AMA: Procore Technologies Product Marketing Leader, Julie Vasquez on Industry Product Marketing

The most critical intersection of Industry Product Marketers and their Solution Marketing counterparts happens with product launches, re-launches, and major feature releases. This helps ensure that relevant use cases, positioning statements, and sales collateral are in place and that the teams coordinate sales enablement and campaign activities to get messaging to the right people. Solution Marketing teams own the messaging frameworks for each product and work closely with product teams as early as product discovery. Industry Product Marketers draw from a portfolio of products to build messaging and execute campaigns for the audiences they serve.

The strategic marketing team could provide direction on where the business has the greatest growth potential: where there is a strong product-market fit and room to capture a greater share of demand. They may already have target growth numbers in place. Next, you’ll need to determine whether you can identify the industry for each customer segment in the customer relationship management (CRM) system (e.g. Salesforce) and track their progress through the pipeline. With this information, your marketing operations or analytics team can build dashboards to track progress over time.

Industry product marketers need to have a solid knowledge of the pain points and needs for the audience they serve and be able to translate product benefits into customer outcomes. They partner with product-focused solution marketers and campaign teams on go-to-market plans. However, their quarterly and annual plans are not as tightly coupled with product release cycles, but rather with industry events and outreaches targeting user personas and buying segments.

Industry Marketing is useful when a company has a wide portfolio of products or solutions that create value for a number of industry segments. The Industry (or Audience) Marketing team tells an integrated story about the outcomes that a set of solutions can deliver for that set of customers. When the sales organization is organized around customer segments, having Industry Marketing counterparts can be an effective way to make sure they get the right messaging for their prospective customers throughout the sales funnel.

When a company has a broad portfolio of products and serves multiple vertical markets, it is useful to have product marketers dedicated to reaching those audiences. This helps ensure resources are focused on under-represented audiences and that messaging is relevant to them so they clearly understand product benefits for their needs