As a product marketer, do you feel like you're drowning in launches but starving for time to do strategic work? You're not alone.
At most companies, product marketing is seen as a content shop rather than the central nervous system it should be.
The symptoms are all too common:
- PMMs route everything through them to feel valuable, but get overloaded with tactical work
- They document their knowledge in massive docs that no one actually uses
- They lack tools to operationalize and distribute their expertise across the org
The result is a doom loop. PMMs can't find time to evolve their positioning and other teams can't easily leverage their customer/market insights. Launch quality suffers, PMMs feel undervalued, and the cycle continues.
But it doesn't have to be this way! You don't have to burn yourself out.
Here's four ways to save your sanity.
1. Bring strategic insights to your company: As a product marketer, you are expected to be an expert on your customers and the market. Your company is looking for you to bring an informed prospective to important decisions! Are you taking the time to do research and understand the voice of the customer? Probably not, because it takes time (that you don't have)!
It used to take hours and hours to watch recordings of sales calls or comb through support tickets. But not anymore. Now, much of this process can be automated.
We built our customer research tools to help product marketers get a pulse on what their customers want, without doing hours of manual research. You can parse insights across thousands of customer convos, reviews, and more to identify trends that showcase your contributions as a customer expert and power your go-to-market strategy.
2. Ditch the monster go-to-market checklist: Most PMMs get trapped in a vicious cycle of launch execution. They begin to view their entire role though the lens of a checklist in a spreadsheet. But what PMM actually loves their spreadsheets? (If you do, then please ignore this part).
Spreadsheets become a massive to-do list that bog us down in execution work and accelerate the Doom Loop. Plus, we've got bad news for you... your stakeholders likely aren't referencing the spreadsheet (or even know it exists).
The days of launch checklists are over. PMMs can get out of the weeds by sticking to the strategic layer of go-to-market plans and a platform built specifically for PMMs to help automate the execution. Including your goals, research, channels, marketing assets, and more.
"I wish I could spend more time creating content and doing project management." - no product marketer ever
3. Get in sync with your product team (literally): If your product team has ever surprised you with a new feature and said "okay now what's the launch plan?" this section is for you. Go-to-market plans aren't built in a vacuum. They are based on products or services that we as product marketers are responsible for commercializing. So why aren't product roadmaps connected to the go-to-market plan? No, literally.
All the research and customer insights that created a roadmap item should be used to power the go-to-market plan. So we built a full roadmapping suite in Ignition so you can do exactly that. Seriously -- it's only a couple clicks to turn a roadmap item into a launch plan. Product managers and product marketers can and should be using the same platform.
4. Find your own personal copywriter: You probably spent a ton of time on your messaging and positioning. And that's great. It's the favorite part of the job for a lot of us. But do you ever find yourself re-writing it in a bunch of different places? Sales enablement material, blog posts, paid ads, etc. We think if you've done the hard work once, you shouldn't have to do it again.
Ignition has a built-in AI copywriter. Just plug in your positioning, messaging, and brand voice. We'll take care of the rest for you. Think of Ignition as your own private PMM copywriter.
This is the future of product marketing - and it's what we're building every day at Ignition.
Ready to escape the Doom Loop? You can give Ignition a try for free.