Q&A: “What is the difference between Growth Marketing and Product Marketing?”
Syd asks: “What is the difference between growth marketing and product marketing?”
With the rise of technology companies around the world, both product marketing and growth marketing have increased in need and popularity as functions. So what are the differences?
Understanding the differences between these two marketing roles will help you distinguish between opportunities during your product markeitng job search.
Product Marketing Role
As I’ve discussed previously, product marketing is about creating marketing strategies and/or marketing plans that drive business growth.
Every product marketing job is different based on the specific job and company, but the core foundations of product marketing include:
- Market and user research
- Competitive analysis
- Positioning development
- Marketing strategy creation
Acquisition and engagement marketing execution is sometimes included in product marketing roles but are often housed in separate groups in larger companies.
And this is where growth marketing comes in.
Growth Marketing Role
While product marketing focuses typically on strategy creation, growth marketing typically focuses on driving execution of some part of the marketing plan. This can be acquisition or engagement (or both) where acquisition marketing is about going after net new customers or users and engagement marketing is about getting existing customers/users to do more.
While product marketing focuses typically on overall business performance and overall marketing plan success as primary KPIs, growth marketing typically focuses on driving repeatable tactics and initiatives to increase specific metrics.
For example, growth marketers at a company with a freemium SaaS model might be focused on increasing free users, increasing free to paid user conversion rate, and/or paid user attach rates. And their work would typically involve frequent iteration on tactics in order to drive those specific metrics. They may own the in-product surfaces, for instance, that are used for both increasing conversion rates and attach rates, and they would develop targeting and messaging plans to increase each of those metrics.
Growth marketing also applies market, user, and competitive research that other teams like product marketing have done, or will conduct on their own, in order to inform initiatives and messaging. The research often takes a different flavor, however, than that conducted by product marketing. While PMM will conduct competitive analysis at the strategic and business level, growth marketing will often focus research on benchmarking growth marketing activities at other companies.
In the example from above, for instance, growth marketers would analyze what other SaaS competitors in the category are doing to bring in new free users, increase free to paid user conversion rate, and increase attach rates. In contrast (but in complement), the competitive analysis that product marketing would focus on would be more related to areas like what international markets are competitors strong in, what types of business models and pricing are they engaging in, what are the customer segments they are going after, etc.
Both product marketing and growth marketing functions are critical to an organization, as both drive business growth, just in different ways. The choice of which to do depends on what you are interested in doing at the particular stage in your career.
Anything else you would add to differences between growth marketing and product marketing?
Check out my product marketing classes:
- Product Marketing Bootcamp class for new and aspiring marketers to learn the essentials of end-to-end strategic product marketing so they can launch with confidence. Learn more.
- Product Marketing Resume Boost is the only online course that teaches you how to tailor your resume specifically for product marketing manager roles. Learn more.
