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Here are few suggestions for how marketing automation can provide benefits for product managers:

• Better understand your customers. MAPs capture a lot of data on customer buying behavior. Like Web analytics, this data can provide insight into customer needs and pain points. When tied to specific companies, marketing automation can help provide insight into differences across segments – certain triggers that are more appealing to large companies, for example, or prospects in a certain industry.
• Influence your future roadmap. Many software-as-a-service startups build “fake” landing pages and use traffic and conversion on those pages to determine what capabilities and features to build. This same approach can be taken with marketing automation, though in a bit more conservative way, as the idea of mentioning product capabilities that are still under consideration wouldn’t fly at many companies.
• Identify potential persona and customer interviews. Product managers should be talking to prospects and customers regularly to understand their needs and get this insight firsthand, though actually arranging interactions is sometimes time-consuming or challenging. This is where marketing automation can help pinpoint individuals for further discussions. Also, the marketing automation platform may have more robust and detailed data than the sales force automation system for targeting certain types of customers.

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