This article is based on Clayton's appearance on the Customer Marketing Catch-Up podcast.
Building effective collaboration between product marketing and customer marketing is essential for driving success in any organization.
I'm Clayton Prichard, with over 11 years of marketing experience across various tech companies, including roles in product marketing and customer marketing. Throughout my career, I’ve seen how closely these two teams must work together to ensure a seamless customer experience.
In this article, I’ll share insights on the distinct yet complementary roles of product and customer marketers, the importance of cross-team collaboration, and practical advice on how both teams can align to drive adoption, renewals, and long-term customer success.
Differences between Product Marketing Managers and Customer Marketing Managers
The distinction between product marketing managers and customer marketing managers is largely defined by their names.
Product marketers
Product marketers focus primarily on the product itself. They work to deeply understand our ideal customer profile (ICP) and ensure that the product is being built in alignment with customer needs and market demands. Their role involves gathering insights from the market and customers, then feeding that information back to the product teams to ensure we're building the right things in the right way.
Another key responsibility of product marketers is planning the go-to-market strategy. This is often overlooked during product development, but it's crucial. Product marketers spend a lot of time thinking about how they introduce the product to the market. This is where the collaboration with customer marketers begins, as they provide invaluable customer data.
Since customer marketers maintain close relationships with some of our biggest customers—often through case studies—they can offer unique insights that influence both product development and go-to-market strategies.
Customer marketers
Customer marketers, on the other hand, are focused on specific customer segments. Depending on the company's size, they may start with a broad focus but eventually specialize in targeting specific ICPs.
They run campaigns tailored to these personas, ensuring that the messaging resonates with particular customer groups. Additionally, customer marketers work closely on creating case studies and other content that often requires one-on-one interactions with customers.
In essence, product marketers are centered around product development—what we're building, how we're building it, and how we're taking it to market—while customer marketers concentrate on nurturing relationships with existing customers and executing campaigns targeted at specific personas.
How customer marketing feeds into product marketing
There is a strong interplay between the two teams. Product marketing is often seen as more "pre-purchase," focusing on getting things off the ground, whereas customer marketing provides feedback from existing customers that informs future go-to-market strategies.
One of the main differences is that while product marketers concentrate on launching new products or features, customer marketers think about the entire customer lifecycle. Their focus spans from when a customer first becomes a solid lead to their eventual renewal or upsell.
Customer marketers ensure we are consistently engaging with customers, driving adoption, and securing renewals. Often, they do this by highlighting features that may have already been launched, ensuring customers are making the most of the product.
In short, product marketers work on the next big launch, while customer marketers are focused on maintaining and growing the relationship with customers over the long term. Both roles are critical, and their collaboration ensures that we're not only building the right product but also sustaining strong, ongoing relationships with our customers.
Building a marketing team from scratch: How product and customer marketing fit in
When you're building a marketing team from the ground up, like I did at Momentum as Head of Marketing, the approach to product marketing and customer marketing is largely determined by the stage of the company.
Early on, we didn’t have someone dedicated to customer marketing because we were still in the early stages. The founders, customer success managers, and sales team had close relationships with all of our customers, so there wasn’t an immediate need for a scaled approach.
Customer marketing usually becomes essential when you have a larger customer base and need to start scaling outreach—setting up email campaigns, managing case studies, and handling the onboarding process.
The key signal for me that it’s time to bring in a customer marketer is when the customer success team can no longer manage everything on their own, or when product marketers are spending too much time handling customer success tasks instead of focusing on core product marketing functions.
Product marketing tends to be a more strategic role and usually comes later in the hiring process. It's vital for defining our messaging, positioning, and go-to-market strategy.
However, before that, I prioritize roles like content marketing, community marketing, and demand generation. Product marketing, while critical, usually scales with the organization alongside the product management team.
Marketing teams emerge during periods of growth
Typically, both product and customer marketing roles are introduced during periods of company growth, especially as customer bases expand.
Product marketers, for example, scale as the product management team grows. If the founders or a small team are handling product management, it might not make sense to bring in product marketers until there are enough product managers for them to collaborate with.
Once the product management team grows, it becomes essential to scale the product marketing team in tandem to ensure alignment between product development and go-to-market strategies.
How customer marketing supports growth
Customer marketers are crucial once you have a sizable customer base because their primary goal is to ensure that customers are successfully adopting the product.
If customers aren’t using the product effectively, they’re unlikely to renew, and without strong usage, it’s much harder to drive upsells.
Customer marketing helps ensure that customers get the most value from the product, increasing their likelihood of renewal and making it easier to upsell additional product lines or add-ons.
As the company expands, there are often new product lines or add-ons available for existing customers. Customer marketers play a key role in communicating the value of these new offerings and how they fit into the customer’s goals. This alignment drives revenue growth through both renewals and upsells.
Personalization and customer experience
Customer marketers work closely with the customer success team to ensure that marketing efforts are personalized and tailored to different customer segments. This collaboration is crucial because customer success managers have the deepest understanding of individual customer needs.
The data they collect is used to run scaled campaigns, personalized for specific segments, ensuring that customers feel the product is tailored to their specific use cases.
There are also situations where scaled campaigns aren’t appropriate for certain customers. In those cases, customer marketers enable the customer success team to handle more personalized, one-on-one outreach.
Whether it’s through individual emails or phone calls, these touchpoints help maintain adoption and create long-term value for each customer.
Customer marketers drive both personalization and customer experience, ensuring that every customer interaction is meaningful and aligned with the customer’s needs and goals. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also impacts revenue by increasing renewals and upsells.
The role of product and customer marketing in website design for customer experience
In my experience, product marketing plays a crucial role when it comes to shaping how a company presents itself through its website.
The website is often the first interaction a prospective customer has with your brand, so it must reflect the right positioning, messaging, and pricing. For product marketers, this is a key area of focus because it's where we can control how the product is perceived before a customer even makes a purchase.
Typically, product marketing either takes the lead on the website or collaborates closely with a web design and development team, depending on the size of the company. Regardless of who leads, the goal is to ensure that the branding, messaging, and experience customers get from the website align with what they’ll experience once they start using the product.
This continuity is especially important for SaaS and internet-based companies, where the handoff between the marketing site and the actual product experience needs to be seamless.
If a customer visits a website and then enters the product environment, and it feels disjointed—whether that’s because of a visual mismatch or a stark change in messaging—it creates a disconnect. The experience should feel cohesive, with the website flowing naturally into the product.
To ensure this, the design and development teams that work on the product and the website should either be the same or collaborate closely, sharing style guides and design principles.
Often, I prefer for the product itself to drive the overall brand aesthetic, with the website and other marketing materials following that lead. This way, the feeling customers get while using the product is consistent with what they see on the website, creating a unified brand experience.
The handoff from product marketing to customer marketing is just as important, ensuring that after customers engage with the product, customer marketers can build on that experience and continue the brand narrative. This smooth transition is critical to maintaining a consistent customer journey, from first touch to continued engagement.
The importance of collaboration between product marketing, customer marketing, and other teams
Collaboration between product marketing and customer marketing is essential.
These teams rely on each other to do their jobs effectively. Both roles are inherently collaborative, but product marketing tends to work with a broader range of teams, including product, engineering, and sales, whereas customer marketing typically focuses on customer-facing efforts.
However, customer marketing should still have a good line of communication with product marketing to stay aligned on what’s being built and how it’s being marketed.
Customer marketing doesn’t need to work directly with product and engineering as much—that’s where product marketing comes in as the intermediary. Product marketing understands what’s being developed and ensures that customer marketing has the information they need to communicate effectively with customers. This approach prevents silos and ensures that both teams are working together seamlessly.
Beyond product and customer marketing, collaboration with customer success is incredibly important. Customer success teams have the most direct relationships with customers post-sale, so they are key to helping customer marketers understand what customers need and where they may be struggling.
Sales, while less directly involved post-purchase, is still important, especially for product marketing. Having strong relationships with sales helps both product marketing and customer marketing better align their strategies.
Effective collaboration isn’t just about making requests from other teams—it's about understanding each team’s goals, challenges, and incentives. By taking the time to understand what other teams are trying to achieve, we can create a more cooperative environment where everyone is working toward shared objectives.
This mutual understanding helps remove barriers and challenges, and fosters a culture where everyone is asking, “How can I help you?” instead of just focusing on their own needs. It’s similar to how we approach customers: understanding their challenges and goals is key to helping them succeed. The same principle applies internally.
Advice for customer marketers on collaborating with product marketing
As a product marketer, one of the best pieces of advice I can give to customer marketers is to focus on how you can add value to the product marketing team. Much like how product marketers build relationships with product managers by bringing in market insights and customer feedback, customer marketers should think about what they can contribute to the product marketing function.
For product marketers, we’re constantly looking for insights from customers that help us ensure we're building the right products, and those insights are incredibly valuable. Customer marketers have a unique advantage here, as they have direct relationships with customers and can provide both qualitative and quantitative data.
Understanding what customers are enjoying about the product, what they're struggling with, and what they need next is crucial information that customer marketers can bring to the table.
Another way customer marketers can add value is during the go-to-market phase. Helping ensure that customers are adopting the product or feature is key, and this is where customer marketing can have a big impact.
What’s especially helpful is when customer marketers aren’t just taking direction but instead are actively pushing back or providing input on go-to-market strategies. If a customer marketer has insights on what messaging works better based on past experiences, they should share that and suggest adjustments to improve adoption rates.
Rather than simply executing an email campaign, it’s beneficial for customer marketers to be strategic partners, collaborating on how best to drive customer success.
Leveraging customer marketers’ deep understanding of customers
Customer marketers have a closer connection to customers than product marketers typically do. They’re often on the front lines, hearing feedback directly through campaigns or customer success teams. That makes their role vital in providing insights that product marketing needs to shape both product development and messaging strategies.
Customer marketers should focus on sharing these insights with product marketing regularly. They know better what resonates with customers, both at an individual level and across segments, and that knowledge helps inform everything from product decisions to how we communicate about those products.
For instance, customer marketing can help uncover why a particular feature isn’t being adopted as expected—whether it's a product issue, a positioning problem, or something else entirely.
The qualitative data customer marketers gather through direct interactions or through customer success teams fills in gaps that product marketers can’t always access, even if we have strong data on product usage. Understanding the "why" behind the data is just as important as the data itself, and that’s where customer marketers are invaluable.
They can help product marketers refine messaging, adjust strategies, or even suggest product improvements based on what they’re hearing from customers.
A collaborative, two-way relationship
Ultimately, the relationship between product marketing and customer marketing needs to be collaborative and two-way. Both teams have a shared goal: ensuring that the product resonates with customers and drives long-term success.
By working together, sharing insights, and being strategic partners, both teams will be more successful in their efforts—and the company as a whole will benefit.
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