Tag: product marketing

How to Effectively Outsource Product Marketing Content

Posted on by

This article was originally published on MarketingProfs

First off, yes, product marketing content can be outsourced effectively. From whitepapers to sales enablement, there are freelance contractors (like me) that are capable of understanding your highly complex product and creating that key content to help drive revenue.

Wait, why not just hire another product marketer? 

1) It’s cheaper and 2) It produces more content. The fact is that most product marketers get pulled into so many meetings and deliverables with engineering and product management that writing always seems to fall to the wayside. That leaves demand generation and sales teams frustrated waiting for content.

A good product marketing contractor can focus on your content needs without the interruptions of in-house product marketers and create spectacular content. You just need to manage them effectively. Read on to get my advice on how to work with contractors like myself for a mutually beneficial engagement.

Continue reading “How to Effectively Outsource Product Marketing Content”

How To Easily Get Content From Employee Thought Leaders

Posted on by 1 Comment

Chances are good that you have lots of thought leaders within your company that have a wealth of great stories and knowledge to help make your content marketing efforts soar. Thought leaders can be engineers, product managers, product marketers or anyone who works with customers (see more ideas here). 

However, if you ask a thought leader to provide content and to write it themselves, it will rarely get done. They will always have priorities that are higher than helping marketing. Even if they have good intentions, it is difficult for them to clear their schedule to have a continuous block of time to write. And if you do get content, it likely isn’t in a format ready for the target audience. Instead of waiting for a miracle, here is a simple way to extract content from these thought leaders without causing pain for you or for them.

Continue reading “How To Easily Get Content From Employee Thought Leaders”

Don’t Make Product Marketers Write—Make Them Outline

Posted on by 8 Comments

Product marketers. They are the golden goose of software companies. This mythical combination of technical product knowledge and writing prowess. Marketing is depending on them for a steady stream of whitepapers (a.k.a. golden eggs) so they can generate demand for the business. It sounds wonderful, but alas, it is really more of a fairy tale.

The Reality of What Product Marketing Does

According to Pragmatic Marketing’s Annual Survey, on average product marketers work 46 hours per week and 53% of that time is spent in meetings and managing email. Another 20% is spent supporting development efforts and 15% is spent helping sales with existing customer deals or prospects. That leaves a measly 9% of their time spent creating and reviewing marketing materials. Not a lot of golden eggs can be created in 4 fragmented hours a week.

Continue reading “Don’t Make Product Marketers Write—Make Them Outline”

It’s Time to Socialize Social

Posted on by 2 Comments

Here we are more than a decade past when B2B companies started using social media as a promotional channel and we still haven’t figured out the best way to manage it. Looking forward, our approach needs to be about enabling all marketers in the process to add their expertise in order to create relevant social posts that your target audience wants to click through. To sum it up—we need to socialize social.

Continue reading “It’s Time to Socialize Social”

The Opportunity Cost of Product Marketing Content Gaps

Posted on by 24 Comments

After writing an article on the ROI of outsourcing demand generation content, I was asked if the same numbers and reasoning held true for product marketing content. I definitely write a lot of white papers, core website messaging and even sales enablement content so there must be value there too. But what are the actual numbers?

Read on for the hard numbers on more than doubling the output of product marketing with ⅙ of the cost of a product marketer.

Continue reading “The Opportunity Cost of Product Marketing Content Gaps”