Feng Hong

Well, that depends on the role. If you're writing a lot of content and not driving a lot of strategy, you probably should be a content marketer or a writer. If you own strategy of product marketing, and product marketing is an important marketing function to drive growth, then I'd say there's a clear path to director of product marketing. You can look at a company that's at the forefront of marketing to see how important product marketing is, Hubspot. (you can also look at Salesforce, etc.) A PMM there for three years (Meghan Keaney Anderson) made it to Product Marketing Director and then ultimately VP of Marketing.

Meghan's LinkedIn for reference: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meghankeaney/

Now, if PMM sits under product for a certain company and mostly owns input to the product roadmap, then that person won't lead marketing, and likely won't lead product. My two cents.

Always an interesting question.

1. What's the leadership structure of the marketing team?
2. Is there a director of product marketing
3. and what does the demand gen team expect from the PMM team?

To me, those sorts of things dictate the relationship between the two. Also, if a company is more transactional with its products, then it tends to lean more demand gen focused strategies, vs a company with a challenge in educating (e.g., for a more technical product or a longer sales cycle company). Basically, it matters what a company/marketing team thinks it's getting right and needs more of.

I think it depends on what the priorities are at the company and the other roles pre-existing (they both affect what the PMM needs to do more of), but I think the PMM contributes input for the roadmap based on the market feedback they are in tune with. The pmm can also do whitespace evaluation in the market.

There's a lot of reluctance around investing in buyer persona research that comes from a "so what" sort of experience in the past. You're going to have to establish what you want to accomplish with the buyer persona research as well as how to operationalize the research so that it isn't just a deck that sits there collecting dust. Prove that the content strategy requires the buyer persona research. Show that segmentation is proving valuable in email open rates and asset downloads. Show that there needs to be buyer persona segmentation of content and that there are gaps in addressing the audience due to the lack of cross-organization buyer persona knowledge and ownership.

This depends on the company and what it needs the role of product marketing to be. This boils down to: what gap is the company trying to fill? I'll use my role as an example, and for context, Full Circle Insights is a six year old startup with a sort of technical product aimed at enterprises/businesses. I sit in Marketing (and I would be reluctant to join a PMM team that sits under Product due to my desire to drive growth and demand gen activities). My company's main objective is to drive growth and more leads, though that's not to say that product feedback loops aren't crucial. There is just a more pressing need to align the PMM with marketing + sales. With that said, if a company had a product even more technical than ours, more complex assortment, and with many markets to align back to product, then maybe that company cares more about influencing product roadmap (and thus, sits the PMM role under Product). 

I started with the hubspot template but definitely don't let the format limit the amount you want to write in there. it looks nice but i definitely had to augment it to make it more actionable. That's one of the main challenges of buyer persona research: operationalizing the deck and not letting it just sit there as an fyi

For companies of a certain DNA (Bay Area, technology), brand marketing is not a priority compared to being able to measure the performance of your own marketing, with a philosophy of investigating what works and what doesn't. That's because the company likely has a demand problem, not a brand problem. So if product marketing wants to support demand generation and growth, then the product marketer needs to have an analytical foundation or analytical acumen.

Brand marketing comes into play with a product marketer's natural audience intuition. How is the brand received by the audience? How are the words that are used also being received by the audience? Product marketers with brand marketing skills have a mastery of language and intuition of audience to be able to convey. This is the other half of the product marketing skillset required. But still, without analytical skills, the intuition is full of bias and can often times be wrong without the know-how to shift gears.

For most growth-focused tech companies, if I had to pick between a demand gen background or a brand marketing background to shoehorn into product marketing, I'd hire the demand gen person to do a product marketer's job rather than a brand marketing person 9 times out of 10. Outside of that, and outside the Bay Area, I'd perhaps think a little differently.

What medium and what specific messaging? Depends on those two things (e.g., emails that capture people's attention vs website messaging that enables a staged, conversion-optimized flow of learning). Plenty of more in-depth stuff here if you could clarify what you mean.

If it's the value proposition itself, then it's a question of how to design the right positioning statement. The "tried-and-true" format really emphasizes the segment you're going after as well as addresses the pain point with the proof point. "For SDRs, [Salerizer] is the [email automation] that [pushes the smartest email recommendations to each SDR when they need it], using the [whatever proof point]."

Actually, speaking of website messaging, I kind of like the expression of the product done right at the top of the hero banner of www.pathlight.com .

There needs to be alignment on the content itself between you and the sales team. Is the content answering a pain point they have? Is it actually useful in answering questions their audience has? Are you prescribing or pushing a specific time and place to use the content? Is the content actually effective in answering the question (it might need some better design or copy for conveyance). It helps to also see the different hacked-together materials they use and ask them why they use those "black market" slides / content.