The Making of a Product Marketer
Product Marketing is HOT right now.
There are more jobs in the field than ever and companies around the world are realizing the value that the Product Marketing Manager (PMM) brings to their organization.
As the middleman between everyone (sales, product, engineering, marketing, enablement, and more), product marketers have a lot on their plate.
Distilling it down to the most basic level:
Product Marketers are translators.
PMM’s take technical content and make it easy for anyone to understand. They take sales jargon and turn it into product roadmap items. They take growth marketing techniques and apply them to new product releases. Product Marketers are basically your modern-day renaissance people.
Even though product marketing is hot right now, few people understand what it entails.
There are 7 distinct areas that fall under a PMM job description that you should get familiar with if you are looking to break into the field.
Product Launch & Go To Market (GTM)
This might be the first thing most people think about when it comes to product marketing: launching new products/ features and strategizing how to approach the market. I won’t go into too much detail here (stay tuned for a future article on GTM) but product marketers need to understand industry trends and who their customers are as a first step for GTM. From there, they’ll need to determine their best approach to engage customers, drive interest, and the steps to a successful product launch. Then, even after a launch, they’ll need to get feedback on the process and continue to iterate.
Product/Feature Adoption
Once a customer buys, what happens?
Is the customer even using the product? Are there features they aren’t even touching?
How can we get our customers to fully utilize, understand, and reap the benefits of the product?
Product Marketers are often the first people to strategize and think about how we can increase adoption before customer success takes on the execution of it.
Competitive Intelligence
Understanding the competitive landscape. PMM’s need to know who the top competitors are, their strengths and weaknesses, and how their product is better. On top of this, it requires deep knowledge of the industry and the trends in the space.
Marketing Collateral/ Content Creation
This is what gets me excited about PMM. The actual writing, presentation creation, and demo building. What are the value props? How do we display this visually or through the written word? What kind of studies can we run to write a good white paper? Should we have a blog? Does the website need a new copy?
All of this falls under content creation.
Sales Enablement
Having all the marketing material in the world is great, but it doesn’t matter if your product isn’t selling. Your sales team makes your business. Without sales, you have no business.
Product Marketers help design trainings/training materials to get the sales team up to speed. Since PMM’s are experts in the industry, they can help the sales team understand this to ultimately drive more revenue.
KPIs, Metrics, and Data
Every role has KPIs they need to hit and metrics to meet. Every team has goals and data. However, in product marketing, this can have a huge impact on sales and ultimately revenue. It’s critical for a Product Marketing department to have a strong process for tracking and reporting metrics.
I know this may not be all-encompassing, but just a high-level look. If you are interested in getting into the field, definitely take a look into these areas as places to start learning. Backgrounds in product management, sales/ sales engineering, content marketing, and sales enablement often translate well to a PMM gig.
