Head of Product Content is the missing role on your marketing team

I get questions about moving from content marketing to product marketing and what it was like. I sometimes feel guilty about my answer. Like I should have more to say. But, to be honest, it wasn’t all that different.

At least it wasn’t nearly as different as I imagine jumping into a demand gen or events role might be. The foundations of a great content marketer — writing and storytelling — are also the foundations of a great product marketer. Same bow, different arrow. I really believe anyone who’s great at one is capable of being great at the other.

The more interesting conversation to me, though, isn’t migrating from one career path to the other. It’s the way these two positions are both falling short right now, and how the answer to what each role is missing lies in ripping a few playbook pages from the other side.

In other words, it’s time for a new role in the modern marketing org: Head of Product Content.

Your media company is failing

You can trace most modern content marketing back to the early days of HubSpot and their original “Inbound” thesis, which went something like this:

• For decades, businesses reached their market by renting attention in the form of advertising in traditional media channels.
• But these channels were getting more expensive and crowded every year. And thanks to the internet, the foundations of all this legacy media was starting to wobble.
• But (also thanks to the internet!) the barriers to entry for publishing and reaching an audience effectively disappeared. Anyone with a website and a writer could become a media organization and reach an audience without all the pesky expensive things like delivery trucks and printing presses.
• So that’s what you should do. Flip your awareness budget from paying for attention to earning it. Become the go-to content source for your market. Even better, your new media organization can match whatever market your company plays in — no matter how niche. Sell commercial garden hose nozzles? Start a blog all about commercial gardening, become the #1 trusted destination for commercial gardeners by writing authentically about all the questions and topics they care about. Then, when they’re ready for a hose nozzle, you’re the one they seek out.

This calculus looks great, but there’s one variable that didn’t get penciled in. The barrier to entry for creating and distributing content lowered for everyone. For top of funnel awareness endeavors, this meant your company was suddenly competing with an explosion of new content. Standing out was still possible, but hardly a sure thing. Even HubSpot saw the direction things were going and, in 2018, published this declaration: “We’ve changed our stance on ads. Here’s why.”

“Gone are the days when an inbound marketer could build an audience on Facebook and reach them via organic updates. Today, organic reach for businesses on social is reported to be as low as 2%.”

Your product content sucks

Try this sometime. Go to the YouTube search bar and type in “learn photoshop” or “Lightroom tutorial.” Heck, even try “learn excel.” You will find some absolutely stunning product content.

Very few B2B products are doing anything this good in-house. Sure, you’re lucky if you happen to be one of these companies getting amazing user-generated content on YouTube. But these are outliers. What about the thousands of companies who don’t have the giant audience Excel or Adobe has?

While our new generation of content teams have been busy producing excellent content at the top of the funnel, product content for the most part has been painfully stuck in the old days. Compare this incredible YouTube content to your garden variety B2B webinar, with some product marketer droning on in monotone and a fuzzy screen share that you have to squint to see.

So why the disconnect? Why do billion-dollar businesses invest so much in content teams, yet have such painfully uninspired product content? I think it’s partly because we raised a generation of content marketers who are afraid of product. Talking about product was antithetical to the Inbound 1.0 days. So for a lot of this new class of modern content marketers, “sell” became a four-letter word. Your mission was to earn attention and trust, and you don’t do that by shoving product down readers’ throats. “Product-agnostic” became its own religion. It’s time to rethink that.

What does a head of product content do?

I would love to see more companies tackle this problem. A head of product content role could bring all of product content under one umbrella, up and down the funnel. Think of the way a Chief Revenue Officer brings sales and marketing into one team. Now imagine your blog and Tweets and YouTube channel harmonizing in perfect pitch with your support docs, onboarding emails, and landing pages. And imagine product demos, webinars, tutorials, and getting started guides that are actually delightful and engaging.

In a perfect world, this happens anyway. I’m sure there are already a few companies who have hit this harmony. Ones where product marketers are making delightful product content and content marketers aren’t afraid to get hands-on with the product teams. For small startups, I can see a person like this for an early marketing hire as a hybrid role who does both functions. At bigger teams, there would be a ton of value to a director-level role overseeing both product marketing and content marketing as separate teams while ensuring the right collaboration and overlap.

Or maybe you get lucky and users pick up the slack for you on YouTube. But that doesn’t sound like a strategy to me.