Elevating Product Marketing: Moving Beyond Tactical Support Roles
by Cate (Schley) Zovod
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What you'll discover
when watching Cate's story
- Diverse backgrounds, like theater, can provide valuable skills for a marketing career, emphasizing the importance of cross-functional abilities and empathy.
- Building relationships with trustworthy and integrity-driven colleagues is crucial when evaluating career opportunities in marketing.
- Balancing efforts between retaining existing customers and acquiring new ones is a constant challenge in marketing strategy.
- Direct engagement with customers is essential for understanding their needs, pain points, and decision-making processes.
- Marketing is undergoing a significant shift from outbound to inbound tactics, with buyers relying more on peer recommendations and online research.
- Metrics in marketing are evolving, with a growing focus on revenue-aligned measurements rather than vanity metrics.
- Product marketing should be involved early in product development to ensure product-market fit, rather than being limited to launch planning and tactical execution.
Meet Cate Zovod - Vice President of Global Marketing @ Azira
Cate (Schley) Zovod is the Vice President of Global Marketing at Azira, a global location intelligence platform. She began her career with a theater background, majoring in playwriting in college.
Cate’s journey into marketing started in the 1990s tech boom in San Francisco. She worked at a PR agency with big clients like Apple during Steve Jobs’ return. This experience got her hooked on technology marketing.
Over her career, Cate has focused on business intelligence and data infrastructure companies. She has expertise in demand generation, ROI analysis, and attribution.
At Azira, Cate leads storytelling efforts for B2B companies targeting shoppers and travelers. She emphasizes the importance of direct customer engagement and aligning marketing with revenue goals.
Cate advocates for product marketing to have a seat at the table in developing product and go-to-market strategies. She believes strongly in product-led growth and achieving product-market fit.
Check out Cate Zovod's thoughts on product marketing
When it comes to product marketing involvement in product development, Cate shares:
"Product marketing should be sitting right at the table with product management and engineering in and sales, in crafting product strategies and go to market strategies."
She also shares the importance of customer engagement in marketing :
"The only way to really capture and validate a buyer's needs, their pain points, their judgment is to talk to them and talk to them directly."
And how marketing metrics are changing:
"Everyone needs to align around revenue. It really doesn't matter how many leads came to your website. It's really about who converted."
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