“Jack of all trades & Master of MANY” – New age challenges will require tweaking of old quotes & formulas. One such function is "Product Marketing"

So the reason behind writing this article is to answer the questions and bust some myths around the profile called Product Marketing, after having a lot of conversations with my friends, colleagues, juniors & specially HRs about what exactly is this profile about, what kind of skill set is required, is it product management? is it Digital Marketing? is it Industry specific? Is it B2B or B2C?

So I will be tackling all these questions with my articles, starting with the big question, that What is Product marketing? So before writing this I did the most obvious thing, googled it and was excited to see what might come up,

Here is the first result.

“A lot of folks have difficulty answering this question, but it's not your fault. Although product marketing is a prominent department across both B2B and B2C companies, it's pretty hard to find a good definition of it anywhere — even on Google.

What makes it especially difficult is that it's one of the few job functions that touches product, marketing, and sales. It all comes down to knowing the target customer and testing to find ways to learn more about them and how best to interact with them"

SRC-https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/what-is-product-marketing

And what I got was correct and challenging at the same time, because when even google doesn’t have the right definition will I able to answer it? But then I realised, Google never answers any question, Google just finds if somebody has answered it and just shows it to us. So every correct answer which is there on the Google was written like the way I am trying to write one.

Alright, so here is my take on what is Product Marketing? Product Marketing is a very unique Skill Set/position right in the middle of Marketing, Product Management & Business Growth (Supply or Demand). End goal is to create Tools & Processes which helps in Business growth, Top of the funnel, Partner Engagement, Sales Enablement, Product Adoption & Launch while working with cross functional teams.

It Requires the complete understanding of the technicalities of product and should be able to express it from the POV of the end user and distribute that message on all the marketing channels like FB, Google, Email etc. It Requires Stakeholder management as you will be juggling between Development team, Senior Management, Designers & Product team. It Requires the complete understanding of product management, in order to build and integrate tools required for marketing. It Requires the complete understanding of Performance Marketing, in order to conceptualize and execute campaigns end to end.

Here is a snapshot of the application of the above mentioned skill set

Product Management will be required to create Landing pages/Partner Websites/Web Application, User Persona, User Journeys optimisation, Product Roadmap, Development sprints, Wireframes, Prototype, Backlogs. Also to understand the Roadmap of the core product in order to plan campaigns accordingly.

Performance Marketing will be required to build & execute campaigns, deep association with design team & Copywriters, integrating marketing and CRM tools,

Business Growth, this will require understanding the Core product of your company and what problems it solves for the end user and help creating a simplified and effective pitch for the BD team, building tools for them which can be used on ground.

If you have braved the whole article and reached here, so you must be wondering how can one person have all these skills, so for that stay tuned for my next article, because I will be explaining How I got all these skills and how to go about it step by step.