did it for a couple months, and then Reforge got acquired, which I didn't necessarily see coming, but also kinda like closed the product marketing chapter of my career.
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So I had three glorious months- Three glorious months... as a product marketer.
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[laughs] And now I'm back to working on content marketing, which is like, that's my like, that's my comfort zone and like I, I really enjoy that. But
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I learned a lot, and I got to, uh, you know, it's kinda like this perfect middle ground of like using skills I already had and being really challenged to take on new ones as well. And so there's like some takeaways here,
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just like that maybe I can run through quickly, but I also, I just feel like the product and content marketing discussion has changed quite a bit, largely because of AI, I think, and just like the way that marketing teams are thinking about this right now.
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And also each of you have very different perspectives based on the type of work you do and the types of companies that you work for.
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You know, I think size is definitely like a, a significant factor here in the way that companies divvy up content and product. So maybe does it make sense to like run through some quick learnings? I can be brief.
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Like I'm not gonna go nuts on this. Go for it. All right. The couple things I learned, one important one was that product marketing is a lot closer to the action.
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And I had a very similar experience when I was at Animals and got to work on sales there.
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And, uh, once I started working on sales, I was like, "Oh, this is like the most important thing that's happening at the business."
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And I like kinda had a similar feeling when I started working on product marketing, not that the, the product marketing was the most important thing, but that the product and engineering was the most important thing, and like my job was to support them and like kind of he- like make their work shine and kinda like yell it from the rooftops about how cool this stuff was.
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I felt like in each case it was like a healthy reminder to me that like content marketing is a means to an end rather than the end itself, you know?
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And I feel like s- that, at least for me, I find that that is sometimes easy to forget because I enjoy-The craft of content, of the strategy and the creation, and just like an enjoy-- Like I, I find satisfaction in it, and I find it's a little easy to kinda overlook, like the why are we doing this, and kinda like how is it supporting sales or, you know, how is it supporting the features that we're launching or, like, a-all these other things.
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Because the practice of content itself is rich with all these factors that are just sort of fun to focus on. So that was the first thing.
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The work felt meaningful and important and urgent also, because, like, the company is making this pivot, and the team is shipping cool stuff, and so, like, you know, like the entire company's attention is, like, very focused on we are now a SaaS company.
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And so my role in that was-- It was elevated basically, like, kind of quickly, even though I, like, only sort of knew what I was doing. [chuckles] So that was the first thing.
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Uh, the second was there is so much more coordination required among the team. You know, like, content marketers, they don't always run on their own schedule.
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But, like, if you're working primarily on, like, increasing your organic reach or you're working on a thought leadership campaign or something, like, you're not really tied to the product schedule.
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And I found this to be, like, probably the most overwhelming part of it was you got PMs, you got engineers, you have designers, and then you have product marketing, and everyone has to be on the same page.
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So, like, I need a certain amount of lead time to put together the marketing materials.
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Like, I'm working on a version of the product that is not actually released yet, so sometimes I would actually forget that, that like, the feature is still actively being worked on.
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And sometimes I would, like, make a tutorial video only to realize, like, "Oh, this isn't even gonna be shipped. I have to, like, redo this now because there's another version coming."
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And, like, sometimes I would find out the morning of, like, "Oh, we found a bug. We can't ship today."
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You know, so, like, kind of the team aspect of, like, getting everybody on the same page and keeping the schedules going and, like, making sure the marketing hit when it was supposed to hit was-- I mean, I guess it's sort of like project management 101, but, like, I just typically as a content marketer have kinda worked on my own, my own schedule and, like, just wasn't really used to that.
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The other side of that coin is that there's much more camaraderie, I found, because each person is contributing a very different component to the final output. Code, design, the PM-ing, the marketing, et cetera.
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And so, like, it actually felt like a real celebration when everything got out the door and the marketing hit and you see the numbers going up.
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Like, it was awesome, and that camaraderie was probably my favorite part of the whole experience.
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And then maybe not surprising, one other thing I learned is that Claude is extremely helpful, especially if you kinda only halfway know what you're doing.
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[chuckles] You know, like I kinda mentioned, there's, like, this sweet spot of, like, I kinda get the basics of product marketing, but I don't have, like, a ton of experience actually doing it. But I can write.
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I get how to write a blog post, make emails. I can make a video. You know, I can whip up something. It's not gonna be amazing, but I can do it.
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And obviously, I got, like, pushed quite a bit to learn new things, and Claude helped me a lot.
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And so if you want, I can run through, like, a couple of quick things that I use, some of which we've actually talked about on this podcast.
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The first was I created a Claude project that I would use for all of the product marketing, and I just loaded it up with tons of context.
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And actually, most of that context was screenshots from Slack, where, like, the team is talking about the feature that is being worked on, and I would just be, like, grabbing that, throwing the project.
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The team used Linear as the tool to track all of the work. It's like the Asana for product teams, basically. And so, like, I was able to get stuff out of there.
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And then sales, we had decks and a bunch of other sales enablement stuff I was able to pull from. And then our founder actually put together an amazing messaging and positioning guide that went in there as well.
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Then the next thing was creating a custom style in Claude, which I think it's, like, the easiest, simplest, and, like, best thing you can do to make the output of Claude writing better.
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Our founder had already made one for himself, and I kind of borrowed that and tweaked it for stuff that was gonna be published on behalf of the company and not him specifically.
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Uh, I also have an article that's going up on this. I have a link in here of, like, how to make your own style guide if you haven't done it already.
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It makes such a massive difference when you're creating marketing materials to run it all through a, a custom style in Claude. Another one which we have talked about on the podcast was the, a Notion connector. So
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I got really sick of, like, talking to Claude and then taking the output and copying and pasting it somewhere, so I connected it to Notion.
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Claude helped me create a template, so anytime I wanted to create, we needed to kick off a new product launch, there was actually a Claude scale in place that would copy the template, and then we'd work there.
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And then, like, as I'm talking with Claude, instead of responding to me directly in the chat, it's going into Notion.
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And then as I make edits there, Claude can see those edits so much easier, and the threads become so much more condensed, so it's much easier to navigate if you have to scroll up and down a bit.
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It's not really, like, a product marketing thing, but it just made, like, the work itself so much easier because I was relying so heavily on Claude.
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One last thing and then I'll get out of the way because I've been talking for a really long time.
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One kind of, like, marketing learning I had from this is that I felt that my role as a product marketer was to basically get out of the way. Like, the marketing is basically just showcasing the product.
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I didn't want it to feel like the reader has to go through the marketing to get to the product. I wanted to, like, eliminate the middleman essentially, right?
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So I wanted the marketing to feel basically invisible, so that when someone, like, clicks the email, sees it in LinkedIn or, um, X or wherever else we were posting stuff, that what they were seeing was the product itself in a way that made it really easy to understand what the feature did, why it was valuable, and why they should give it a go.
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Rather than, I think there is a tendency in content marketing, and, like, certainly I do this, where, like, there is the reader hitting the content and then there's some additional step to be taken maybe then, but probably later on, and I wanted this to be much more direct.
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So I tried to, just really tried to keep the marketing, like, invisible is, like, the word that comes to mind, but kind of, like, quiet in a way. You know what I mean?
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It's like we're sort of yelling from the rooftops that we have this thing, but I wanted people to see the thing, not the marketing for the thing. Does that make sense? It does make sense, yeah.
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Yeah, I think I find when I'm doing... Like, I do a lot of product launch blog posts or emails at Dock, and yeah, there's, like, a different voice you take that it, it's like, "Here, I'm just showing you.
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I'm just showing you this new thing. I'm not trying to sell you on it. Like, if this is the right thing for you, then it's already-... resonating.
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Like, if this is the product you actually need versus, like, when you're in content mode, you're often, you are feeling [laughs] like you're doing more of a sales job or having to tell a story.
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Even though that's not like... I do think there's a lot of areas of product marketing where you are, like, crafting the story, but I, I feel like when it comes to, like, product launches specifically, that's when you...
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I do agree with that feeling of, like, trying to get them get out of the way.
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There's maybe a touch of, like, telling people why they should care, but you want it to feel easy and natural and like you sort of slipped it in there.
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Yeah, I think I always try and think about, like, also have this, I don't know if it's controversial. But it's like, I do believe that your product should be in your content.
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Like, I don't think that you should be smacking readers over the head with it, but I think, like, content marketing in general, I feel like some companies that I've worked at, there's two sides of the spectrum in content, and getting into that, like, sweet spot is where a company should be.
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And the two sides are a ton of thought leadership that you read and you have no idea what the company does, and you don't understand why you're supposed to work with them or, like, what they stand for or what they're offering.
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And then the other side of the spectrum is, like, five reasons why you should buy us yesterday.
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And, like, I think that is part of content marketing's job and part of product marketing's job to, like, find that sweet spot because, like, product marketing kind of helps develop that, the narrative and the why and the validation and the positioning, and then content is like, okay, great, what are the actual pieces of content that run from this?
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And, like, your product is going to, in my opinion, like, organically run through that. Like, you're gonna mention and talk about a feature. You're gonna talk about a use case. You're gonna have a client story, right?
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Like, you're not gonna have those things in every single piece, but I think a lot of times, like, the drift between content marketing and product marketing is almost too wide of- Mm...
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of a gap because I think that you should be constantly thinking of the things that your product marketing team is actually thinking about, and that's how you kind of stay a little bit more in sync.
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That was a great point. I like that a lot.
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One of the things I actually found myself working on, or probably the most time-consuming thing I did, was create videos, like tutorial style videos for each feature, and it was time-consuming 'cause, like, there's a learning curve for me to, like, figure out how to use Descript, and, like, I haven't made a lot of videos, and now I've, like, there's a little bit of pressure to, like, make one that's good.
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But one thing I found was that it was so refreshing to just be like, "Hey, we launched a new feature. Here's how you use it." [laughs] Versus- Yeah...
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like, you know, trying to come up with, like, catchy blog post titles that will, like, get someone's attention. Like, I didn't have to do that. I was just like, "Here it is."
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It did make me think, like, huh, I would like to have this feeling, this kind of refreshing, like, sort of simplistic approach to the marketing, like, a little bit more often. Yeah, I'd love to comment on that.
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I think, 'cause, uh, maybe half my job at Doc now is product marketing, I would say. We have a lot of product velocity, so we have lots of things to launch, which is also becoming an interesting...
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There's another impact of AI, is just that there's, our team is using Claude Code and things like that to ship product faster, so there's just way more to talk about more often, and that's causing another sort of marketing bottleneck for me because if I talked about everything we launched, I would be doing nothing but product launches as a one-person team.
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So that's created one challenge, but I think what I like about product marketing that's sort of the flip of content marketing that you got to is that there's, like, a calendar of, like, "Kate, we're gonna launch this on this date."
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I have a list of things I need to do for each launch. You know, there's, "I'm gonna make a blog post. I'm gonna make an email. We're gonna do a couple LinkedIn posts."
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Like, there's a checklist I can just go through, and it, like, slots nicely into a schedule, and I can know, like, "Okay, this time every week, I'm gonna have to work on this," versus content marketing being so open-ended.
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The flip side of that being that, like, there's, like you said, there's more time pressure. There's more time crunches. There's, like, more stakes it feels like.
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And so it's nice to be able to oscillate back and forth between both. I don't know if I'd be cut out for product marketing all the time.
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To your point too about, like, having to reschedule things because the product changes, like, one thing we just started doing at Doc is we release the product, and we wait, like, three weeks, and then we announce it.
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Oh, interesting. [laughs] Because we have a customer base of, you know, a few hundred accounts.
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If we had millions of accounts, we probably couldn't do this, but we'll just, like, sneakily launch something, wait for bugs to show up, wait for features that we decide need to change, like, once real people are in there, and then we do the product marketing launch, and that's when we, you know, so we don't end up repeating so much work on the marketing side.
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So I don't know if that could apply to... Obviously, you're done now. Your stage is over now, but it's been really useful for us, yeah.
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I think that's, like, a very deliberate decision, though, in terms of trying to figure out, like, what tiers of product launches you have as well because, like, the more things that go into a product launch, the higher probability of one of those things not, you know, not being the best that it can be is, like, there might be an inaccuracy in a blog post that translates to an inaccuracy in a video, in a sales enablement piece, in a one-pager, whatever.
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So it's like you kind of have to think about all of those moving pieces together and make sure that, like, not a single step gets missed.
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But that's why I think, like, I rely on product marketing to be like, "Okay, how big of a splash are we making about this?" Right?
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Because we might have something that's just a feature release, and the one thing I'm trying to, you know, to continue to educate is, like, just because we have a feature release doesn't mean we have a blog post on it.
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Just because we have a feature release doesn't mean we have a social post on it. Like, again, that should kind of flow a little bit more, like, organically within what we're doing.
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Like, is there content we should be updating instead that makes sense to do? Or if it's something brand new, like, yeah, okay, how do we make a big splash about it, and how do we do, like, the lead up to it?
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So again, I think it's, like-The two teams really working in parallel. Like, I think your product marketing team should be, like, your content marketers', like, best friends. Yeah. You know, that's a great point.
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I feel like I've either worked at really small companies or really large companies, and I just, like, haven't really crossed paths with product marketers that much.
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Either the company was too small to have someone dedicated to the role or was so big that, like, I wouldn't have even known where to find them. You know what I mean?
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I also find just, yeah, like, in that Medium world, Jimmy, that you're talking about, though, I've worked at companies that has, like, a product manager who is doing a lot of the work of a product marketer. Mm.
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So like, so they're helping figure out what product should be built. They're making the internal argument why, and then, like, that's naturally...
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They also end up responsible for kind of the messaging around the product because they're the ones who basically made the argument for it internally. So for those who haven't worked at a startup, it's like they'll...
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Someone... They're basically a project manager slash sort of, like, product visionary who understands the customer really well.
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They work closely with customer success to understand, like, what features people are requesting, and they're kind of just, like, the voice of the customer internally to...
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And they interfaces with the product team to get the thing built.
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And then I've been in a relationship where they sort of, like, not necessarily throw things over the fence to me, but they say, "Okay," like, "here's our product roadmap. Here's what's releasing.
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Here's why we built this and why." And then in the world where we didn't have, like, a product marketer, they would sort of hand, like, the information to me, and then I just had to make assets basically.
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Like, they told me the story, and I do assets. I think at Doc there's been times, like, our CEO is basically our product manager, and so me and him kind of share product marketing responsibilities.
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But I've also been at companies where we had a product marketer, and it was like then they went around telling the story to the whole company. "Here's what we're building. Here's why.
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Here's what our competitors look like in this space. Here's the messaging. You know, here's a demo." And then, like, as content marketing, I got handed it, like, more downstream. It's like, "Okay, here's...
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Now just write the email," right? Yeah. And so there's sort of, like, a timeline of responsibilities when it comes to building a product or launching a product, like, or go to market if you wanna call it that way.
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And there, like, the line where content comes in or product marketer comes in is just sort of shifts along that timeline, and there might be more handoffs depending on how many more people there are.
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But I feel like the life cycle is kind of consistent, and you, like, you just have to figure out, like, where you fit in that life cycle.
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I think there's also, like, a missed opportunity for content marketers when you have such a heavy product marketing presence, and that can be exactly what you just said, Eric.
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Like, being able to talk to the product manager and really get in the weeds of the product because that's where a lot of the ideas can come from when you're listening to someone say in their own words, like, "Here's why we created this.
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Here's the, you know, the trials and tribulations, and I've been with this company for 10 years, and our clients have always wanted this, and we finally built it, and we're excited about it."
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It's almost like the product marketer gets to experience that because they're the ones that are in the weeds talking to all of these different stakeholders.
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And so, like, the fact that content marketing, in theory, gets a nice little pretty package at the end to then go figure out what content assets and all that sort of stuff we wanna stem from it is nice.
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But yeah, there's, like, something missing where I'm like, "Oh, man, I wish that, like, I could do a little bit more of that product marketing work," but I can't because I have a shit ton of work to do myself.
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So [chuckles] it's like you don't feel, like, as close to the business, I think, as a product marketer does. I... just personally. Yeah. I would agree with that.
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One other interesting thing I found was that it was interesting to think about, like, growth a little more holistically and understand, like, where I fit into it.
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So, like, as an example, like, I get on a call with, with the PM and the engineer leading a f- a, a new feature, and, like, they're already talking about how the feature itself will support growth.
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Like, for example, there's a template library within the product. Okay, now the template library can be shared with the team. Like, where does the share button go? Like, what's the copy like?
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H- how do we make it super easy for people to, like, invite a team member? And then, like, how does the billing work if that person... Can they view only for free? When do they start charging?
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Like, they're already thinking about all this, and then, like, the sales folks wanna get on that call because they're like, "Oh, once this is out, I'm gonna go to a couple of my accounts because I know that they'll be interested in using this.
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So, like, help me, like, make sure I know how to explain this to them." And then it just sort of helped me figure out, like, okay, I have a role. It's not, like, my sole responsibility to drive interest to this thing.
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Like, everyone is thinking about this from a different perspective.
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And I found that to be, one, comforting 'cause I'm, like, amongst a group of people who are all kinda, like, thinking about the same goal from slightly different perspectives and then, two, like, tried to help...
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It helped me sort of, like, narrow the focus a bit on, like, the best way that I could help the team be more successful. Can we talk about messaging?
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'Cause before this call, we were just vamping a little bit, and I think one of the lessons that Jimmy had and something I had is that, like, content marketers' relationship with messaging, like your product messaging, and your ICP, your ideal customer profile, is you're, like, a little more distant from it, and the stakes are kind of lower of getting it wrong.
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So, like, I'll give you an example.
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Normally, when I'm writing a blog post or even let's say, like, I'm handing a blog post to a freelancer, I'm like, "Your ICP is a head of sales, uh, and when they're reading this blog post, they're, like, frustrated with their CRM or, you know, whatever the story is."
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And, like, and that's enough kind of, right? Like, then they take the topic, and they can write a blog post.
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And you have to roughly understand, like, how senior the person is or something like that, but whatever point you're trying to make, you can still make it, and it's fine if you don't understand the customer 1,000%.
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But for, in product marketing, I found, like, I was partially tasked with basically redoing all of Doc's messaging around, like, okay, we're a digital sales room, but now we're a sales enablement platform.And then it was like, "Okay, I have to make sure I'm not saying the same thing about Doc that all of our competitors are saying about themselves."
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Like, our story needs to be really tight. It actually needs to resonate with the audience. So if, like, if I'm wrong, we're not gonna make any sales, 'cause this is gonna go in our sales pitch.
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And so, like, it has to be very... Chloe used the word before the call, it has to be validated. You know, I actually have to test that there's demand here.
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You kind of have to, like, go intern into your sales team and be like, "Is this BS?" Like, "Is this the real story?"
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And there's a lot more, like, stakes in it, I found, and you just have to have, like, a tighter relationship.
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Everyone says know your customer, know your audience, and, like, you can get away with kind of fudging it in content, but in product marketing, I feel like, like, it has to be true.
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Like, it's your product market fit and your, all that is, like, super tied to your messaging. And so I just found the stakes were higher.
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I don't know if that resonates with you, Jimmy, in your brief time doing product marketing. Definitely. I found that especially... Well, I think maybe helpful context is we were, like, a relatively new software company.
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You know? Like, the team had been building stuff for, I don't know, months, not years, you know? And, like, now we're, like, finally ready to, like, tell the world.
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And so, like, we were doing much of this for the very first time, so, like, I'm also doing product marketing for the first time myself for a company that is doing product marketing for the first time.
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And we just ran into so many questions that were really messaging and positioning questions that, like, forced us to have very productive conversations.
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Like I mentioned earlier, like, our founder was really, really good at this, and, like, he had, like, a very strong vision for the software, and so, like, he was very, very helpful in this.
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But, like, I found, like, even tiny little things, like- like, do we capitalize the name of the feature? And if so, we have to make sure that's consistent everywhere.
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Like, and there's tons of, like, tiny questions like that were not answered because they had never been asked before.
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And then Claude is, like, really helpful, 'cause once you answer those, you just, like, put it in Claude and then it's always right after that, which is really nice.
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I think it's really interesting, though, because it's like, is that the product marketer's decision or is that the content marketer's decision, right?
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Like, do product marketers care about capitalization as much as a bunch of content nerds? [laughs] That's a good question. Uh, maybe because I am a content nerd, that was why I cared.
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[laughs] I have those debates with our customer success team all the time, like, do we call the doc library, like, capital L? Do you call it, like, the content library? Yeah.
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I do wanna give an example in my story, 'cause I just thought of it after I, I spoke.
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A really good example is, like, so we went out and we were like, "Okay, we're repositioning Doc as, like, the AI sales enablement platform," right? Everyone's doing that right now.
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And so we said, "The old way you're doing it is wrong.
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You used to have, like, static content libraries, but now, like, your reps are going to be able, with AI, to have, like, basically things, like, put on their lap and their lives are gonna be so much easier."
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And I, like, made a pitch deck and went internally to our sales team and presented this, and they're like, "Yeah, no, like, customers don't care at all about that." Like, no. Oh, interesting.
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Like, if I had written an article about whatever, content management, and, like, pitched the value of AI, like, I, I'm sure that article could have converted and got some leads.
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But, like, it doesn't really matter that I wasn't, like, hitting the nail on the head, versus our sales team is like, "You know what?
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Like, the customer cares about, like, the product we're trying to rip and replace, like the big incumbent platforms. They're like so many clicks to get to where you need to go. Like, that's what annoys them."
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Or, like, they have to have a whole admin person taking care of it, and, like, Doc, like, someone can spin it up in like one day, and it's just so much more lightweight.
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Or, like, those are all built for enterprise and, like, anyone who's not enterprise can't use them. And so, like,
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all, like, the real stories I completely missed because I was going about it sort of as a, in the wrong way. Like, I wasn't thinking in, like, a true product marketer mind.
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I was thinking more like, "What's the story I wanna tell as a content marketer?" So that was just sort of a concrete example of maybe the difference. Maybe that just makes me, like, a crappy content marketer, too.
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[laughs] I don't know. But- No, I think it's like a chicken and egg thing, though, too, right? Yeah.
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Like, it's like sometimes as content marketers, like, we can get so caught up in making it sound good and making sure that we have a content thread for it and making sure that it aligns with, like, our keywords and all this nitty-gritty crap that product marketing doesn't really understand or care about, which is fine.
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But I think the most complex but fascinating part of product marketing is they have to be able to distill it into, like, the simplest terms for us to then build upon, right?
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Like, it's not in so much about, like, why say it in 30 words when you can say it in 6?
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It's more just, like, what is that core thing that we are trying to get across in our messaging in, like, why our product versus this other one, and taking that from, like, 17,000 different inputs to distill it into one takeaway.
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And that is... I give product marketing a lot of props for that.
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Like, when I was in my kinda, like, career transition, whatever, unemployed, whatever you wanna call it, sure, I debated, like, going into product marketing because I felt like I was really close to it in a lot of ways.
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There were a lot of things that I really liked and I was like, "I think I could be good at this." But then thinking about, like, all of the other tenets of product marketing, I was like, "I don't know.
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I don't know if my brain works this way. Like, I think I'm a content girly. Like, I think that's just where I live." [laughs] So it's just a very different way of thinking. Totally.
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One of the challenges I've found is, like, there's so much output in content, and other than product launches like I talked about, where you have a calendar, like, the messaging thing, like, you can spin your wheels forever on, like, how do you know that you've landed on the right messaging?
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In marketing, I'm like, "My blog post is done. It's SEO optimized, and it's published, and now I'm getting rankings." For product marketing, you're like, "Is this the right messaging?" Right. Like, okay, are...
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Like, did we say the right thing on our homepage? Should we change it again? Should we change it next month again? Like, you're just constantly... There's even more, like, self-doubt, I've found.
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Part of that comes from not being as much of a, quote-unquote, "expert" in that area.
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But I, I found, like, the end points were harder to figure out.That's interesting, Eric, and I actually think it's probably a good segue to talk about money, too. Mm-hmm.
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Because I feel like in, in general, product marketers earn more than content marketers. That's a broad statement, but I...
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The data would support that kind of on average product marketers earn more than content marketers. And I think, actually shout out Sierra. She used to work at Superpath.
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She wrote an article on the Superpath blog titled, "Why Do Product Marketers Earn More Than Content Marketers?" And I went and reread it recently, and I think it still holds up.
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And I think probably the number one thing is it's just easier to tie ROI to product marketing activity than it is content marketing activity.
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Like, despite the fact that it's harder to say, like, when is it done, it just like, in general, like, kind of the metrics you're looking at are easier to tie to the work than content, which is kind of constantly suffers from this kind of indirect attribution problem, which is, y- you know, kind of just, like, inherent to content marketing, I think.
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And I think it's what I said at the top of the call, too, which is just that product marketers are inherently just closer to the business. Yeah. Right? Like, they have to be.
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Like, I always say, even when I'm talking about content goals, it's like you have your business, your product, your sales, your marketing, and then your content, but it's like product marketing actually sits in this, like, connecting back to your business goals, to your sales goals, understanding the product roadmap.
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So, like, the way that I think about laddering content up to everything, I think product marketing has to do that in a much more substantial way, right?
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Because, like, they're the ones that are putting the stake in the ground in terms of here's the actual messaging we're going out to market with, and here are the actual people that we're targeting.
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And like you said, Eric, it's much more dangerous to be wrong as a product marketer than it is as a content marketer.
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Because when you get to, depending on the type of business you work for, like, by the time it gets to the content marketer, in theory it's all been validated. It's all been like, "Okay, yes, this is our source of truth.
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This is great," and then we need to go build a content strategy for it. So, like, I do understand why product marketers make more. Like, I'm okay with that.
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[laughs] And to your point before, too, Jimmy, I think you talked a lot about the internal collaboration that happens, and so I think, like, a lot of content marketers struggle with getting internal visibility and appreciation of their work, like, whether it's due or not, and I think because of there's so much, like, inherent internal visibility built into the product marketing role, you're probably working with every single team in the organization- Yeah...
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more or less, right? You're working with developers, you're working with sales, you're working with customer success. Like, everybody knows what you're up to kind of at all times.
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You're doing a lot of, like, internal trainings, launches, so you have so much visibility, and so you're probably, like, valued more.
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Like, whether it's deserved or not, like, probably, but you're valued more than a content marketer who's like, "We're doing a lot of, like, external facing stuff."
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And so, like, it's possible you're, like, appreciated more by the outside audience than internally, which is an interesting dynamic. I'll give you example quickly.
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Like, I do a lot of QA for Doc things while I'm doing the product videos, like you mentioned. Like, I'll be doing- Oh, yeah...
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clicking through something, and I'll be like, "Oh, found a bug, found a bug," and I probably get more, like, internal praise.
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Like, there's a joke that I'm, like, the QA lead at Doc, and, like, maybe I spend one hour a month on that.
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But, like, a lot of people in the organization are like, "Oh, Eric's great at QA," and like, "He's so valuable for that reason."
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And, like, I wouldn't really have that visibility with a developer, for example, if I was, like, the marketer making the podcast, doing my arts and crafts, right? Like, that's- Yeah...
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th- like, there's a different, like, appreciation and relationship that the rest of the team has with me when I'm doing product marketing things. I wonder how product marketers feel about content marketers. Like [laughs]
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we need the flip side of this. Yeah. I have some thoughts on that. I mean, I, I sort of think back to, like, when I was at Animals working on sales and previously been working on marketing, and I was kind of like,
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"Wow, marketing isn't doing anything to help." [laughs] Like, there's all these sales pro- We could make so much more money if we could just improve all these things with the sales process. Like, we could just refocus.
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A- also, I was the person doing marketing, so I was only throwing shade at myself. But it was just, I found it to be, like, really interesting to find that, like, oh, if you improve sales, you just make more money.
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Like, it's that easy, or not that easy, but that simple. Yeah. You know? And I, I wonder, I don't know.
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Like, during my stint at Reforge, like, I was working on content marketing for three months, and basically the only person I worked with at the company was the founder.
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And then working on product marketing, now I'm working, like you said, Eric, with a whole bunch of different people, and I think I was, like, a little intimidated by that, because I'm like, "I, like, kind of know what I'm doing, but, like, hey, like, look, my job here is to, like, make your work shine."
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And I think people really appreciated that, 'cause they'd been working super hard on the stuff. Mm-hmm.
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We're, like, finally ready to launch, and it was an awesome way to, like, build rapport and, like, get to know the people on the team, and I think they liked me, because I would, like, talk about how great the work they were doing was, you know?
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[laughs] Who wouldn't like you, Jimmy? It's interesting that you say that, though, because that's actually the same advice we would give about just working with subject matter experts as content marketers, right?
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Like, that's, like, a line that I've said several times when people are like, "How to work with subject matter experts?"
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And I'm like, "Tell them that you exist to shine a spotlight on all the fricking awesome stuff- Yeah...
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that you're doing, and you also want to try and make their job as easy as possible by just taking their outputs and figuring out how to package it up," right?
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So it's like this is where I feel like this line between product marketing and content marketing can get blurred, in a good way, because a lot of the skills are transferable, I think, in order to be good at both of those things.
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Definitely. Like, I found I was able to pick up product... I'm not saying I was, like, the greatest product marketer in the world, but, like, I was proficient within, like, a month.
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But because I had spent all this time in content marketing, and now I'm back in content marketing, and, like, that transition was, like, 15 minutes. There was nothing. You know?
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So I think you're totally right that the skills are highly transferable. You just sort of work in a slightly different context.
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Yeah, and the lessons are good for content marketers who wanna earn more money, like, get more internal visibility, like, go talk to more teams. Like- Absolutely...
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you get a closer relationship with your sales team, your customer success team, like, all... Figure out how to, like-Get your hands in the rest of the organization and, like, have an influence.
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And yeah, and make them, like Chloe said, make them feel amplified, and I think you'll create more earning power for yourself, and you'll just become a better content marketer. Yeah. Definitely. Cool.
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I feel like that feels like a very nice place to wrap up- Beautiful... this conversation on product and content marketing. I'm taking a screenshot of us. Of our colors.
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Yeah, the audience should know that the green sweater that Chloe is wearing is the exact same green that I have on my sweater. I also have yellow on my sweater, and Jimmy, I believe, is wearing a yellow T-shirt.
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So we- Yeah... we're a beautiful color palette right now. [laughs] Didn't plan it. And actually, Jimmy, you ran the Boston Marathon. I feel like we kinda buried the lede here. Can you talk about that for our listeners?
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Sure. I mean, yeah, yeah, I'm wearing my Boston Marathon hat right now. Pretty cool. Chloe took a screenshot, so this will all make more sense when you see it. It was... Yeah, I mean, I like running.
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Like, I've been a runner for almost my entire life, basically, and I've always wanted to run the Boston Marathon. It's like a lifetime bucket list.
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And I finally did it, and it was, like, the greatest running experience of my life. It was just so much fun, and the race itself is incredible.
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Like, the fans, the energy, it's all amazing, and the running gods smiled on us and gave us this, like, absolutely perfect- Really good weather... weather. Oh, it was amazing weather. It was so good.
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Like, Boston, it could be, like, 33 degrees and pouring rain. It could be 80, and you could just be baking out there.
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And we had, like, 48 degrees and a tailwind, which is, like, the most perfect weather you could ask for. So it was great. Yeah, it was w- it was so much fun. Congratulations.
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And I think the lesson for the audience is join Superpath, and you might become an elite athlete. [laughs] Yes. Yeah, running and fun is definitely not something I would put in the same sentence. So
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I don't know if I'll be joining that club anytime soon, but I appreciate all the work you put into your [laughs] marathon training. [laughs] Congratulations. That is a massive, amazing feat. Oh, thanks.
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Yeah, it's kinda like, like, if you're into running, you should go to the Boston Marathon. It's just like a... Even if you're not running, just go 'cause it's amazing.
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And if you're into content marketing, you should join Superpath because similarly- There we go... you'll be surrounded by a bunch of other enthusiastic peers who are dealing with all the same challenges that you are.
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And, you know, this product versus content marketing thing is sort of an example of, like, the type of conversation that people are having all the time as they navigate their careers and, you know, kinda fine-tune the work they're doing on a day-to-day basis.
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So was that a good segue? Spoken like someone with three months of product marketing expertise. I love it. [laughs] Awesome. Well, thank you, guys. Superpath.co, obviously go there. A 30-day free trial.
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Come kick the tires, see if it's for you. And if you do join, say hi to us in Slack. We're always there. Chloe, Eric, thank you guys, as always. Thanks, folks. Thanks. See you guys.
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