What Is Product Marketing?
The role of product marketing in technology companies is a fascinating topic in part because it is so poorly defined and inconsistent. I've managed product marketing now at LinkedIn, SurveyMonkey and various early-stage startups and in each case the expectations for the role were different from team to team and company to company. It's a chameleon role that is often defined by circumstance, such as the first hire of a marketer to support the product development teams. Often, this first hire creates a precedent on product marketing's role and contribution within the organization which results in wildly different roles from company to company. What then do product marketers do?
The role of the product marketer is to accelerate product growth by championing the customer, communicating product value, and driving distribution. Effective product marketers are focused on ensuring the product connects with its ideal customer. The "work" of product marketing may look very different due to the variety of products out there, but generally they share these common pillars.
Championing the Customer
Product marketers work closely with their product teams to define the target customer and champion them throughout the product development process. During initial product design, product marketers are often focused on researching and defining the ideal target customer. This often takes the form of customer development interviews, market research surveys, and competitive analyses. Key insights such as a customer's purchasing process or industry information during this phase can influence product teams to make radically different decisions. For instance knowing the primary complaint about your competitor's feature might inspire a team to double down in that area.
After a product is launched, product marketers often play the role of data aggregators, sifting through customer data to provide actionable recommendations for development teams. While many product teams are on top of product metrics, other sources of data may be overlooked. What are the top trending issues from the customer support teams that are receiving feedback from customers? What is the reception from early sales conversations with prospects? What can we learn from the traits of the most engaged or profitable customers? What is the general sentiment of about product & brand on social media? While product and engineering teams are deeply focused on the work of product design and execution, product marketers play a key role in enabling them to easily leverage customer insights from other sources. Often, product marketers have a seat at the table as a proxy for the customer's voice. At Mochi Media, when we had debates over which feature to prioritize next for our game developers, I'd message key customers for quick feedback to drive an informed decision. At LinkedIn, we monitored our product's Net Promoter Score and verbatim feedback, and analyzed the results to provide roadmap recommendations.
Examples of a product marketer's role in championing the customer
Communicating Product Value
Successful product growth and engagement is fundamentally linked to whether customers understand and realize the value it offers. While all product teams aspire to create an elegant user experience and functionality that enables customers to intuitively "get it" after they try it, product marketers are focused on conveying the product's value to the customer to engage, convert and retain them. Product marketers play a key role in driving awareness and trial as well as packaging the product to appeal to customers. They accomplish this by packaging a product's features and functionality into messaging and positioning, pricing, and collateral.
Prior to launch, product marketers spend time helping the team gain an understanding of the customer. During this process, the team reaches a clear understanding of who the ideal target customer is, their motivations, and what pain points are driving them to purchase. In a crowded landscape with limited budgets and many options, competition is fierce, and product marketers are responsible for developing product messaging and positioning that explains how the product provides unique and differentiated value that resolves pain for the customer. Without someone owning this critical component, many brilliant products are reduced to a long-winded list of features lacking clarity on how they are better or different. In addition to this, the product marketer ensures that the product's value connects with the customer on the basis of it's price and overall package. During and after the product launch, product marketers own the expression of the product's messaging throughout the website and marketing materials. When the product package is well-defined, everyone who interacts with the customer from product development and design to sales and customer support should have a clearer view of how to effectively and consistently explain what the product is.
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Examples of a product marketer's role in communicating product value
Driving Product Distribution
Successful product marketing teams adopt shared goals with the extended team to drive the adoption and engagement of their product areas. While product development teams are focused on shipping brilliant products, product marketers play a key role in making sure these products reach their intended customers. Rather than applying a standard marketing playbook, strong product marketers develop and execute plans based on their unique insights about their product and target audience.
Many teams approach product launch by creating a comprehensive list of many potential channels and beginning to execute on them, often on the basis of interest or difficulty. The challenge is that budget, time and resources are scarce to launch and optimize distribution channels. Product marketers are critical to ensuring that they are spent wisely. The key role that product marketers provide in this arena is prioritizing these initiatives and driving their execution with the broader team. Based on their customer insights, they have a perspective on where customers spend their time and assess the feasibility of a channel. For instance, at Mochi Media we knew that our target audience of game developers was practically unreachable through PR and paid advertising, so we focused our resources on web forums and business development at developer conferences ultimately launching our own flagship conference. While building my contact management startup Connected, we were able to leverage SEO and app integrations, but quickly abandoned paid marketing because the cost-per-click for CRM-related terms against our LTV were too high. Often this is a rapidly changing environment with new data or market shifts happening on a day-to-day basis, and product marketers provide significant value in bridging this gap for product development teams.
Examples of a product marketer's role in driving product distribution
While the day-to-day work of product marketing is varied and diverse, the focus is often the same. Ultimately, product marketers accelerate product growth by championing the customer, communicating product value, and driving product distribution.
Ada Chen Rekhi is co-founder & COO of Notejoy, a collaborative notes app for individuals and teams. She’s also an executive coach who works with founders and executives looking to scale themselves as they scale their teams. If you enjoyed this essay, subscribe to her newsletter or follow her on @adachen.
Exec technology innovator and product designer with track record of growth in many large scale environments. Enterprise, telco, mobile and healthcare.
8 年Brilliant article, it hits one of the biggest issues in technology expansion I see again and again. Which is the huge divide that sits between technologists who want their tech to be loved and marketeers who want their brand to be recognised, but few people in the middle know how to build it all together. How about we simply run a campaign to get LinkedIn to run a global search and replace on all job titles "Product Marketing" and insert "VP of Why" since what they really do is create the explanation of why everything must be done in the right order, for the right reason :-)
Fractional Marketing Leader, B2B SaaS GTM Strategy, Growth Marketing/Demand Generation
8 年Having started product marketing functions at two tech companies and talked to many people in the industry, I've come to the conclusion that product marketing gets a custom job description based on the needs of each company that creates the function. Unlike Product Management, which has "best practices" and standardized rules of engagement in organizations, Product Marketing is usually created later and in response to some need in the organization. As a result, product marketing tends to be concentrated either in product development, or product go-to-market. One or the other is the primary pain point in the organization that becomes the mission of the product marketer to fix. (Plus, most candidates do not excel at both types of product marketing).
Senior Leader | Product & Revenue Operations | Strategic Planning, Cross-Functional Initiatives
8 年Such an excellent summary. Anyone who has been in product marketing for a few years know it's a catch-all opportunity. The roles require a deft touch in managing through influence, developing strategy, and leading execution. It's a tough role, but one that sets people up for success in leading bigger organizations.
A compassionate, practical, servant leader with expertise in healthcare technology, RWD/RWE, business transformation, finance, sales, and marketing. Thriving in life with a growth mindset and a no quit attitude.
8 年Great article focusing on the value a Product Manager brings to the organization. I've seen too many situations where start-up tech companies forget to plan and invest in this very important function. In some cases, the function can be performed by one person who is also leading the Marketing function. However, in today's competitive technology environments I would advise the functions be kept separate with the Product Manager part of the Marketing organization. Understanding customer needs is the single most important aspect of building a successful enterprise. This can only be achieved by engaging with prospects in the targeted segment and not making assumptions about the product's value in the market place.
Highly experienced CRM marketer | Former Google, Uber, Walgreens
8 年Nina Kwon :)