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 PM ...Read More

Always an interesting question. What's the leadership structure of the marketing team? Is there a director of product marketing 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, ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ther ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More