A strength of most marketing automation platforms (MAP) is that they can be used in as many creative ways as you can come up with. While a MAP isn’t typically thought of as a tool for product marketing, there are some really great ways to use your platform to help your product marketing team be more successful.

1. Segmenting leads and contacts by product interest

A list of leads and/or contacts with similar product interests can be very helpful for product marketing, and these segmented lists can be created using data from a variety of sources. For instance, you could have your sales team tag product interest directly in your CRM when they speak with prospects, or you could use visits to product pages on your website, or you could create a list based on product-specific content requests. You can even use a combination of these sources to find the products your contacts are honing in on.

2. Offering contextual content on your website

A typical enterprise MAP can connect your contact database to your website content and allow you to dynamically offer different content based on who the contact is and their past history. Practically, this means your website can personalize each interaction by recommending specific content and products based on past interactions. You can create recommendations for other relevant content and even modify your call-to-actions to match any given contact’s product interest.

3. Developing and executing product-relevant nurturing campaigns

As leads progress through the sales process and seek out more product-focused content, lead nurturing campaigns are a highly efficient and easily measured tactic. You can use these campaigns to focus on your prospects’ pain points and how your product can address them, as well as the key features and benefits that help. You can also encourage interaction with other MoFu (middle of the funnel) content assets such as testimonials, case studies, and data sheets. These kinds of campaigns can also help you identify the most active leads and accelerate them to sales.

4. Using product info in lead notifications to help sales

Alerting sales when a lead is ready for some human interaction is a very common practice. What isn’t as common is including product information to help provide context for that follow-up. An excellent best practice is to include which product pages the lead has viewed, how many times they have viewed each page, and a list of associated content they’ve downloaded or read.

5. Automating social listening for product mentions instead of just brand mentions

The social sphere is full of conversations, and you should know when they are talking about your products. If your MAP has social listening functionality, you should set up campaigns to listen for mentions of your products just as you do for your brand name. You want to know if the market is happy or indifferent, and you want to know why. Listening to social media can help you develop important insights you can use in future campaigns.

These 5 ideas for product marketing using a MAP will depend on the feature set of your platform, but even if you can only execute one or two, you will see some powerful results.

This blog previously appeared on the Product Marketing Community blog.

^{Image courtesy of Ell Brown, Creative Commons.}