Product marketing

 

Product marketing 

Product marketing is the driving force behind getting products to market - and keeping them there.

Product marketers are the overarching voices of the customer masterminds of messaging enablers of sales and accelerators of adoption.

PMMs are responsible for a variety of deliverables and are a fundamental part of the product lifecycle

In six very simple circles the role looks a bit like this

Strategize - Whether it's product-market fit your GTM plan or your pricing strong product marketing always comes with a strategy.

Define - This is all about identifying your personas and applying what you garnered from your discovery stage to shape customer journey and communications.

Get set - Here it's time to harness all your hard work thus far with training sales enablement sessions and marketing campaigns so your team is equipped to take the GTM by the horns and run with it.

Grow - This is where your post-launch process needs to kick in to ensure your product continues to flourish and evolve in its market.

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Product marketing vs product management

There's a lot of ambiguity around both roles, so you can be forgiven for confusing Product Managers (PM) with Product Marketing Managers (PMM) as many many people do.

There are certainly some similarities PMs and PMMs are all-rounders who can effectively work across product marketing and sales. Both are responsible for product launches and both roles need to coordinate different teams within an organization to ensure that the product release is successful.

Check out the article below for more information

Product Marketing Alliance

Emma Bilardi

What are some examples of product marketing

Product marketers are the people responsible for being able to deeply understand and therefore articulate what is different and better and remarkable about your offering. April Dunford Founder of Ambient Strategy

One of the challenges of product marketing is that we’re surrounded by it 24/7 and yet people have a really tough time defining it.

The first step to understanding it might be understanding what it isn’t. Think of Coca-Cola’s polar bear commercials. There wasn’t any particular product push in there the message was just if you think of Coca-Cola think of the largest living land carnivore and have happy thoughts.

It didn’t matter if you buy a bottle of regular coke a can of diet coke or a Coca-Cola t-shirt. This is brand marketing. On the other hand the Diet Coke break ads are pushing a particular product Diet Coke and this is (a small part of) product marketing.

But it doesn’t end with ads. Coke’s product marketers would have had to think about what the pricing of Diet Coke says about its position in the market:

A product marketer might find there is a gap in the market for marketing automation amongst small businesses so it will follow that the software should have a low price and flexible subscription options and the website should make it clear that it’s for small businesses and there’s little need for enterprise-level after-sales care like dedicated customer contacts.

The insight that the particular technology the company made would fit best with small businesses will affect everything from the go-to-market strategy to the name, and it’s a product marketer’s role to bring that all together.

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Why is product marketing important

Important It’s not just important it’s critical.

Your company is going to sell products and services. If it doesn’t it isn’t a company. Those products and services need to be things people actually want to buy and they need to be priced so people will want to buy them.

Take Quibi for instance. This two billion dollar faux pas’ is a classic example of the need for solid product marketing. The phone-only Netflix competitor tried to be the solution for a problem that didn’t exist offering five-minute TV shows to be consumed as ‘quick bites’ during downtimes like waiting in line for coffee or the commercials in regular TV shows.

A smart product marketer could have prevented this disaster with a quick customer survey to show that people didn’t really want to watch more shows during shows instead they went to market not knowing who their customer was what problem Quibi solved for them or how to sell it.

This was not a company that was customer obsessed 

And after you have a solid product and you know customers for it are out there product marketing allows you to

Learn about your competitors.

Position the product in the market.

Differentiate your product from others.

Use customer feedback to improve it or create new products.

What is product marketing actually responsible for

A product marketer’s responsibilities never fade and they’re at the heart of products and customers before during, and after launch. Our 2023 State of Product Marketing report uncovered the most common tasks they work on

As we touched on a little earlier though the role varies from industry to industry company to company and product to product so what’s a priority for someone else might not necessarily be one for you.

What do we mean by that

For one product marketer, creating sales collateral might make up 60% of their job and for another it might account for just 25% of it. Because the role is still relatively new many organizations are still finding their feet with it which is one of the main causes of ambiguity.

So let’s drill down into each of those responsibility areas in a bit more detail.

1. Product messaging and positioning

Having a great product is...great but what’s not so great is trying to convince an entire market to buy it with one blanket message. It just doesn’t cut the mustard and that’s where product marketers are instrumental.

The aim of messaging and positioning is to understand what does and doesn’t make your market tick and then frame your product in a way that resonates. In terms of templates there are two pretty common industry-wide documents that help with this messaging hierarchies and positioning statements (spoiler we have frameworks for each in our membership plans).

Collectively, these answer important questions like

2. Managing product launches

Whether it’s a small-scale feature update or a full-blown new product launches are the cornerstone of the product marketing position.

We all know the iceberg analogy right Well product marketers are the people responsible for that pristine tip effortlessly sitting above the water - all the while juggling the chaos that lies beneath.

The word intersection  is used a lot in product marketing and that’s because its exactly where the role sits at the intersection of many departments - like sales product customer success finance and engineering - ensuring each is up-to-speed pulling their weight and enabled.

3. Creating sales collateral

Sales collateral comes in all sorts of forms and the extent of what’s required will largely depend on the type of launch.

For example, a small feature update that only impacts a subset of existing customers might only need a tiny wording update on the website and brief huddle with Sales and Customer Success to share the details.

A new product on the other hand might require the whole hog - demo videos battlecard fresh messaging and positioning completely new webpages sales training - the lot.

If you're new to the industry one thing worth bearing in mind is that creating powerful sales collateral is one half of the battle getting customer-facing teams to actually use them is the other so don’t overlook your delivery  useful article to help with that below.

Useful resource 22 sales enablement tools for product marketers and How to get salespeople excited about your launch.

4. Customer and market research

Next up is the pre-work. Before during and after any type of launch there’s research to be

After all without any of this you’re as good as whacking your finger in the air and seeing what sticks.

Now when it comes to customer and market research there are a few different brackets

The different areas of customer and market research you need to cover

On top of all this there's competitive intel too which in Layman's terms is the act of keeping on top of your competitors  positioning changes price increases or decreases new products or features different marketing channels 

This process is crucial in establishing yourself as the market leader and maintaining customer retention rates.

Useful resources: How to create buyer personas and How to conduct win-loss interviews.

5. Reporting on product marketing success

You could say KPIs are a bit of a grey area in product marketing - lots of people have them many also don’t. To give you a flavor of what you’re looking at though here are a few examples we’ve come across on Slack and in our podcasts:

6. Content marketing

Content marketing could be anything from blogs whitepapers and case studies to social media posts product guides and sales one-pagers.

We touched on it a little bit earlier, but the amount you’ll need to channel your inner-wordsmith will depend on the company’s setup. If there’s a team of copywriters built-in, odds are you won’t need to take ownership all the time.

Anyway naturally some product marketers feel more comfortable with their copywriting skills than others and we’ve seen a fair few requests for course recommendations around this - here are a few we shared in a round-up a few months ago.

7. Managing the website

There’ll be exceptions, of course but it’s rare that product marketing will be responsible for a company’s entire website. Instead this is more a case of making sure

8. Product roadmap planning

There’s no use sugarcoating it some product marketers have a better deal than others when it comes to this but in theory the customer and data-driven intel you gather should help shape product roadmaps.

For example if you identify a meaningful percentage of customers crying out for feature Y when will this be penciled into the pipeline Or if it’s already been decided product Z will be released in July what tasks do you need to complete to be ready for that launch?

Although Go-To-Market strategies are the product marketer’s blueprint to success the product roadmap is the overarching guide - after all without that you’ve not got anything to launch.

9. Onboarding customers

What happens after you bag that brand new customer Nothing Then they might not be around as long as you’d hoped. First impressions count and a solid onboarding process ensure everyone gets off to a good start and has everything they need to rinse all the value out of your product.

When it comes to the crunch, the mechanics of this will largely depend on the type of product you market - a B2B SaaS product will look very different from a B2C consumer goods product for example. Focusing on the former a cadence framework from Intercourse 

Framework for product marketing customers 

As part of our 2020 State of Product Marketing report we asked a few industry experts what they think the key ingredients are for the perfect product marketer:

It's taking down the risk or lowering the risk of investing a lot of money whether it's in people or product development or acquiring something new, and de-risking that investment

Product marketing vs brand marketing

Brand marketing looks more at building brand awareness for a company and ensuring that its reputation remains positive.

Though of course this is still a responsibility of most roles in any given organization product marketing focuses more on driving sales of specific products that an organization