GPT-4o in the Marketing Landscape
The catalyst for a PMM renaissance in the AI-driven era
Product marketers, or PMMs, represent the bridge between product management, sales, and marketing. Our role has evolved significantly since it was initially conceived. Messaging and positioning, creating content, and identifying product-market fit are all tasks of a PMM, but they don’t capture our role’s purpose.
Today, PMMs have access to vast amounts of data, from market trends to customer behavior, analyst reports, and the competitive landscape, alongside countless tools to measure customer engagement and campaign effectiveness. Increasingly, PMMs must engage in post-launch analysis and offer enhanced customer insights, rather than manage launches from a tactical perspective.
OpenAI’s launch of GPT-4o (the “o” is for “omni”) represents a major step in that direction. This model maintains the same level of intelligence as GPT-4, but it can also handle audio and vision inputs and outputs and offers multilingual support with real-time translation across languages. To encourage more users to use the model and generate more data, OpenAI has made GPT-4o available to everyone, including free users.
In a report on the impact of AI, Forrester, a market research firm, estimates that automation and AI will impact—read: replace—around 4.9% of U.S. jobs by 2030, and that frontline B2B marketing roles will be disproportionately affected. While it’s true that marketing automation technologies have been around for decades, large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4o are clearly differentiated by their ability to reduce the quantity (and quality!) of inputs required to generate outputs at scale.
Analyst predictions of AI’s impact on the workforce have a drawback: They draw a correlation between the kinds of tasks LLMs can perform and an equivalent reduction in headcount. Instead, we should adopt a layered approach to task replacement and consider the impact of these tools from a more pragmatic standpoint: Will these tasks be AI-assisted or AI-driven? And if it’s the latter, can we confidently forecast job displacement, or is it more akin to shifting roles and responsibilities?
Constantly proving our value
Although PMMs typically sit within marketing departments, we are not pure marketers. We don't own channels, nor are there always clear-cut metrics to showcase to leadership. Despite frequently being tasked with content creation, our role differs from that of content marketers with a more defined focus. Our market and business strategy expertise leads to lengthy, time-consuming projects, making our contributions distinct but equally valuable.
Everyone agrees that messaging and positioning are crucial. Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, has highlighted their importance, morphing the classic PM function with marketing to bring engineering and marketing closer together.
The health of an organization, one simple heuristic, is how close engineering and marketing are. Marketing—in a lot of companies—are like the waiters, engineers are like the chefs, and the chefs yell at the waiters that go in the kitchen. In fact, the waiters are the ones talking to the customers all day, and they also know how to sell things, so you really want them being joined at the hip. You want engineers to be thinking about how to talk about the products that they’re building. When we’re working on a launch, one of the first things we’ll do is start figuring out what the story is. And the story will often dictate the product, because ultimately you have to tell the story to people. But a story is also a really helpful way to develop a cohesive product.
It might seem like a clear-cut playbook, but this “Apple-style product marketing function” isn’t fully defined either. PMMs face an identity crisis: not solely marketers, product managers, or sales enablers, but somewhere at the intersection of all three roles. We are expected to speak on behalf of customers' concerns (without speaking to customers daily), and reconcile their inputs with a product roadmap we’ve had, at best, only a minimal hand in creating.
Models like GPT-4o can level the playing field, enabling our function to showcase its value more clearly and to execute tasks more swiftly. These tools empower us to act as strategic chess players, focusing on fundamental customer problems rather than granular feature details. Instead of displacing us, these tools will enhance our role, igniting a PMM renaissance in the job market.
GPT-4o and the impact on PMM efficiency and productivity
Meetings, strategy documents, sales materials, and copywriting—all essential, yet time-consuming tasks for PMMs. AI, particularly models like GPT-4o, can automate these routine tasks, freeing us from administrative burdens and enabling us to concentrate on high-impact strategic initiatives.
There are several ways that AI can enhance efficiency. GPT-4o can:
Transcribe meeting discussions in real time, summarize key points, and highlight action items. This ensures no critical information is missed and reduces the time spent on manual note-taking.
Assist in drafting comprehensive strategy documents by pulling in relevant data, generating outlines, and even suggesting content based on previous successful strategies. This allows PMMs to refine and tailor the strategy to their specific needs.
Generate initial drafts of sales decks, brochures, and other collateral using templates and input data. This accelerates the content creation process and ensures consistency in messaging across different materials.
Produce high-quality copy for blogs, social media posts, and email campaigns. By analyzing successful content, GPT-4o can tailor messages to resonate with specific audiences, ensuring that the tone and style align with the brand’s voice.
Proofread and improve articles, ensuring they are engaging and error-free. Additionally, AI can write code for technical SEO tasks, optimizing website content to improve search engine rankings.
Transform a blog post into a script for a YouTube video or podcast, or convert video content into written articles. This repurposing maximizes the reach and impact of content across various platforms.
This shift allows us to dedicate more time and energy to driving business growth and innovation. AI also provides deeper insights into customer behavior, market trends, and product performance through real-time data analysis. This enhances our decision-making and helps us identify opportunities for product improvement.
Imagine GPT-4o analyzing recorded sales calls, interpreting verbal and non-verbal cues to understand customer emotions. This deeper understanding of customer reactions will help us develop more precise ideal customer profiles and craft emotionally resonant messaging.
PMMs and the relentless stream of decisions: from product launches to content and packaging strategies
Our decisions profoundly impact acquisition, retention, and monetization. But the time and effort required to gather and analyze data often lead us to rely on intuition and anecdotal evidence, which in turn increases the risk of unmeasurable outcomes and potential backlash if results fall short.
With comprehensive, real-time data analysis, AI reduces our dependence on guesswork and intuition. LLMs can process and analyze data from multiple sources simultaneously, achieving a speed and scale impossible for humans alone. GPT-4o is the clearest example of this, since it offers an in-depth view of market, customer, and competitor trends, enabling PMMs to make informed decisions swiftly. Predictive analytics—recognized by 45% of business leaders as AI's most valuable marketing tool—allow PMMs to forecast future customer behavior and market trends by identifying patterns in historical data. This foresight enables proactive strategy adjustments, keeping us competitive and agile.
Current decision-making approaches for PMMs are flawed and outdated. Our overreliance on intuition and anecdotal evidence is risky and inefficient, which is why integrating AI tools into our workflow is not just beneficial—it’s critical. AI alleviates the burden of manual data analysis, reduces decision paralysis, and enhances predictive accuracy.
A survey by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group revealed that AI helps PMMs improve the prioritization, organization, and sharing of KPIs, linking commercial and marketing investments to profit margin and market share objectives. For example, AI can identify which marketing channels yield the highest ROI, allowing PMMs to allocate resources more effectively. AI can also highlight emerging market trends, helping PMMs pivot their strategies in real time to stay ahead of the competition.
PMMs who embrace AI can focus on high-impact strategic initiatives, fostering innovation and creativity, and ultimately driving significant business growth. The message is clear: those who fail to leverage AI are not just missing an opportunity—they are falling behind. Future editions of this series will explore specific tools and techniques that can enhance decision-making even further, offering practical examples and case studies to illustrate their impact.
The role of AI in PMM content creation and strategy
While AI can assist PMMs in creating content, it’s crucial to remember that the vision and strategy should still originate from us. AI can help execute our vision, but PMMs must drive the core ideas, planning, and execution. AI tools make content creation more efficient, enabling us to focus on high-impact strategic initiatives.
Using AI for data analysis allows us to uncover creative ways to craft compelling narratives for the market. Content creation is becoming faster and easier, which will make value the key to our success. The ability to understand what is valuable to the market is a PMM's superpower. That is, it’s not just about producing content, but ensuring that the message within the content resonates with the audience and is delivered through the right channel at the right time to maximize conversion chances.
AI also allows us to repurpose content into multiple formats, enhancing our reach and engagement. For instance, we can transform a blog post into a YouTube video or podcast and vice versa. This versatility ensures that our content is accessible and engaging across various platforms.
There are a couple of key applications of AI that come to mind for PMMs:
Data analysis and strategy formulation: Utilizing AI tools to analyze data from platforms like Google Ads, Google Analytics, SEO reports, and Google Console helps us identify valuable insights into customer behaviors and preferences. By applying models like GPT-4o, we can predict customer behavior and tailor our strategies accordingly.
Content creation and optimization: AI assists in creating targeted email campaigns, compelling blog entries, and high-quality, SEO-optimized website content. This reduces the need for external writers and allows for more control and customization of the content. AI also helps write code for technical SEO, proofread content, and craft engaging social media captions.
Despite the benefits, PMMs should not become complacent with AI-assisted content creation. We must continue to perform our analysis, understand market value, experiment with different messaging vehicles, and personalize our messages by stakeholder and their position within the customer journey.
PMMs and marketing professionals are actively skilling up to stay competitive. According to recent statistics, 76% of professionals believe they need AI skills to remain competitive, 69% say AI can help them get promoted faster, and 79% think AI skills will broaden their job opportunities. AI's role in content creation and campaign management will enhance our efficiency and allow us to focus on delivering more value, in turn solidifying our strategic importance within our organizations.
In future editions of this series, we will explore additional ways that AI can transform the role of PMMs. Topics will include the use of AI for competitive intelligence, optimizing customer segmentation, and enhancing personalization in marketing strategies. Stay tuned as we delve into these areas and offer practical examples and insights to demonstrate how PMMs can create more effective, engaging, and versatile content to drive business growth and innovation.
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