CMOs may struggle to bridge the divide that exists between product and marketing teams and bridging that divide may require more than relationship building. Use these five great tips for CMOs and product leaders to create a more symbiotic partnership in your company.
Selling a product or service requires deep collaboration and alignment between both product and marketing teams. It’s a strong relationship where both teams rely heavily on one another for necessary assets and strategy to create a strong brand. However, this collaboration may not always be so collaborative.
Using paid and organic stats from search engines and social monitoring/listening tools can help create the olive branch for deep cross-team synergy. Data that resides in the digital ecosystem can provide highly beneficial feedback on product feature/tool popularity, pain point knowledge, and other areas which help inform product teams what’s going on inside the users’ minds in real-time. Although product teams have access to usage data, it’s nowhere as rich as if what marketers find through their digital channels. You are looking at the largest focus group that you could ever imagine tapping into, in real-time.
In the past, I’ve used this data to help product teams rename products, identify pain points that customers search on in search engines and discover solutions to long-standing product issues.
Below are five tips to help CMOs bridge the divide between product and marketing teams:
1. Contribute to planning sessions. Ask to be invited in initial brainstorming sessions that may allow you to showcase data on your product’s branded term and testing done on messaging that can be paired with strategic intent. This can uncover hidden opportunities for growth.
2. Sync up regularly. Quarterly reports to follow important product feature and capabilities trends from the digital point of view can provide immense value to the team. The rise and fall of search intent in popular search engines, competitor traffic demographics from sites like Hitwise, and information from other tools that document the customer’s changing habits, give the product team access to a virtual world-wide focus group – for free.
3. Uncover how engineers and product developers position certain parts of their products and why. Sometimes learning the thinking behind what you see helps you understand the intent and strategic positioning, which can help shape your own marketing spending decisions and objectives.
4. Ask for regular product usage reports. These reports can help inform overall marketing strategy and spending decisions. Make these a part of marketing planning sessions ahead of the fiscal year.
5. One strategy session. While both teams do have to do a fair amount of planning on their own, starting off together can help both teams collaborate better in the future. Brainstorming sessions and initial product planning activities for launches or feature releases can help test the best name, ensure product focus matches product searches in major engines, and much more. Afterwards, both teams can branch out and begin developing their parts of the plan cohesively.
Paid search has often been tagged as the channel that companies turn to with most of their budget. Using the channel to secure brand in the digital ecosystem, and to generate awareness and consideration are all great aspects. Companies can use digital channels like how the government uses economic indicators—as a health check and a predictor of things to come.
CMOs who struggle to bridge the divide between product and marketing teams can use these five steps to close that gap and create a more harmonious, collaborative, and prosperous working environment.