Content Marketing vs. Product Marketing: What’s the Difference?

Different marketing strategies fall under the umbrella of B2B SaaS marketing, and marketers often confuse or have difficulty explaining the differences clearly. Content marketing and product marketing are two such strategies that are often mixed up. Although both are important, they each have unique approaches to engaging customers.

This is what we are going to talk about in this article.

But, what is Content Marketing?

Let's put it like this: People connect with companies that add some sort of value to their lives. So, for any content piece you produce, think of your ICP's point of view, what are their pain points, what are the everyday issues they are trying to solve, and how you can make their lives better. The value proposition is the heart of content marketing. It is focused on creating and distributing engaging, useful content that will increase brand awareness and establish your company as a thought leader with the B2B SaaS category.

A successful content marketing strategy consists of various content pieces, from blog posts and pillar pages to case studies, customer testimonials, white papers, how-to guides, social media content etc. It targets potential customers across different channels like emails, blogs, and social media, encouraging them to engage with the brand by downloading your whitepapers, case studies, signing up for your newsletter, or interacting with your social media posts.

The elements of a successful content marketing strategy are:

• Alignment with Business Goals: Ensuring content activities support overall business objectives.
• Understanding Audience Needs: Knowing the interests and pain points of the audience in relation to the product.
• Content Planning: Prioritizing and planning relevant topics and types of content.
• Continuous Improvement: Regularly updating and improving published content.

Content marketing involves various stakeholders, including subject matter experts, copywriters, editors, SEO experts, and content strategists, who collaborate to create and optimize content. All these stakeholders need to tailor your content according to the different stages your customers go through. The 4 stages of the content marketing funnel include:

1. Awareness: Sometimes referred to as the top of your marketing funnel (TOFU), content in this stage should be informational and educational, introducing your brand to a prospective customer.
2. Evaluation: The evaluation stage is in the middle of the funnel (MOFU), where potential consumers are familiar with your brand marketing and start considering whether your business would be a good fit.?
3. Conversion: With the ultimate goal of converting every possible consumer, marketers in this stage at the bottom of the marketing funnel (BOFU) can focus on content that’s designed as the final push for leads to become sales.?
4. Delight: Even after conversion, the work is not quite done. At this point, it’s essential to concentrate on retaining customers and building long-term loyalty.

Here are some of the content types you can focus on for each stage ??

Content Marketing Benefits

Overall, marketing has changed a lot in the last ten years. Marketing used to be a creative discipline at its core, but recently it has moved heavily in the analytical direction, and more and more companies are trying to track almost every marketing activity for its impact on ROI (personally I don't agree with this, but's that's another story ??).

That's one of the reasons why you need to be clear about the benefits and impact on ROI or pipeline generated when developing a content marketing strategy. Almost every marketer will agree that some of the most important benefits are:

1. Developing Brand Authority: Consistently creating and publishing quality content, whether through blog posts, white papers, or social media, builds authority with your target audience. This positions you as a trusted brand, significantly improving your chances of gaining conversions.
2. Establishing Strong Brand-Customer Relationships: By producing continuous content, you establish a tone and personality that resonates with prospective customers. This ongoing interaction encourages stronger, longer-lasting relationships between your brand and your customers.
3. Improving Your Social Media Presence: Informative content on social media drives greater engagement and traction, which helps your brand establish a valuable online presence and build a community.
4. Cost-Efficiency: Content marketing is generally more cost-effective than other digital marketing strategies. At first, it’s an investment but it holds longer-term value when compared to paid advertising, making it a cost-effective way to boost your online presence.
5. Providing Long-Term Returns: Unlike ads or other traditional marketing that disappears, your content has a longer digital shelf-life. This means it remains active as long as you allow, serving as a continuous source of brand awareness.
6. Generating Qualified Leads: High-quality content allows you to effectively display calls-to-action (CTAs), which can lead to newsletter signups and sales leads, thereby generating more high-intent leads for your business.

What is Product Marketing?

Now that we’ve covered what content marketing is, let’s move on to product marketing. Product marketing is a subdivision of marketing. It’s a bridge that connects the gap between creating a great product and delivering that product to its audience. It ensures the right people know about the product, understand its value, and see how it fits into their lives.?

Doing product marketing is basically doing marketing that’s focused on everything directly related to making a product successful in the market. Unlike traditional marketing, which focuses on the broader brand message, product marketing focuses on specific product features, benefits, and the problems it solves. It’s essentially your product’s storyteller who positions your product in the market, sets the right price, and launches it effectively.

If we summarize it, product marketing involves:

• Understanding the needs of the target audience
• Highlighting unique selling points
• Helping customers recognize the benefits of your product over competitors.

To implement it effectively, your content should cover the entire process from your product launch to positioning, messaging, and improving customer experience.

Some marketing tools you can use that are commonly associated with product marketing are:

• CRM Software: Platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho are designed to help you track customer interactions, understand customer preferences, and tailor marketing efforts to specific customer segments, leading to more personalized and effective marketing campaigns.

• Marketing Automation Platforms: HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot, and Eloqua are tools that automate various marketing tasks, such as email campaigns, social media marketing, and lead nurturing. They also offer advanced audience segmentation capabilities to enable more targeted and personalized marketing strategies.

• Product Analytics Tools: Companies like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Pendo provide businesses with deep insights into how customers interact with their products. These tools will help you track user behavior, engagement, and feature usage, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to drive product improvements.

• Survey and Feedback Tools: SurveyMonkey, Typeform, and Qualtrics are great for collecting and analyzing customer feedback. They offer a range of survey and feedback collection methods, as well as analytics and reporting features that will allow you to make data-driven decisions to improve your product offerings and your marketing messages.

• Competitor Analysis Tools: Platforms like Crayon, SEMrush, and Ahrefs give you comprehensive data and insights to analyze your competitors' strategies and performance. These tools offer features for researching keywords, analyzing backlinks, and monitoring competitor activities.

User research and customer feedback are also essential components. Successful product marketing requires a collaborative effort involving product managers, developers, designers, researchers, executive leaders, customers, board members, investors, and C-suite executives.

Product Marketing Benefits

Making a purchase decision in B2B SaaS takes longer than in B2C SaaS due to the complexity of the decision-making process, which often requires more detailed analysis and research. You might be asking, what’s the role of product marketing in this decision-making process? Well, since customers are looking for the right product with the right features that will best solve their pain points, product marketing helps you discover how to build and position your product as the perfect solution.

Some key benefits you can expect when you shift your focus toward product marketing are:

• Improves Customer Understanding: To build a marketing strategy, you need to know who your customers are, what they want, and why they want it. This information is usually scattered throughout the company, but product marketing brings it all together to give you a clear view of your customers. This is extremely valuable for any SaaS company.
• Boosting Sales: Product marketing by highlighting the unique features and value of your product attracts the attention of potential customers and demonstrates how the product can meet their needs. Once the customers understand the value and benefits your product brings them, it’s a lot easier to convert them into sales. Additionally, delivering great products and constantly attending to the satisfaction of your customers drive Word of Mouth Marketing (WOMM).
• Builds Better Products and Services: A well-optimized product is the key to driving sales. Product marketing helps businesses find out the features and experiences that customers are looking for.?

Key Differences Between Content Marketing and Product Marketing

Finally, let’s discuss the differences between content marketing and product marketing. In content marketing, the main focus is on showing your expertise, engaging and educating customers about your brand, and building long-lasting relationships. On the other hand, product marketing is all about sales; it's about highlighting the product and its benefits and driving conversions. This involves implementing tactics to turn potential leads into customers and working closely with sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

Content marketing targets the top of the sales funnel, aiming to build awareness and trust among potential customers. It uses tactics like keyword optimization to be discovered through various content options. Product marketing, on the other hand, focuses on successfully launching a product, ensuring that the sales team and the market understand the product, and driving demand by explaining how the product solves a problem.

As you can see from their focus when it comes to targeting the audience, content marketing focuses on a broader audience at different stages of the buyer’s journey. The goal is to attract potential customers early on by addressing their pain points and providing valuable insights.

On the other hand, product marketing engages with prospects who are already in the consideration or decision stages. It focuses on demonstrating how the product solves specific problems and meets the needs of the target audience.

Content marketing generally tends to have a longer timeline, with content being created and distributed over months or even years to build a strong brand presence and foster trust with the audience. Product Marketing often has a shorter timeline, focusing on specific campaigns around product launches, updates, and promotions to drive sales and market penetration quickly.

In summary, product marketing heavily relies on paid advertising, focusing on the product experience and converting prospects into customers. Content marketing focuses on creating engaging content to educate and attract potential customers, building brand awareness and trust over the long term. Product marketing is more short-term and outward-focused, using paid campaigns, while content marketing is a long-term inbound strategy, providing regular content to attract and engage customers.

Can Content Marketing and Product Marketing Work Together?

Despite their differences in most situations, content and product marketing complement each other and create a comprehensive marketing strategy. Content marketing lays the groundwork by building awareness, educating potential customers, and establishing brand authority through valuable, engaging content.?

It draws in leads and nurtures them by addressing their pain points and providing solutions. Product marketing then takes over by refining the message and positioning of specific products, taking advantage of the trust and engagement built through content marketing. It uses targeted strategies to highlight how these products solve problems and meet the needs identified through content marketing efforts.?

For example, let’s take a look at a recent client we worked with in the geospatial AI industry. One of the primary challenges they wanted to tackle was demonstrating the practical application of their AI-driven geospatial analysis tools. The product marketing aspect we worked on focused on promoting the software’s unique features, such as automated change detection, real-time data processing, and advanced visualization capabilities.

On the content marketing side, we developed and promoted in-depth guides, blog posts, and case studies covering topics from environmental aspects to success stories in AI-driven monitoring. These content pieces positioned the company as an authority in geospatial AI while indirectly highlighting the value of their software.

For instance, we worked with them on creating and advertising webinars showing how their AI tools were used to monitor deforestation and urban development in real time. This was complemented by educational content addressing broader industry trends and challenges, effectively attracting and educating potential customers.

As you can see, by combining content marketing and product marketing, you can produce content that attracts and educates your customers while guiding their purchasing decisions. Their synergy creates a seamless customer journey from initial awareness to final purchase, improving overall marketing effectiveness.

When to Focus on Content Marketing vs. Product Marketing

A good rule of thumb is that content marketing is usually most useful for top-of-the-funnel marketing motions, while product marketing shines most at the bottom of the funnel.

This concept is pretty simple: at any given time, only a limited number of prospects are ready to purchase your product. To optimize your marketing efforts, it's wise to use content marketing to provide value to a wider audience within your target market. You can deliver this content through various channels like email, social media, or blog posts.

Once prospects engage with your content marketing and allow you to continue communicating with them (for instance, by subscribing to your email list or following your social media), it's your job to guide them from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel. This process, known as a nurturing campaign, involves gradually moving from general content to more targeted, product-specific content that demonstrates how your product is used by other customers.

An effective nurturing campaign is a blend of art and science. When done well, it smoothly navigates prospects through their buying journey, making them feel in control rather than being pushed through the sales process. B2B SaaS companies who excel in both content marketing and product marketing can significantly impact their sales funnel, not only by attracting leads at the top but also by effectively moving them down to the funnel and turning them into new business.

Conclusion

Both product marketing and content marketing are important for SaaS companies. Product marketing demonstrates value, improves products, and drives sales, while content marketing attracts and educates customers.

The decision of whether you choose to first focus on content marketing or product marketing will ultimately depend on your current stage, goals, and resources. However, in many cases, starting with content marketing can provide a solid foundation for getting your customers familiar with your brand. Once you have accomplished that, you can shift your focus toward product marketing to highlight your unique selling points and drive adoption and retention.

Neither is inherently better; they complement each other to ensure market success. A well-rounded marketing strategy incorporates both, targeting different stages of the funnel. Top-of-funnel content should avoid heavy sales pitches, while bottom-of-funnel content should highlight why the product is the right choice.

Ultimately, the combination of content marketing and product marketing allows B2B SaaS companies to build a strong brand presence, generate high-intent leads, and drive higher conversion rates, resulting in a strong marketing strategy that meets the needs of the modern buyer.