First startup marketing hire: growth marketing or product marketing?
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In recent years growth marketers have been the golden child of marketing, but doubling down on reach without positioning & messaging that resonates can burn a lot of cash. But great product landing pages won’t matter if no one discovers your brand…classic chicken/egg problem. 🐣
So which marketer should early-stage startups hire first?
The difference between growth marketing and product marketing
Here’s how people define the difference between growth and product marketing:
Anne Fleshman, VP of Marketing at Flowhub says:
“Growth marketing is the process of identifying repeatable, scalable, and compounding systems or programs across multiple channels to accelerate customer conversion and sustain business growth.
Product marketing is the process of identifying and effectively demonstrating a product's value and benefits in order to persuade a target audience to action.”
Nic Brandenberger, VP of Consumer Marketing at Fandom says:
“Product Marketing establishes connections between products and customers. Growth Marketing multiplies, intensifies and expands these connections.”
Brain Balfour, former VP of Growth at Hubspot and founder of Reforge:
“Growth marketing owns activation, channel infrastructure, pricing optimization, and is generally expected to perform experiments to understand how to best convert customers.”
The majority of growth marketers we’ve seen are, in fact, demand-generation marketers. They tend to focus on paid ads, SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing), and email marketing—primarily top-of-funnel rather than full-funnel activities.
Growth Marketers & Demand Gen know exactly what metrics they are held to. Product marketing tends to be more qualitative and is often unsure of the metrics they should own, but if they had to pick one, it would be visitor to signup conversion on the website.
What is growth marketing (aka demand generation, performance marketing)?
Growth Marketing Definition
Launch, measure, and optimize scalable campaigns to move prospects through the funnel to become customers, and eventually promoters.
Growth Marketing Skills
Analytics, reporting and troubleshooting
Tech stack implementation
Experimental process
Media buying
SEO & Content marketing
People, resource and agency management
Weaknesses tend to be: positioning, messaging, copywriting, product knowledge.
Growth Marketing Owns
Distribution channels (social, ads, search)
Drives inbound leads
Supports sales outbound efforts
Website (especially landing pages)
Paid (ads, search, paid PR placement, event sponsorships)
Marketing ops & tech stack
Email marketing
Referral programs
Growth marketing is about optimizing a company’s marketing funnel for success.
Demand Gen tends to focus on the top of the funnel. By contrast, growth marketing looks at the entire funnel for ways to improve it holistically.
This might mean increasing the number of prospects at the top, improving clickthrough rates and engagement in the middle, and boosting conversions at the bottom of the funnel.
And after conversion, retention becomes the key focus of growth marketing - because a growth marketing team cares about acquiring users who will stick around.
In short, growth marketing strategy is about driving demand from customers who are a good fit - and working hard to keep them happy, buying more, and telling all their friends.
Growth marketing shouldn’t be confused with “growth hacking,” which is a set of iterative, low-cost tactics based on rapid experimentation to boost a company’s bottom line, fast.
A growth hacking strategy is dedicated to rapid market growth, while a growth marketing strategy focuses on the sustainable growth of revenue. Growth hacking falls under the growth marketing umbrella. Intercom’s Ben McRedmond covers this well in this post.
“Growth starts with a deep understanding of product value and is about moving new users to the Aha! moment as quickly as possible, measurable in seconds.”
— Chamath Palihapitiya | CEO, Social Capital
Growth Marketing KPIs
Revenue (Net new, expansion)
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
Churn
Growth marketing is ideal for:
Startups (and their investors) that want early growth, fast
If acquiring and retaining users is the goal, growth marketing can involve low-cost campaigns with high yield.
Companies that want sustained revenue growth
Growth marketing brings a sustained approach to generating long-term revenue.
Companies that want to scale their marketing operations
Growth marketing is highly scalable, so it’s easy to ramp up your marketing ops without increasing costs too much.
What is Product Marketing?
Product Marketing Definition
Product marketing is the sum of all efforts to research, frame the message, and promote a new product to ensure it resonates with the target customer.
Product Marketing Skills:
Great storyteller and copywriter
Cross-functional relationship builder
Product knowledge
Understanding selling
Lead and manage large scale projects involving lots of stakeholders
Weaknesses tend to be: analyzing data, experimentation, paid strategy
Product Marketing Owns:
Product Positioning & messaging
Website homepage and product pages
GTM relationship with product
Sales enablement (pitch decks, 2-pagers, battle cards)
Pricing (along with finance or ops)
Competitive analysis
Partner and customer marketing.
Product marketing brings products to markets, and brings markets to products
The popular analogy that product managers put product on the shelf and product marketers get it off the shelf is fundamentally wrong. The best products are built with the market in mind, and product marketing should contribute long before anything gets put on a shelf.
Product marketing sits at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales. It is the sum of all efforts to research, frame the message, and promote a new product to ensure it resonates with the target customer. Product marketers have a wide range of responsibilities that involve close collaboration with product teams and other marketing functions.
Product marketing KPIs
There are many metrics that a product marketing team can use to track and analyze their efforts - but which ones are useful?
The primary goals of product marketing fall into 5 buckets:
Product sign-ups
Active product usage
Paid activations
Churn reduction
Upgrades and add-ons
Product marketing is ideal for:
Companies looking to establish product-market fit.
Figuring out messaging for different customer segments.
Complex or complicated product that requires customer education.
You’re about to launch but still haven’t settled on pricing.
Your sales team needs help closing more deals faster
To learn how product marketing changes as the company grows, read this post.
Which marketing role should startups hire first?
A look at what marketing roles unicorns hired first
What our network said about first marketing hires
Sean Broderick, Head of Product Marketing at eDesk
“You hire the Growth Marketer and bring in a Product Marketing Consultant to get your initial positioning/messaging nailed down.”
Ksenia Gordeeva, Product Marketing
“Being a product marketer, I am biased here:) in my view, until you find a product-market fit (and it is a product marketing job), it could be a bit early for growth marketing.”
Sebastian Ungureanu, Product Marketing
“It all depends on the CEO's bandwidth. The CEO is the first product marketer in any early-stage start-up, deciding positioning and messaging and bridging the gap between product and the market needs.”
Melinda Chung, Director of Product Marketing at Adobe
“Although PMM is in my blood, I agree with Sean. Strategy is overshadowed by the need for execution in early stage startups so you don't have to have the best strategy but you do have to have amazing execution. So for super early stage, I would hire growth marketing first.”
Mukul Sheopory, Author of "Bucephalus' Shadow
“Agree 100% with Melinda. At that stage of a company, growth at a certain clip is vital for their very existence.. A refined messaging strategy won't matter if only ten people consume it 😁 Get the Growth Marketer first, and hire a Product Marketer when survival has been secured.”
Tom McMahon, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Highspot
“Agree with a lot of the comments here already and although the value of PMM can't be overstated when it comes to building a good foundation, experimental marketing is probably what's needed in early-stage startups.
Growth marketers can put signals out into the market, observe engagement, test, and iterate which all provides useful insight to establishing product/market fit.
Really like Sebastian Ungureanu's point about CEO bandwidth because if you can pair a PMM strategy brain with those growth/demand signals you can really carve out a solid direction.”
Peep Laja, Founder at Wynter, CXL, Speero
“Depends on the skillset of the CEO / founding team.
For instance, in my case, it was growth marketer first as I got lots of product marketing taken care of myself (starting with positioning and messaging), but needed more efforts/hours invested in growth activities.”
James Doman-Pipe, Product Marketing at Remote
“It's easier than ever to build an audience and get in front of people. But it's harder than ever to get them to pay attention. PMM first!”
Mo Shehu, Head of Content Ops at FreeAgent CRM
“Can't grow anything effectively without solid positioning and messaging. I'd say the product marketer comes first.”
No matter which role you hire first, make sure your first marketer has the right balance of strategy and execution. Curiosity, grit, and scrappiness with a ruthless focus on impact is key. First marketers need to be able to think strategically about what to work on, then roll up their sleeves and get it done.
