AMA: Vanta Head of PLG Product Marketing, Madison Leonard on Consumer Product Marketing

I spent some time in B2C before transitioning to B2B - I did so easily by transitioning into a PLG B2B company. My skills were more product-focused, so I was able to apply those same skills for retention, activation, and growth in a B2B company. I would say the transition is harder from a sales-focused PMM to a consumer-focused PMM. This is because your brain is hardwired to think at the 30,000-foot view, position to buyers and large enterprises, and craft collateral and training around those personas. Buyer personas are very different from user personas. You really have to be product-led in your marketing materials. I would recommend coming into a product-led organization (PLG or PLS). Then, learn the additional skills required to have a full specialty. 

Titles mean different things to different companies - so I would concentrate less on that and more on the day-to-day you're responsible for. If you're already in charge of things like product growth, activation, retention, etc then you can easily transition to B2C product marketing. As for non-tech product marketing, that's a different story altogether! Product marketing for a physical product will have much different metrics than for a software product. At the end of the day, in true PMM fashion, it's all about the narrative. But in this case, the product is you! Align yourself to metrics that would benefit the business you're interviewing at and you'll be golden! 

Everything in B2C is based on users and the product. The days of sales narratives, collateral creation, etc are over. Become best buddies with your PMs and Growth leads at your existing companies. Start working on projects that impact end-users (increasing adoption/retention, increasing self-serve free-to-paid conversion, etc). It's easier to transition from a PLG B2B company than a sales-led company, so that may be a great stepping stone for you. 

There is no one-size-fits-all to team building. Everything should focus on business needs and impact. For example, early-stage startups likely don't need an entire role dedicated to competitive intelligence. But a late-stage scaling company would benefit from that role, esp as they move up-market. For an early-stage B2B company, 1-2 full-stack product marketers are great to start with. They should focus where it makes sense in the business (product or sales focused). For B2C early-stage companies, you'll likely need more of a generalist marketer rather than a specialist role. As you scale, product marketing can expand into customer advocacy, competitive intelligence, segmentation, and more. Some companies require more growth-oriented PMMs that focus on holistic customer journeys, while other companies might have growth teams for this and need product marketing to focus more on driving impact within the sales organization. TLDR it depends! 

Human attention and distribution. These things aren't new - they just increasingly get harder every year. There are a million apps and products out there. It's more important than ever to differentiate yourself and position yourself accordingly. Also, the days of buying consumers through paid ads are over (wayyyy too expensive and not scalable). So, distribution has to be well-thought-out. Plus, the time to value has to be short. If someone isn't able to find value the first time they use your app, you'll lose them! 

B2C product marketers work much closer to Product, so you'll need to have a robust understanding of how EPD (engineering, product, design) teams work. You'll be plugging into road mapping and developing user personas alongside your PM counterpart, so you'll need to walk the walk and talk the talk! You'll also find these skills in B2B, but they won't be as heavily influenced in traditional sales-led companies. However, skills like marketing to individual users rather than buyer personas is absolutely vital to do well in a B2C organization. It would help if you had some generalist marketing skills as well (content, paid, SEO, etc). 

I look for 3 main skills when bringing someone on the team: 1. Can they position themselves? If they have the skill to uniquely position themselves against other candidates, you've got yourself a master storyteller. 2. Are they able to manage multiple stakeholders? Test it in a panel interview and see how they do with differing opinions! 3. Do they have a hunger to learn? This one really takes the cake. I'll usually test this theory in real time by asking them to perform a task or brainstorm in real-time on something they aren't familiar with. You can teach someone how to write good copy in a few months, but it's really hard to teach someone how to handle a room full of stakeholders in anything less than a few years. I weigh the needs of the business and the specific role to better understand how long the learning curve will be and if that aligns with the rate of the business growth. Most of the time, the hungry-to-learn candidate wins. 

The frameworks are pretty similar. Talk with your customers, develop a narrative based on the pain points they have, and craft positioning based on your findings. There are some cool tools out there to help with website message testing (like Wynter), in-app messaging (like Pendo), and competitive intelligence tools (like Crayon). Ultimately, the availability of these tools will depend based on the stage of the company you're at and the available budget for software. Even if you don't have access to those tools, you should still put a lot of emphasis on talking with customers. Hear their pains, develop positioning and GTM strategy based on what you hear, and test it with that same persona to ensure you're on track. 

Some B2B companies, such as PLG, put the product at the front of their GTM strategy. The goal is to be very similar to a B2C company in that you target and market directly to end-users. Transitioning from B2C into a product-led B2B organization should be relatively easy. However, the skills gap widens the more up-market the B2B company is. PMMs who focus on end-users will have a steep learning curve for marketing to enterprises and buyer personas. 

Great question - the short answer is that traditionally Product Marketing has been seen as sales-focused rather than product focused. In sales-led organizations, PMM doesn't play a big role (usually) in product experience, road mapping, etc. That's soo far from the case with B2C product marketing. PMM is working closely with Product on user personas (different than buyer personas), onboarding, product growth, and adoption. A lot of PMMs I know come from sales backgrounds, so it would be hard to transition to a B2C type of role where it's more product-centric. It's just a different type of focus!

B2C PMM is all about the product itself. You're not having to go through buyers like you do with B2B - so you've got to speak to the product success. Don't make the common mistake I see B2C PMMs make today! I see so many people just focus on output (number of blogs, that a launch happened, copy skills, etc). Talk about the impact of your work - did it help the product grow? Did you increase adoption or retention? Did you find product-market-fit? And since it's a big company, they're going to also want to have trust that you can manage a political atmosphere with lots of different stakeholders. Best of luck!