Human-centered product marketing: the key to unlocking B2B buyers’ hearts and minds

News flash: B2B buyers are people, too.

You might think of your audience as a bunch of suits in a conference room, but they're real people with real problems and goals they want to achieve. They just happen to be wearing suits.

Product marketers must unlock the human needs behind business goals—and then connect those needs to the features of your product or service. The best product marketers use information—not opinions—to connect a prospect’s goals to a product’s features.

Deliver greater business impact.

Marketers who take the time to discover what's behind your customer’s needs and goals will unlock strategies that lead to greater business impact. These are the types of people you want on your team: they are able to define a strategy as well as the tactical steps to execute it—so the rest of the organization can focus on what matters most: helping customers buy from you.

Ultimately, product marketers are what’s behind making product features appealing, whether that's through webinars, compelling landing pages, sales demos, presentations, email campaigns, or partnering with cross-functional teams on other marketing deliverables.

Product marketers are part storyteller, part Sherlock.

They're world-class multitaskers and detectives, who play a key role in making sure products address a target customer's needs. This begins with identifying served personas to customize their journey and how you speak to them.

How? Any number of ways, but some useful, concrete steps include reading company blogs, tweets and following prototypical stakeholders on social media. They also jump on sales calls to both serve as a product expert but more importantly, to listen to the questions being asked and the challenges prospects are trying to solve. Product marketers dig into what their served personas care about to see if they can find any common threads that connect with their brand's mission.

They then use this to develop engaging sales enablement content, training sessions, and relevant demos so that the team is ready to run with the go-to-market strategy.

Once they’ve done all this legwork, it becomes much easier for marketing and creative teams to create engaging content that resonates with the market through all stages of the customer journey and the lifecycle of the product. And, it helps the product team know what to build next, grounded in market truth.