Hard to believe how fast we went through 2024! As the year unfolded, one theme stood out across peer conversations, industry conferences, and organizational practices: the need to connect limited or dispersed marketing resources to a deep understanding of the market.

On a personal level, this year challenged me to focus on what truly matters – leveraging my product marketing expertise to address the needs of sales teams and partners while driving tangible value through content-based go-to-market (GTM) campaigns aimed at demand generation.

This shift meant moving beyond activity and event-based approaches to rigorously generating high-quality leads. The key? Becoming unapologetically customer-centric and partner-led. By embedding curated product marketing strategies into GTM campaigns, we enabled a more focused and effective approach.

It starts with bringing contextual focus to GTM efforts by clearly articulating a value proposition for sellers and partners. From there, it’s about creating impactful solution messaging for customers, a Bill of Materials (BoM) for strategic alliance sellers, and fostering long-term partnerships that drive joint GTM success.

This is the essence of product marketing. Organizations need expert product marketers who can bring sharp judgment and structure to enable well-oiled GTM strategies in collaboration with sellers and partners.

How focusing on customers reshapes GTM campaigns with sellers and partners

Impact on the bottom line

Isn't it all about the bottom line as well as revenue generation when it comes to GTM programs? Being customer-obsessed brings valuable and curated product marketing content leading into events and activities.

This accelerates MQL conversions, develops high-intent leads, boosts product adoption by partners and customers, and enhances the customer lifetime value (CLV).

Looking for the ‘so what?’ 

Our customers are inundated with information, so it's critical to make every touchpoint meaningful.

While we create a ‘drum beat’ with webinars, industry event participation, and channel field days, it's equally important to ensure session impact.

Curated content and refined value propositions from product marketing help better align with the target customer cohort’s goals, needs, and challenges. This allows campaigns to be more resource-efficient and impactful. 

Proactive risk mitigation

Effective GTM strategies do a lot of listening. Gathering insights from customer touchpoints, analyst feedback, and SME expertise ensures marketing initiatives are rooted in customer reality.

This proactive approach by product marketing identifies risks early and enhances the customer experience by minimizing friction and maximizing relevance.

Cross-functional collaboration for GTM success

To deliver exceptional experiences, we ensure that every customer interaction – from pre-sales to post-purchase – is seamless and valuable. This requires tight alignment across product development, marketing, sales, partners, and support teams. 

Interactive demos, hands-on exercises, and expert-led sessions make complex concepts accessible and engaging for customers and partners. 

Product marketers successfully drive this alignment as their day jobs, and can lead GTM campaigns to deliver improved customer and partner experience. 

Continuous learning for customer connection 

Staying customer-centric means continuously refining strategies based on real feedback. By deeply studying personas, leveraging data points, and incorporating customer stories, product marketers can create GTM campaigns that resonate. 

These additional efforts generate high-intent leads rather than a mechanism to collect contact info. This is a product marketing muscle and this constant learning ensures agility, allowing organizations to pivot and optimize based on evolving customer needs.

Looking ahead to 2025: Elevating customer-centric GTM

As we enter 2025, the role of product marketers in crafting and executing content-based and customer-centric GTM campaigns will be more crucial than ever. For any recurring revenue business, customer obsession is key – and is relevant to the pillars of:

  • Adoption, 
  • Retention, 
  • Advocacy, and 
  • Expansion. 

What is rapidly incoming during this year is increased relevance and context based on enterprise LLM applications – enabling support for generating high-quality content with high contextual relevance. 

This makes product marketing a lot of fun, unlocking true creativity and personalization at scale! As a result, organizations will increasingly expect product marketers to spend more time on things that matter to drive growth. 

Product marketers are taking on the increased responsibility to expertly execute GTM programs that gain a competitive advantage with high-intent leads, lean in on customer advocacy, and focus on building the brand. Here are the prominent mantras for 2025:

Get personal 

Harness AI-driven insights to personalize messaging and refine targeting for diverse customer segments. This becomes very relevant, especially in the context of enterprise LLM applications for generating high-quality as well as highly contextual content.

The focus now turns to greater judgment from product marketers to define credible core messaging based on a deep understanding of the partner/customer segment pain points and speak to them in their language.

Speak less, show more 

Demonstrate ROI through revenue growth and enhanced CLV by prioritizing customer needs in every campaign. An ideal example is the GTM of a joint solution offering with partners to target customers. 

Such a campaign prioritizes informing, educating, and incentivizing partner sellers as much as articulating a differentiated offering to the customer. 

As a result, the bespoke BoM of assets includes seller enablement and training collateral (including a ‘how to pitch’ video), as well as clear customer value proposition, customer presentation material, use case-specific solution briefs, and more. 

Change the recipe 

Lead with hyper-targeted content and bespoke campaigns that resonate with customers and partners, eliminating generic, one-size-fits-all activities. 

This calls for curated collateral and GTM to partners and target markets – aligning with the target cohort’s goals, needs, and challenges.

It's further boosted by including interactive sessions with SMEs, live demos, and hands-on exercises to amplify the brand, product positioning, as well as messaging retention. Needless to say, it's a mistake to take the brand and company's reputation for granted! 

Listen before you tell 

Leverage real-time feedback from customers and partners to enhance the responsiveness and agility of GTM campaigns to gain high-intent leads. Achieve this by discovery calls with team leaders and pre-session surveys for valuable insights. 

It behooves us to rapidly pivot to customer and partner needs by demonstrating the product’s value using local data points, customer stories, use cases, and industry reports. Take into account the target geography, work shifts, and other nuances.  

Open the door 

Make way for clear channels of ongoing learning and support. Lead cross-functional efforts to deliver cohesive, impactful customer experiences through multiple touchpoints. 

Involve product, field marketing, sales, support, and customer success teams to align with GTM goals, delivering a consistent market message and improving partner and customer experience. This ensures efficient use of resources and maximizes the impact of marketing and sales efforts. 

Ask “What’s the score?”

Finally, always ask ‘What's the score?’ to track progress by assembling a set of quantitative measurements formulated as preferred by the team – whether as KPIs, OKRs, SMART goals, or simply key metrics. 

Define tools, methods, and clear ownership associated with collecting and analyzing that data – ideally via an accessible, actively refreshed report or dashboard that doesn’t depend on any external groups to pull results.

This serves as an ideal input to a diverse ecosystem of partners, including strategic alliances and resellers, or to field marketing teams enabling geographic expansion. 

Final thoughts

To summarize, product marketers are the linchpins connecting customer pain points as well as partner ecosystems to actionable GTM strategies. 

By staying relentlessly focused on customers as well as partners, they can ensure that organizations not only meet but exceed growth goals. In 2025 and beyond, a customer-first and partner-led approach will remain the cornerstone of impactful GTM campaigns and sustainable success.