We talk all the time about Product Marketing, it is a prominent role that exists across both B2B and B2C companies mostly in the USA (EU is catching-up), but it’s pretty hard to find a good definition of it anywhere. Even when you find definitions from Product Marketing Managers they can be very different. What makes it especially difficult is that it’s one of the few job functions that touches product, marketing, and sales, but it is also the beauty of this rol and department.
Why is important?
We know building a great product is…great, but if you don´t have good product marketing strategy to position and communicate well the benefits to your clients, they will not get excited about your product and your sales will not be as expected.
This is when Product Marketing becomes key: Product Marketing is responsible for communicating the company and product benefits to prospective customers, the industry, and general public when it comes to launch. This requires understanding very well your audience and market, and having a great process, methodology and technology in place to be able to coordinate stakeholders, understand users feedback and empower business teams and creators to design and build the right product positioning and messaging to the right audience.
There are many things you can do on product marketing, but we are going to provide you a shortlist of main tasks. According to productmarketingalliance, the main responsibilities and tasks are:
- Product positioning and messaging ****
- Managing product launches
- Creating sales collateral
- Customer and marketing research
- Storytelling ****
- Reporting on product marketing success
- Content marketing
- Website management
- Onboarding customers
- Product roadmap planning
At minimum.run we speak every day with CEOs, CMOs, CPOs, Digital Marketing managers from startups, scales-ups and corporations, and we see that the role and tasks vary from industry-to-industry, company-to-company and product-to-product, so what’s a priority for someone else might not necessarily be one for you.
For one product marketer, creating sales collateral might make up 60% of their job and for another, it might account for just 25% of it. Because the role is still relatively new, many companies are still figuring out the main goals and responsibilities. On top of that, the product marketing role responsibilities falls between Product, Marketing, Sales and Customer Service.
Product Marketing can help product teams providing customer feedback and marketing insights. It can also help marketing & sales teams positioning well their products. Product Marketing is a key department to help organisations to increase leads generation and sales.
Who is in charge of product marketing?
As we mentioned before, Product Marketing it can be a department or a person within an organisation, however, there are many companies without a Product Marketing team. In that case the typical question is, who is in charge of all the responsibilities of product marketing such as product positioning, creating sales collateral, product launch features updates, web management and so on?
Based on our experience, we see marketing, sales, product teams sharing these tasks and responsibilities. The most important thing is to have these teams aligned and put in practice a process and a methodology to be able to work towards the same goals and KPIs all together.
The decision making process of creating and managing a website typically involves Marketing to decide the content, measure performance and be in charge of website management. Product and technology to help Marketing communicating the right product features and setting up the right technology stack so Marketing can work with flexibility and without dependency. Sales and customer service to help Marketing understand what the customers and markets are expecting of their products. The beauty of product marketing is that the combination of these teams working together make a great product positioning, teams working together informing each other with daily, weekly and monthly learnings to continuous improving positioning, engagement, leads and sales.
It doesn´t matter what your product or business model is, you need Product Marketing
We believe Product Marketing is key to each company that it is trying to sell a product or a service. It doesn´t matter if you are a SaaS B2B or B2C, E-commerce or other, a good Product Marketing strategy will help you position well your products in front of potential new clients and leads. Without Product Marketing, your sales or product growth will be much more limited.
For B2B SaaS organizations, your sales team will be very happy to have a strong product marketing because it will help them to generate more leads and close more deals.
For B2C SaaS organizations, your product marketing is vital to stand out against competitors and position well your products online.
For E-commerces, your product marketing team will help to keep evolving your products offering so you can continue growing and improving your buyer persona experience.
We keep working on improving our process, methodology and tools to help our clients create better product marketing strategies. Any advice, comments are welcome, we conceive product marketing and products as a continue iteration where we can improve results everyday.
