Who are Product Marketers and Why Do They Exist Anyway?
Like a lot of roles today, Product Marketing did not exist as a function a few years ago. This is not to say that the job of a product marketer did not exist. It did. However, it was likely tucked neatly under a marketing generalist role, digital marketing, product management (in some cases), marketing communications, content marketing, and I guess you can say any role that has “marketing” in it.
As the world evolves (and workplaces too) there has been a growing need for specialisation. This demand can also be traced to the increased volume in products that are being built today, stirring up the need to stand out in a crowded market.
This chart is proof that the streets are tough especially in the tech space. No, for real. Everyone wants your money, but you can’t afford to give everyone your money now, can you? It’s survival of the fittest out here, so may the best positioned/jobs-led product win.
On a more serious note, to achieve this, you need to be more strategic about how best to acquire and retain customers where every product claims to be best in the market. Hence, the rise of the Product Marketing function.
Product marketers are the backbone of the entire customer and product lifecycle.
To a lot of people, the job of a product marketer may seem new, but that’s not the case for a lot of PMMs today.
A good number of product marketers say they started off as part of the marketing team, and were performing the duties of a product marketer without realising it. I happen to fall into this category as well.
As a result of the supposed novelty of the role, it’s no surprise that there seems to be a lot of ambiguity about the function in various organisations.
It is why daily, PMMs all over the world are doing their best to ensure that there’s a better understanding of what the role entails, as well as what should be expected of product marketers.
What Product Marketing is LESS About
In 2019, Priya Ramamurthi² had the opportunity to join 800+ marketers at the Product Marketing Summit by Product Marketing Alliance. She discovered that common questions product marketers often get asked are:
- Are you in the product or marketing team?
- Oh, could you fix the verbiage on our website?
- Can you do some demand gen for me?
The questions, she says, can often be unending where an immediate response is needed, and rarely do these one-off requests consider overall strategy.
Considering a lot of product marketers started out as marketing generalists, it is not far-fetched for them to be able to perform these tasks. The difference however, is that as a product marketer, you have to first consider how making a fix to the verbiage on the website could affect the customers for whom you are to be a voice to. How that simple “fix” could affect your overall strategy.
Product marketers are a lot of things. Matter of fact, PMMs admit to being a jack/jill of many trades. We are superheroes in disguise, and these superpowers (skills) excite us as they often come in handy at various points in the customer lifecycle.
However, there’s a lot more to this function, which is why product marketing is also less about:
- Writing catchy copies
- Creating presentation decks
- Writing blogposts
- Writing email newsletters, and so goes the unending list
Product marketing is not an afterthought. And should not be treated as such.
What Product Marketing is MORE About
Product marketing is a strategic function that flourishes at the intersection of product, marketing, sales, and customer success.
According to Product Marketing Alliance³, 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. All at the same time.
As a product marketer, I listen to users, empathise with them, and communicate the jobs the users need to get done to the product team. I work closely with the marketing team to attract and convert customers. I help the sales team to sell better by enabling them with the resources and equipping them with the knowledge they need. Lastly, I work with the customer success team to keep customers satisfied enough to become our evangelists and drive referral.
Product marketing is a highly cross-functional role that requires collaboration at every point for the best result.
What Product Marketers Do
In larger organisations with a lot of PMM resources, you may find more specialisation within the product marketing function i.e. Product Marketing Manager — Go-To-Market, Product Marketing Manager — Sales Enablement, etc. However, you find that the daily lives of PMMs are similar across organisations.
While product teams focus on building features and growth teams focus on increasing and retaining customers, product marketers do the following to ensure that customers are the essence of/are not lost in the sauce of both processes:
1. Collaborating with Product
In Samia Suys’ article⁴ on her learnings as a product manager, she highlighted the pressure of adding new features based on requests from sales and customer success teams. This had me thinking that perhaps, they were missing a product marketer on the team.
As the voice of the customer, one of the things product marketers do is to identify and help the product team prioritise what features need to be built by focusing on the customer and the business’ goals.
Typically, product marketers will do this by understanding the customer’s jobs-to-be-done. We serve as the bridge between the product, marketing, and growth teams.
2. Defining Positioning & Messaging
“There’s no such thing as unique, there’s just different”. To answer the question of how your product is different, you need positioning.
Positioning helps products stand-out in a crowded market; messaging on the other hand, consistently reinforces the product’s positioning across various media and channels.
Deeply rooted in positioning work is research. Product marketers use research to first of, understand the market’s needs, then, to identify the competitive alternatives that the market currently harnesses. These existing alternatives could range from a product to a manual process.
There is a need to consistently create product value to match what the market actually needs because driving value is the difference that helps any product stand out. Messaging then picks up the baton by communicating this value to customers and prospects, and compelling them to take action.
In a lot of cases, this means driving them to abandon their existing alternative(s) and habits. By doing positioning, you have more control over how the market perceives you. You’re able to tell them who you are, rather than having them assume what your product is about.
3. Executing Go-To-Market Strategy
To propel the success of a launch, PMMs collaborate with the product and marketing team to create and execute a go-to-market strategy. A go-to-market strategy is a way in which a company brings an offering to market. This offering can span various areas — the launch of a product, a feature, a new partnership, an integration, a new pricing model, rebranding, an exit, and so on.
An ideal GTM strategy should not be executed with a one-size fits all approach because the needs of each market will always differ. It’s why leveraging positioning and messaging is important and forms a core part of the GTM process when broken down into digestible bits. This is often reflected in the company’s choice of communication, channels, adoption/sales strategy, and so on.
PMMs understand the need to factor this when creating the GTM strategy, as it could make or break the success of any launch.
4. Driving Sales, Adoption, and Retention
Product marketers act as an extension of the sales team by equipping them with the knowledge and resources that they need to acquire SQLs. These resources can take various formats — training the sales team, battle cards, landing pages, decks, etc.
The PMM’s role in the sales process is often measured by the sales team’s knowledge of the product, and the efficiency of the enablement resources in helping them close deals.
PMMs play an equally important role in the adoption and retention process by collaborating with the customer success team. As the voice of the customer, they work closely with customer success to gather feedback from customers and work to translating it into something tangible.
In essence, product marketers sit at the point where product, marketing, sales, and customer success interact. As problem solvers, PMMs make it easier for these teams to succeed in a way that translates to the customer succeeding. The customer is the core for a PMM, and because it is so easy for teams to forget this, they collaborate with these teams to ensure that the customer’s jobs-to-be-done remain the primary focus.
