A business, particularly a SaaS business, is an interconnected web of departments and people working toward a common goal. In many cases, different departments report to a single person or collaborate with each other, but not in every case.

Frequent IT department meetings with the sales team are unnecessary, as most of the issues combining the expertise of both parties can be worked through a product manager.

Now, product management is probably the department that has to communicate with every department to find insights to benefit both teams. In particular, product management can find a great deal of insight with the digital marketing department.

In this article, you’ll learn why and how digital marketing and product management can work together.

What is digital marketing and product management?

Digital marketing is the marketing approach that includes using various online assets to market a product or company in general. Typically, digital marketing works with channels like organic search, email marketing, social media marketing, and paid advertising across multiple channels. The goal of digital marketing is to drive traffic, increase conversions, and improve brand awareness.

Product management is a more complex process that oversees every stage of the product. Product management operations include planning the product, developing it, onboarding consumers, and managing day-to-day product operations and updates.

These two departments are deeply intertwined in their functions. Without understanding product management needs, digital marketers can’t market the product effectively. Without understanding the insight into consumer demographics, product management might be missing important product updates.

By working together, these two departments can create product marketing strategies—marketing focused on positioning a specific product to produce qualified leads, not just increasing traffic.

One thing you should keep in mind when planning new collaborations is that even though most employees know that virtual meetings are productive, they feel like there are too many of them already.

Pie charts showing that employees feel conflicted about online meetings.

When planning collaboration sessions, make sure you’re not overburdening them with meetings.

8 Reasons Product Management and Digital Marketing Should Collaborate

Product marketing and product management need consistent collaboration to improve each other’s performance and possibly foster a feeling of unity. Here are eight major reasons you want to foster a collaboration like that in your company. 

Identifying and reaching the right market and audience

The first major reason product management and marketing should work together on strategic goals is doing user research to define the user persona and segment the user list.

Product management and marketing often have different views on the ideal customer. The product management team often focuses on the product’s users and believes they need to be at the forefront of marketing efforts.

Product marketing teams might not have access to product usage information and form their opinions on the ideal demographics based on the audiences that respond to marketing better.

As always, the truth is somewhere in between. People who already use the product are important to target. It’s also important to focus on audiences that aren’t yet using the product but might be interested and explore what it would take to attract and convert them.

People making the purchasing decisions aren’t always end users. For instance, sales representatives use CRMs, but they rarely get to decide which to use. This means both teams should figure out who’s making buying decisions and who’s using the product to attract both.

The tools you can use in this process include Zeda.io’s customer insight tool. This tool can help integrate all customer data into one place, making decisions based on the whole picture easier.

Focusing on effective communication channels

A point that naturally follows the one above is collaboration to prioritize communication channels. The job of product management and marketing teams is to figure out their ideal consumers. Based on this, the product marketing team should be able to pinpoint the best communication channels.

Consumers might be overrepresented on a social media site, or some may prefer searching for products instead of discovering them on social media. This should dictate what channels the team uses to communicate the benefits of the product.

Using different messaging on different communication channels is best. This depends on what type of consumers use them and what stage of the sales funnel they’re on.

The marketing department should communicate with the product management on the optimal ways to report on, analyze, and optimize marketing performance. 

It’s also important to use the right tools for tracking performance across different communication channels. For paid ads, you might use the internal app of the platform you’re using, whether it’s Meta or Google. For organic social media campaigns, you can use a specialized app like Hootsuite in addition to the native admin panel.

For SEO and SEM, you might need to use role-specific software. You could use the all-in-one SEO tool by SE Ranking—this software combines technical website analytics, tracking organic and paid performance, and competitor analysis.

Sharing the key messages and clear positioning

The next area where product management can collaborate with the product marketing department is sharing a vision of product positioning and key messaging. This is extremely important, as not sharing a clear vision or objectives is cited by McKinsey as the third-biggest contributor to poor business results.

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Without input from product management, the digital marketing department can’t do its job. The job of product managers is to explain how the company wishes to position the product to the consumers. Then, the marketing team should figure out how to translate this into effective messaging and tailor it to different platforms and types of consumers.

Even though the management team is leading in this regard, the product management team can also get a lot of help from product marketing. By analyzing the performance of different messages across demographics, the marketing team can draw conclusions about what consumers want in the product. Competitor analysis findings can also be included.

The teams could then collaborate on how to fine-tune messaging and positioning to specific consumer demographics.

Providing a comprehensive competitive analysis

Both product marketing and product management teams are conducting competitive analysis in their market. However, the scope of analytics may differ for both teams.

The product management team focuses primarily on product features that competitors roll out, their pricing, or their positioning strategy. Marketing teams are likely to focus on promotional campaigns and their online messaging.

While both teams learn more about the competitor, their findings will have better results if they share the experience with each other. Lack of communication and bringing competition analytics data together can result in different departments having a somewhat one-sided view of the competition and falling out of alignment.

Including data from the marketing team can show the product team a lot of additional information about competitor’s positioning, brand voice, and the products that they prioritize in outbound messaging. For the marketing team, receiving objective data on competitor’s strengths and weaknesses can help create better marketing campaigns for their own product.

Setting a product price

A crucial aspect of the crossroads between product development and product marketing both teams can influence is the product’s price. Product management teams typically have the final say, but the marketing team can provide insight into the pricing on the market.

The product management team has an understanding of what the product costs to develop and run. The marketing team has a much fuller understanding of how the competition positions their products, how they structure the pricing, and how they advertise it. This should develop a pricing strategy for your business, as even with high production costs, the business exists within the context of its competition, and the price is one of the areas you compete on.

This doesn’t just mean lowering the price; it could mean changing the pricing model. For instance, consumers in your market may want to use a usage-based pricing model instead of a subscription-based one. Or you could discover your product is superior to the competition, and you could get away with charging higher prices.

The marketing team also has a considerable say in discounting the price. Together, the product management team and the sales team could decide when to issue discounts for promotional campaigns and how large they should be.

The tool you can use to help this process is Zeda.io’s Product Intelligence features. This AI-powered tool can help you make sense of all the business signals coming from different departments.

Testing new ideas with the help of experiments

The product marketing team might have a lot of expertise and understanding of their product based on product usage metrics and consumer feedback. But no knowledge is absolute until it’s practiced. The marketing team has the right instruments to experiment with different ideas and find what works best.

The marketing team can run A/B testing of landing pages with different messaging as well as different approaches in display, search, and social media advertising. If the product management team can provide them with ideas to test, both teams can find what consumers respond better to.

This will boost both product and consumer understanding within both teams and the company as a whole.

Optimizing and prioritizing tasks

As product management and marketing are a part of the company with finite resources, their initiatives are bound to compete on the tasks. By cooperating and creating a dialogue around the issues that need to be improved, both teams can create a coherent understanding of task priority.

The product management team mostly forms a product roadmap or asks developers to introduce new features and fix bugs. With marketing, their priority might be to be a part of the decision-making process for launching new product-specific marketing campaigns.

Both marketing and product management teams can generate tasks for other departments. For instance, the marketing department might ask for website changes to make it more SEO-friendly.

The priorities of the marketing and product management teams can be different, so it’s best that both teams take part in task prioritization in the same framework. This doesn’t just lead to a more coherent list of tasks but boosts team spirit since teams don’t feel they have to compete.

Analyzing and reporting on brand performance

Lastly, marketing and product management teams should collaborate in analytics and reporting. As you can tell from the points above, the performance of both departments is dependent on one another.

Participating in gathering data, combining it, and analyzing it is crucial for business success. Digital marketing covers the first stages of the sales funnel, while product management covers the lower half.

Combining the data can give your business a clearer picture of performance.

Summary

The bottom line: efficient communication between departments yields better results. Product management and digital marketing departments have the best synergies; using them to your advantage is key to success.

Foster collaboration between these parts of your company, and you are likely to get impactful insight into the consumers in your market and produce better results.

Author Bio:

Alyse Falk is a freelance writer with experience in digital marketing, technologies, content marketing, marketing trends, and branding strategies. Alyse also writes for several reputable sites where she shares her hints for creating content. In case of any inquiries or suggestions, kindly reach out to her at GuestPostingNinja@gmail.com.