4 Product Marketing and Campaign Management Partnership Strategies

​There’s a lot of debate about the differences and overlap between product management (PM) and product marketing (PMM). But there’s another partnership duo that needs to nail messaging together—the PMM and campaign manager. These two roles require close alignment to achieve the best possible marketing results.

At Aventi Group, we have teams that develop outcome-driven campaigns and are experts at creating plans for campaign execution.

Below, we’ll discuss a few ways to sync product marketing and campaign management.

Product Marketing and Campaign Management: BFFs Who Work in Sync

In smaller companies, product marketing managers are sometimes responsible for handling a greater portion of the campaign management work. This includes establishing messaging, creating copy, and sometimes even creating the campaign theme. In companies of this size, the PMM serves dual roles on a smaller team.

In larger companies, product marketing may sit under marketing (62%) or under the product department. With enterprises, they may have their own department as functions become increasingly specialized.

Overall, the top five responsibilities for product marketing managers include:

• Product positioning and messaging (92%)
• Managing product launches (79%)
• Creating sales collateral (78%)
• Customer and market research (72%)
• Storytelling (60%)

Campaign managers are nearly always square in the marketing department. At smaller companies, campaign managers may take on more of the demand generation or even the marketing ops role.

At larger companies, campaign managers tend to be a centralized function, tasked with running multiple campaigns for multiple products simultaneously.

Why Is It Important To Keep Product Marketing and Campaign Managers Aligned?

Simply put, these two functions enable the company to create and deliver targeted audience-focused messaging. Think of it as a kind of marketing equivalent of Cyrano de Bergerac. Product marketing provides the insights and overall message for campaign managers to create a specific campaign that conveys this message to their target audience.

To ensure that your target market receives consistent, focused messaging, it’s essential for these functions to be aligned. They may need a nudge to ensure your buyers and customers have a seamless experience.

Here are four areas where marketing leaders can help create that alignment:

• Goals/OKRs/KPIs
• Audience Insights
• Messaging
• Sales Alignment

1. Goals, OKRs, or KPIs

Campaign managers live and die by campaign metrics. They’re data-driven and focused on reporting and metrics. Their job success metrics are often tied to campaign results and/or improvements in campaign results.

Product marketing? Not so much. In fact, 15% of product marketing teams don’t have OKRs in place. Many PMMs are working without success measurements to brag about. There’s no reason product management shouldn’t be aligned with success metrics. They’re critical to the company’s success.

Without metrics and analytics, they’re often relegated to support staff. Product marketers work with different functions of an organization, and they should be held to similar, or even the same, goals as those functions.

So, when it comes to closer alignment for product marketing and campaign management, here are some shared metrics to consider:

• Share of voice/mentions (especially when it comes to big launches)
• Deals impacted
• Campaign landing page conversion rates

Depending on the level of collaboration, from messaging to copy, each function could also share campaign goals.

2. Audience Insights

The entire focus of a campaign manager is to create content and copy that converts. Whether it’s survey results, email campaigns, or social media posts, the goal is to get the target market to engage. That’s where audience insights from PM play a big role in the creation of messaging and content.

Product marketers need to know the product. But knowing the target market, or audience, is the second half of the all-important “product-market fit.” Product marketers are responsible for understanding and effectively communicating specific information about the ideal customer profile and its corresponding personas.

They need to understand the challenges, pain points, alternative solutions, and benefits. Then, this information should be shared throughout the organization, including marketing, sales, and customer success.

Audience insights, such as ICP and buyer persona, should be common knowledge and the center of all campaigns for both product marketing and campaign management teams. More importantly, they should be documented, updated, and transparent.

How often have you seen a company conduct target audience research once and call it good? Or worse, do the work once, document it, then file it away so no one else in the company knows where it is? By making audience insights a living document that informs sales, client success, and the product roadmap, a brand makes true progress toward being customer-focused.

3. Messaging

Campaign managers are much more metrics-focused. While they may have technical solution knowledge, it’s a mistake to assume they do. This is a main reason they rely on product marketers to translate technical language into high-level messaging.

Product marketers are translators, communicators, and project managers. They take technical information from the product managers or engineers and translate it into a common language, with few exceptions.

In smaller organizations where product marketers wear multiple hats, they sometimes write copy and create content since they know the customer so intimately. However, in most organizations, campaign managers take the high-level messaging around challenges and pain points to create impactful copy for creative campaigns.

What’s the difference between messaging and copy?

Messaging is strategic and foundational. It’s WHAT you talk about and WHY it matters. And while it will evolve, the changes will be nuanced and undramatic. Copy is HOW you get the message across. It has to be concise and catchy—hit you in the gut. Make you notice. Here is an example from Warren West, a copywriter.

For better continuity and consistency in the message, it makes sense for product marketing and campaign management teams to collaborate on conception and build out campaigns. It’s also important to clarify where that overlap ends and when product marketers pass the baton to campaign managers. Clarification on both sides will help avoid frustration by keeping each role focused on its own objectives.

And don’t forget, the alignment on messaging isn’t a one-way street. The feedback loop is critical to continuing to evolve the messaging for the living audience insights document. Campaign managers need to communicate the results of A/B campaign tests, especially when successful campaigns include a variation or different messages than what was originally intended.

4. Sales Alignment

The last area where product marketers and campaign managers need to be aligned is with the sales team. Sales is looking to these roles for two different reasons:

• To product marketers for messaging, enablement, and sales playbooks
• To campaign managers for a stream of interested buyers

Which role do you think receives the most attention from the sales team? If you guessed campaign managers, you’d be right. Presenting a unified front helps sales see and understand the importance of consistency in messaging from product to advertising to sales.

Consider having product marketing and campaign management professionals present to sales teams together when launching new products. Sales will gain visibility into the value of the two roles and how they work together. And as another customer touchpoint, the sales team will be able to provide first-person feedback on the messaging, marketing strategy, and overall campaign.

Driving Campaign Traffic Through Partnership and Alignment

The winning play for companies today is to be customer-focused. Both campaign managers and product marketers perform jobs that are extremely focused on the customer. Even if they’re not customer-facing, their work product is. The more guidelines you can provide these two functions to keep and stay aligned, the more collaborative they will be. With these two departments in sync, you can expect a significant improvement in the customer experience.

At Aventi Group, our product marketing agency specializes in delivering world-class go-to-market execution for high-tech B2B clients. Our practice delivers targeted narratives that guide prospects through every stage of the buyer’s journey, building trust and driving conversions.

To learn more about our program and campaign management services, contact Aventi Group and start driving engagement with our tailored campaign services.