Product Marketing Vs Growth Marketing: Know the Difference

There are various marketing approaches to sell your brand. However, you have to make sure that the strategy you’re using aligns with your goal. As a marketing strategist, you should familiarize yourself with the differences between product marketing vs growth marketing.

Growth and Product Marketing are subject to some similarities and distinctions. However, there are many opportunities for these concepts to work together. Above all, they possess a significant similarity with one another: your company’s success.

There is a lot of difference between product marketing and growth marketing. Yet, both are crucial to a company’s success. However, not all CEOs know the difference between product marketing vs growth marketing.

What Does Product Marketing Mean?

Product marketers talk about the value of their products to the right customers at the right time. Successfully bringing a product to the market and keeping it there is their responsibility.

Product marketing professionals are masters of messaging, positioning, and research. You must inform your target audience about what you are selling. Also, you have to identify your most vital selling point based on the customer’s core values.

They serve as a bridge between the product and marketing teams. However, you should not confuse them with product managers. Product managers are responsible for the actual development and roadmap of a product.

The goal of product marketers is to bring products to the market successfully. They are responsible for driving demand and usage for products.

What Does Growth Marketing Mean?

The process of growth marketing involves creating and managing campaigns that can turn leads into conversions. 

Growth marketing is the general approach by which you need to reach a larger audience and test different channels. It’s possible to consider growth hackers as the “mad scientists” of a company. They constantly develop cutting-edge strategies to build and maintain a customer base. 

Afterwards, they hypothesize and analyze strategies till they multiply growth in large numbers.

Growth hackers focus more on users – they evaluate how users encounter their product for potential satisfaction and new channels.

Product Marketing Vs Growth Marketing — Know the Difference

Growth marketing became associated with several high-profile initiatives by business-to-consumer (B2C) companies such as Airbnb. Business-to-business (B2B) startups began to see this viral success as an opportunity to accelerate customer acquisition.

One important distinction is that Product Marketing focuses more on creating pre-sale value. On the other hand, growth marketing focuses more on post-sales value creation. Depending on how business models are structured and what type of product they come in, these dynamics can vary from company to company.

Consequently, Product Marketing tends to align with acquisition-oriented teams like Sales and Marketing. Conversely, growth tends to be a partnership with retention-driven teams like Product, UX/Design, and Customer Success.

The methodology of creating value is another distinction. Product marketers often operate from a “story-first” mindset, while Growth pros tend to focus on a user-first attitude. 

Adding some granularity to the distinctions, we should note that both roles operate differently in B2B and business-to-consumer (B2C) environments. B2C companies often have Product Marketing teams that are smaller and focus more on messaging across the brand. Meanwhile, Growth marketing may operate as more of a product team’s commercial and business development arm.

Wrapping Up

Finally, you now know the difference between product marketing and growth marketing. Remember, product marketing tends to focus more on the reputation of the brand being sold. Product marketers establish an excellent reputation for their products by selling them to various potential clients.

On the other hand, growth marketing invests a lot of effort in researching and testing possible marketing outcomes. Growth marketers are frequently referred to as the “mad marketing scientists.” The reason behind such a tag is their ability to predict the success of marketing strategies through mere computation and estimation.

Now that you know the differences between product and growth marketing, which of the two do you think will work for your business?