As Head of Product at Pure360 I have a number of frustrations that I wish I could fix. These ‘pain points’ like limited product usage data and lack of resources slow me down and make my role that little bit harder. 

marketing-pain-pointsAs product managers, it is our job to understand our customers’ pain points so we can look to build products and functionality that solve them. By understanding marketers’ frustrations and anxieties we can build products that customers love and solve the problems that matter. 

So what are the things that stop people being marketing superstars?

At our recent PureAcademy events in London and Manchester we asked just that. We showed each attendee a set of cards with common pain points on and asked them to pick their top 3, and then rank these 3 from highest to lowest.

So what came out top?

No real surprise here but lack of time featured in nearly half of attendees top 3 pains. Marketing resources are constantly challenged with an ever growing list of things to do from managers. So how can we help with this? If we can reduce or remove time consuming jobs we can help marketers focus on the things that add real value. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are great opportunities to solve this challenge and hence our focus as a product team heading into 2020.  

Next on the list was data quality and consolidation. As we create more and more marketing data sources this challenge will only get harder. The average number of data sources used by marketing organisations grew by 50% between 2017 and 2019. Our challenge as a product team is to empower marketers to control this data without the need for constant technical expertise and support. A marketer managed customer data platform giving marketers this control is our objective.  

With an ever increasing amount of data and information coming back from marketing campaigns it is no shock that the next highest ranked pain point was knowing how to improve results and analyse reports. To transform this pain into a gain this data needs to be converted into insights that can then be easily used to improve results. This is another opportunity for Artificial Intelligence with ready made reports in natural language that tell you exactly what the data means.  

marketing-pain-pointsSo were there any surprises that we expected to see more highly ranked?

If we had done this exercise last year then no doubt GDPR would have been in the top 3. Time has reduced this as a pain point for some but it was still quoted in the top 3 by 15% of people.

The other pain point that we thought would be higher was lack of budget. We all want more budget to spend on marketing but without the time, data and insight this money would likely be wasted.

So how will we use these results? They form the backbone to the prioritisation of our product roadmap (along with a number of other things). Tracking how these change over time as we introduce new features to solve these pains will tell us if we are succeeding as a product team.

If you have a pain point that you would like us to solve then get in touch.

Author

matthew-oliver

Matthew Oliver
Head of Product
Pure360