How do you look at the difference and overlap between growth and product marketing?

Product marketing is deeply aligned to the product team and is focused on maximizing the adoption of the product suite. Product marketing can also be split into “inbound” and “outbound” functions depending on the stage of the company. Inbound being responsible for research, strategy, and insights to inform product roadmap decisions while outbound is responsible for launches, sales enablement, messaging, and distribution. At a smaller company, product marketing is responsible for both inbound and outbound but their focus on either might shift depending on the stage of the product. 

Growth marketing is composed of channel experts that are focused on various stages in the user funnel and closely linked to revenue. Growth marketing typically has a variety of functions and it may differ from company to company. For my team, growth marketing includes paid acquisition, demand gen, website optimization, lifecycle marketing, and events. Growth marketing is also typically responsible for the “execution” of marketing work. E.g. building emails, ads, in-product notifications. 

The overlap exists where growth marketing and product marketing may both want to drive the adoption of a feature (for example, through lifecycle automation) in order to improve core user metrics. In those cases, product marketing and growth marketing should work together to inform strategy and growth marketing will likely take on the execution.  

In my opinion, there isn’t much overlap between PMM and Growth PMM, but the things that they need to know to power the work that they do is where there’s some overlap.

From my perspective, there are two main areas of overlap:

• Customer and market knowledge: Both teams require a deep understanding of user needs, behaviors, and preferences in order to effectively inform growth and PMM strategies.

• Data utilization: While Growth PMMs heavily rely on data for growth strategies, PMMs also use data for market research, customer feedback analysis, and refining marketing approaches.

Where they differ:

• Growth PMM focus areas:

  • Conversion optimization: Optimize conversion funnels and improve the user journey to increase user acquisition and retention in partnership with Product

  • Experimentation: Conduct A/B testing and experiments in partnership with Product to identify the most effective strategies for user growth

  • User Retention: Collaborate on strategies to enhance user retention through targeted communication and engagement initiatives

• PMM focus areas:

  • Product: Drive market success of the product and solutions portfolio by ensuring strong product-market fit, compelling messaging, differentiated positioning, and strategic pricing & packaging

  • Demand: Drive demand by supporting strategic marketing plans that cement industry authority, build brand awareness and drive pipeline growth

  • Enablement: Drive revenue and retention by empowering sellers and customer success with the content and narratives needed to support the customer journey and sales cycle

Ultimately, the main differences lie in the primary focus of each role—Growth PMMs specifically concentrate on post-launch user growth, while PMMs have a broader responsibility across the entire product lifecycle.

While product marketing focuses typically on marketing 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.