This article is based on Josh Mayfield’s talk at the Product Marketing Misunderstood virtual event. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the complete recording here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard.

One of my favorite quotes ever comes from Mark Twain: 

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." 

This perfectly captures one of the biggest challenges in product marketing – especially for junior PMMs. Myths get thrown around, become ingrained as fact, and shape their worldview.

Recognizing and challenging these myths can transform how we approach product marketing, leading to better strategies, more effective campaigns, and greater overall success in the marketplace.

So, let's explore and bust some of the myths that can mislead us in product marketing. This list isn’t exhaustive – there are dozens of myths out there – but I'll focus on the five that I've encountered most often, and share how they offered opportunities to demonstrate value.

Myth 1: Product marketing is all about launches

One common misconception is that product marketing is all about launches, not campaigns and promotional efforts. However, I've realized that campaigns heavily depend on product marketing. 

Think about it – a campaign needs a call to action (CTA), which requires context, which in turn needs a perceiver, and that perceiver must have a personality. It all boils down to who you want to take what action. 

This is a core product marketing function – these are our targets, and here's what we want to happen. We know the market conditions, external factors, and internal politics of various organizations. Product marketing is designed to be this intelligence service.

Being able to identify and understand the target market is foundational to campaigns, not just product launches. Often, product marketing is confined to launches in the marketing roadmap, but this is a mistake.

If there's one thing to take away, it would be that demand generation, revenue operations, growth marketing, and all other marketing efforts should start with your CTA and work backwards. 

The framework I use is an acronym: FADE - follow, attend, download, experience.

  • Follow: Encourage your audience to follow you.
  • Attend: Invite them to attend events or webinars.
  • Download: Offer valuable resources for download.
  • Experience: Provide opportunities for them to experience your product, like demos or trials.

This approach helps you learn much more about your marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs). By following the CTA, you can tailor your selling motions or opportunities based on specific actions taken by your audience.

Myth 2: Product marketing strategies are one size fits all

Another common myth is that product marketing strategies are generic and one size fits all. Yes, there are frameworks and repeatable methods, but the real substance comes from product marketing’s knowledge outputs, tailored specifically to the target audience – and this is getting more and more vital each day. 

Due to changes in the structure of global systems, a breakdown in the traditional total addressable market (TAM), and shifts in the number of buying entities in B2B, this precision is becoming even more critical. Where you can sell is changing, and this will greatly impact the types of programs you run and who you target.

As more organizations consolidate their tools, the number of buying entities is shrinking. This means we have to be more selective and targeted with our strategies. The spray-and-pray approach or trying to go viral won’t work anymore. General strategies are out; tailored, precise marketing is in.