Product Marketing vs Growth Marketing – Know the Difference

Product marketing and growth marketing both aim for the same thing: to boost a company’s revenue.

However, their strategies and focal points differ significantly. 

This guide will clarify the distinct roles of Product Marketing (PM) and Growth Marketing (GM).

Let’s discuss what sets these two types of marketing apart and how they can uniquely contribute to your business’s success.

What Is Product Marketing?

Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market, promoting it, and selling it to a customer. 

It involves understanding the target audience’s needs and crafting marketing strategies that effectively position the product to meet those needs. 

However, product marketing is more than just promoting what’s already been created.

Seth Godin nailed it when he said, “Don’t find customers for your product. Find products for your customers.” Product marketing managers tailor products to meet the existing needs and desires of consumers rather than trying to attract consumers to pre-existing products.

Example 

For example, consider Airbnb’s strategic approach to product marketing. Initially, Airbnb highlighted urban properties as ideal vacation rentals. However, after observing a significant increase in bookings for rural locations by U.S. guests, they shifted their focus and began prioritizing rural properties in search rankings.

This change enhanced user satisfaction by catering more closely to current demands and maximized earnings for rural hosts, generating over $3.5 billion. 

Learn more about the key elements of product marketing.

KPIs to Measure

• Market share
• Customer acquisition cost
• Customer lifetime value
• Product qualified leads (PQLs)
• Sales conversion rates
• Customer feedback and satisfaction scores
• Retention rates

What Is Growth Marketing?

Growth marketing is an approach focused on acquiring, engaging, and retaining customers through continuous testing and optimization of marketing strategies. It uses data-driven methods and innovative experiments to increase long-term customer value and drive company growth.

Growth marketing differs from product marketing in its focus. While product marketing aims to match the right products with the right customers, the growth team seeks to expand the user base and boost engagement through rapid, iterative testing. 

Example

Consider Slack’s example: They redefined workplace communication by positioning its platform as essential, similar to tools like Microsoft Word. They created a new market category, making instant messaging a central productivity tool.

Slack’s growth strategies included defining a new market, addressing key communication issues, and continuously improving based on user feedback. 

They also used a freemium model to attract users and a straightforward onboarding process to eliminate barriers for new users. 

KPIs to Measure

• Monthly active users (MAU)
• User acquisition rate
• Activation rate
• Churn rate
• Revenue growth rate
• Engagement rate (time spent, feature usage)
• Referral rate

Product Marketing vs. Growth Marketing: Key Differences

Below is a table that outlines the key distinctions between product and growth marketing across various aspects.

Aspect	Product Marketing	Growth Marketing
Definition	Involves defining the target market, positioning the product effectively, and communicating its value to drive sales.	Centers on using data-driven techniques to experiment with marketing strategies across the customer lifecycle to foster growth.
Goals	Focuses on delivering the right product to the right customer, increasing product adoption and customer satisfaction.	Aims to rapidly scale and increase the user base, focusing on user acquisition, retention, and engagement.
Roles	Product managers, market researchers, and content creators.	Growth hackers, data analysts, digital marketers.
KPIs	Market shareCustomer lifetime valueSales conversion rates.	Monthly active usersChurn rateEngagement rate.
Pros	Aligns product features with market needs and builds strong brand loyalty.	Rapid experimentation can quickly identify effective and scalable strategies.
Cons	Can be slow to adapt if market conditions change rapidly.	May focus too heavily on short-term gains rather than sustainable growth.
Collaboration	Works closely with product development and sales teams to ensure product-market fit and effective go-to-market strategies.	Often collaborates with all facets of a business to optimise every touchpoint in the user journey, from marketing to product usage.
Challenges	Balancing product features with what customers want.	Making sense of a lot of data, keeping users happy while growing.

Product Marketing Strategies

Here, we’ll explore five product marketing strategies that challenge conventional assumptions and push the boundaries of traditional marketing. 

1. Leverage Customer Co-Creation: Bring your customers into the product development loop. It’s a game-changer. By involving them early, you’re not just guessing what they want but actually building it together. They’re part of the journey, and that builds a connection that’s tough to break.
2. Build a Cross-Functional Go-to-Market Team: Say goodbye to silos. Pull in your members from product, sales, customer service, and marketing right from the start. When everyone’s on the same page from day one, you get a holistic strategy that covers all bases. 
3. Craft a Story, Not Just a Launch: People don’t buy products; they buy stories. Frame your product launch as a narrative that people can relate to. Customers who see your product as a character in their own life story are more likely to feel a connection. 
4. Stay Agile with Dynamic Product Positioning: Markets evolve, and so should your product’s position. Regular tweaks based on ongoing feedback keep your product competitive. This is not about frequent rebranding but about subtle shifts to stay aligned with your market and ahead of competitors. Stay responsive and keep your strategy as dynamic as the market itself.
5. Use Predictive Analytics: Before you even launch, predictive analytics can give you customer insights into how the market might react. It’s a powerful tool that minimizes risk and maximizes your potential to hit the market strongly.

Growth Marketing Strategies

Here are some creative growth marketing strategies to help you connect with potential customers in new ways.

1. Reverse Engineering Competitor Successes: Analyze instances where competitors have succeeded where you have not and integrate these insights into a forward-thinking strategy. You can research their marketing channels, audience responses, and campaign strategies. Use these findings to creatively adapt your growth strategies that counteract the prevailing market norms.
2. Focus on Viral Coefficients: Make sharing natural. Your product should encourage users to invite others. Whether through built-in sharing features or referral rewards, getting your current users to bring in new ones can exponentially increase your growth rate without a proportional increase in marketing spend. 
3. Implement Continuous A/B Testing: Never settle on “good enough.” Test everything from email subject lines to landing page designs. It allows you to constantly refine and optimize your tactics based on real user data and customer experience.
4. Leverage Underutilized Social Platforms: While most companies focus on major platforms like Facebook and Instagram, identifying and utilizing underexploited social media platforms relevant to your niche can provide a significant untapped audience. For example, platforms like Twitch, Discord, or even niche forums can be goldmines for engaging with dedicated communities and driving growth.
5. Segmented Retargeting Based on User Intent: Go beyond traditional retargeting by analyzing the specific intent behind user actions on your site. Develop customized retargeting campaigns that respond to a user’s previous engagement with your product and the inferred intent behind their actions.

Collaboration Between Product and Growth Marketing Teams

Product and growth marketing teams communicate frequently to maximize a company’s market impact. 

Typically, they share data and insights during regular meetings, strategy sessions, and through collaborative tools like shared dashboards and communication platforms.

For instance, the product marketing team might identify a new customer segment whose needs differ slightly from the current target market. 

They would communicate this information to the growth marketing team, which then tailors campaigns to engage this new segment, tests different approaches, and monitors the response rates and engagement levels. These insights are again shared with the product team to refine the product features or messaging further. 

The communication cycle continues regularly, ensuring both teams are synchronized and can react dynamically to customer preferences or market conditions changes. 

Here are some more collaboration examples to optimize marketing efforts:

• Product marketing informs growth marketing about new features for launch campaigns
• Growth marketing shares user engagement data to refine product messaging or features
• Teams align on messaging and timelines for consistency in marketing campaigns
• Product marketing’s market trends help growth marketing targets correctly

Product Marketing vs. Growth Marketing: The Future

As we look to the future of marketing, the lines between product marketing and growth marketing are poised to blur further. 

Today’s consumers expect products that meet their needs and offer an experience that feels personalized and engaging. Can one side of the traditional marketing team handle this alone? Unlikely. 

That’s why we’re seeing these roles merge—combining strengths to better understand and react to fast-changing consumer behaviors.

In the future, the skill sets required in your marketing team will change. Future marketing leaders must be adept at crafting compelling product narratives and executing scalable growth tactics. Is your current team equipped for this? 

Companies that can effectively integrate product knowledge with growth strategies are the ones that will stand out and succeed in this crowded market.

Conclusion

Product and growth marketing are integral parts of successfully marketing a product. Each one helps your product reach the right customers and keeps them interested.

If you want great results using product and growth marketing, think about working with a full-service marketing agency like Aventi. We have more than 250 marketing experts ready to help you out.

Want to make your product a big hit? Reach out to Aventi today and let our team help you shine!