What Product Managers Can Learn from Digital Marketing Analytics
When I started my MBA, I knew that becoming a better product manager meant learning more than just how to build great products — it also meant understanding how to market them, measure them, and grow them. For my Digital Marketing Skills & Analytics course, I worked on a simulated campaign for an enterprise SaaS company, using marketing data to diagnose sales funnel inefficiencies and identify growth opportunities.
What started as an academic assignment quickly became a practical lesson in customer acquisition, lead management, and value communication — all critical to product success. In this blog post and the slide deck below, I’ll break down my approach to the “Next Generation ERP” campaign, share key takeaways about optimising the digital marketing funnel, and reflect on how these lessons translate to product management and product marketing in the real world.
So what does this mean for a Product Manager?
For a Product Manager, understanding digital marketing analytics isn’t just about running ads or generating leads — it’s about learning how customers move through discovery, evaluation, and decision-making, and using that insight to build better products and experiences.
In this project, I applied common frameworks like the Buyer’s Journey, Elements of Value, and Waterfall Analysis — with each offering a lens that product managers can use beyond simply marketing.
The Buyer’s Journey helps reveal where friction occurs in the customer experience. In my analysis, identifying low conversion rates between SAL and SQL highlighted not just a marketing issue, but a potential product-market fit or messaging gap. For PMs, that means using these stages to diagnose whether the product resonates, if features are aligned to user needs, or if sales enablement materials reflect the product’s actual value.
The Elements of Value Framework connects the emotional, functional, and ease-of-use factors that drive decision-making. For a PM, these insights mirror the product discovery process — understanding why users choose your product over others and how to design for those underlying values (e.g., risk reduction, integration ease, reputational assurance).
The Waterfall Analysis quantifies how every step in the funnel contributes to outcomes. Product managers can interpret this like a conversion funnel — where each stage represents not only lead quality but product-market signal quality. Leveraging waterfall metrics can reveal product insights, like the need to improve onboarding, simplify configuration, or address objections through product design.
Ultimately, digital marketing analytics gives product managers a mirror into how customers perceive and adopt value. It trains PMs to think in terms of customer journeys, conversion bottlenecks, and value communication, bridging the gap between not just what products they build, but also how they’re sold.