“Mind the Gap.” If you’ve ever taken the London Underground, you’ve heard this iconic phrase. It’s a simple reminder to watch your step as you transition from platform to train. But as a formerly-train-riding expat British product marketer, I’m here to bestow upon you—with authority—the following wisdom: Gaps aren’t just on train platforms; they exist in life in general, including in marketing.
In our world, the gap between content marketing and product marketing can feel precarious. Misstep, and your audience might tumble into confusion or disengagement. But connect product and solution capabilities to compelling stories of real-world value, and you’ll create a seamless journey that moves customers effortlessly from awareness to adoption.
Let’s explore how aligning two sometimes-separate marketing disciplines can elevate the overall go-to-market process and drive real business impact.
Acknowledge the gap: how content marketing and product marketing relate
The first step is knowing how content marketing and product marketing connect and overlap. Both aim to support business growth by attracting, engaging, and converting customers. Both communicate a company's value proposition to the market. In B2B tech, both target the same audiences—buyers, decision-makers, and influencers. And, of course, content marketing often feeds into product marketing—e.g., content can generate leads that product marketers later nurture into customers.
The left side of the gap: content marketing is for building relationships and trust, not closing deals
Content marketing is all about creating and sharing valuable relevant content that addresses your audience’s challenges, providing genuine insights and solutions.
The very best content marketing often features data or insights not available elsewhere. This is when minding the gap is critical, staying squarely on the content marketing track attempting only to build trust and offer value. If you possess unique data to support a novel insight, audiences will surely pay attention. And attention is, today more than ever, the most valuable commodity in business.
Imagine you’re a cloud provider. Your ability to analyze millions of cloud migrations can reveal patterns in customer pain points within specific populations like industry verticals. Sharing useful insights with exclusive content positions your company as an authority. If you look hard enough and ask the right people in your company, you’ll surely find something in the data that’s both safe to publish and fascinating. And fascinating should be your bar. Uninteresting content is just noise. It won’t move the needle.
This content marketing frame is straightforward:
- Identify your audience’s real challenges
- Illuminate those challenges with data and insights only you have
- Produce and deliver incisive content that offers real value
The right side of the gap: product marketing is ultimately for closing deals by offering an answer
In contrast, product marketing focuses on presenting your product to the market, its features, benefits, and differentiators. This is where you highlight what makes your solution unique and why it’s the best choice for your target audience.
Product marketing includes everything from core messaging and product descriptions to sales presentations and customer case studies. For example, if your product offers advanced AI-driven analytics capabilities, it’s within product marketing disciplines and channels where you’ll explain how you outperform competitors in accuracy, scalability, or cost efficiency.
In our work, we’ve witnessed the best product marketing teams relentlessly elevate the customer and continue to drive growth, even as the dynamic tech industry environment challenges those teams to adapt. These successful orgs have systems in place to direct the storytelling appropriately, accounting for the content/product gap and knowing exactly what product marketing efforts will fill pipelines and close deals.
Bridge the gap: How product and content marketing can work together
Content marketing and product marketing focus on different objectives, but they are most powerful when integrated seamlessly. Content marketing excels at building awareness and trust at the top of the funnel, while product marketing drives conversions at the middle and bottom of the funnel by showcasing solutions tailored to customer needs.
Balanced carefully, an integrated approach ensures your audience feels informed and empowered rather than segmented and assaulted. A well-executed strategy creates a smooth journey from initial engagement to final purchase, without ever feeling disjointed. Mind the gap!
