How does your company define the difference between Marketing and Product Marketing teams and how do the responsibilities differ?

We have different types of product marketing teams:

1. Core product marketing - responsibile for working closely with engineering on influencing the product roadmap and developing the value proposition with associated assets to drive awarness, consideration and adoption of our solutions
2. GTM - responsible for training our field and partners to ensure they understand the value proposition and can clearly articulate it to drive consideration and adoption of our solutions 
3. Events - responsible for all first party and third party events where we will be present 

At Heap we are fortunate to have a CMO in Lynn Girotto who has a firm grasp and strong working knowledge of all aspects of marketing. Often times you run into CMOs who only know brand, or only DG (or for that matter, only PMM), and the results can be disastrous. She has structured our marketing team into three distinct pillars: Product Marketing, Demand Gen, and Corporate Marketing. The roles and responsibilities are quite clear, but keeping communication open is essential even within our own marketing function.

PMM owns GTM strategy, positioning & messaging, content strategy, product launch, and sales enablement. As the driver of GTM strategy, we are leveraged for our deep understanding of our personas to provide guidance to Demand Gen on everything from campaign themes, to email nurture, and website design. I am also comfortable passing our messaging platforms, which provide core approved content, over to the Demand Gen team where they can craft campaign emails and web copy, tuning the core content as needed for their target audience or channel.

Similarly I have a tight collaboration with Corporate Marketing, which owns content marketing, external communications, and analyst relations. By mapping out the customer journey, PMM can craft a compelling content strategy, and thus align with the content marketing efforts of the Corporate Marketing team. And just like with Demand Gen, external communications and thought leadership are based on our core positioning and messaging, but adapted and extended as necessary. Last but not least, analyst briefings and inquiries are a team effort across Corporate Marketing, Product Marketing, and Product Management, with PMM generally owning the decks and demos.

With a strong product marketing foundation in place - e.g. persona definitions , journey maps , and messaging platforms - in combination with a system of trust, PMM's generally small footprint can scale effectively and our critical resources can be pulled in for content validation and approval on only the most critical pieces.

In addition to above, since all content is so closely tied to how/where it shows up and who needs to see it, versus 10 yrs ago when product marketing would created a set of standard content and post on the website. I would recommend sitting down with Demand Gen team, PR/AR to figure out what is needed for a successful campaign and nurture stream. Then consider one or 2 core pieces of content - whitepaper, webinar or customer video -- which then can be further marketed across the campaign with derivative pieces. Kind of like the core piece becomes the "neuron" and each of the streams that emerge from it in social media banners, webinar based on the topic, a partner video on the topic - all reinforce the thought leadership/essence of the story. It helps to reinforce the message continuously and makes integrated marketing really come to life. 

For us the Corp Marketing team is accountable for brand, demand generation, creative, and communication (PR/AR/etc.) along with execution of programs (e.g. project management on campaigns or tradeshow/event work). The content however comes from Product Marketing to deliver in these programs and events.  

Product marketing are the experts on buyers and how they buy. Product marketing defines the go-to-market strategy. Marketing (Marcom) develops a plan to support the GTM strategy.

The short answer is product marketing defines the go-to-market strategy to achieve a return on investment. The Marcom team executes the tactics in support of the GTM strategy.