What Is Product Marketing?
I explain it across 4 core responsibilities:
Experts on our customers, products, and markets
We find the right insights and turn them into strategy, and make the insights easily consumable for the rest of the org
Marketing owners for product
We partner with product teams to make our products successful — driving awareness, acquisition, adoption and expansion for our product lines
Integrators
We sit at the intersection of most teams, working with each of them to break down silos and get to better results
Customer advocates
We work with internal teams to design and deliver great customer experiences that make them feel understood, empowered, and valued
Obesessing about what our Customers need from our Product (v. what our Company wants to sell to our Customers). Making sure that the products (and experiences) we deliver are actually solving real problems in their lives and that we are merchandising them in a way that is simple, clear and compelling. Celebrating the moments when our products work better together to drive even bigger outcomes for our Members.
Simply, we combine market, customer, and competitive insights with product innovation to deliver a unified narrative and winning GTM strategy for the company.
This means focusing on four core areas:
- Product: Drive market success of the product and solutions portfolio by ensuring strong product-market fit, compelling messaging, differentiated positioning, and strategic pricing & packaging
- Demand: Drive demand by supporting strategic marketing plans that cement industry authority, build brand awareness and drive pipeline growth
- Enablement: Drive revenue and retention by empowering sellers and customer success with the content and narratives needed to support the customer journey and sales cycle
- Customer: Drive expansion revenue and adoption by supporting engagement and growth initiatives for existing customers that drive retention, loyalty, and advocacy
Product Marketing, in my experiences, has been owning and championing the voice of a target customer within the intersection of Product, Sales, Design, and Marketing teams. This then allows product marketers the ability to target and reach the right customers when taking a product to market. What's really worked for me is using the research and experimentation processes of the role to hone and refine key positioning and copy assets.