What is Product Marketing?
In this article, you’ll learn what the definition and core responsibilities of product marketing are, when should you hire product marketers, what are the biggest risks to look out for when starting out, and what the talent market looks like.
Table of contents:
Definition
Product marketing can be defined simply as bringing products to market and keeping them there. However, the reality is much more complex. Actual tasks and responsibilities of product marketers vary a lot between companies and even members of a product marketing team.
Customer understanding and communication skills are at the center of product marketing. Successful product marketing includes elements of sales, product, customer success and marketing. A person working in this role must work closely with all these functions and teams. In addition to marketing, people who are successful in these roles typically have experience in at least one of the other areas as well.
What Do Product Marketers Do?
Product marketing typically belongs to the marketing or product organization. So it's clearly a hybrid role, but what are the responsibilities and tasks in practice?
Typical product marketing areas of responsibility include for example the following:
Clarifying user and buyer personas and ideal customer profiles.
Go-to-market: launching a new product or service, or launching new updates and features for existing products.
Performing customer research and interviews.
Developing unique selling propositions for your product.
Sales support & enablement: training sales teams on articulating the benefits of your product and developing materials such as one pagers, case studies and sales decks.
Product communications both inside and outside the company.
Researching competitors and the market in order to position the product against the competition.
As you can see, it is an extensive list. There is a lot of variance from company to company though, and the list is definitely not exhaustive. Some of these areas might sit under a different team at some companies.
When Does a Company Need a Product Marketing Function?
As a rule of thumb, I recommend you start building product marketing when your company has one or more Product Managers. A Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager typically form a dynamic duo, which allows both to focus on their key tasks and build on each other’s work. For example, the product teams at Meta (Facebook) are usually structured like this.
Pictured: Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager ready to bring a killer product to market.
Product marketing can be particularly useful in the following situations.
Complex Products
Does your product contain a wide range of feature and functions? Is it being used by customers in many different industries, in different ways? Do you have several product managers, each responsible for different areas of the product? If you answered yes to all or some of these questions, product marketing can be extremely beneficial for you.
Practical examples: marketing and CRM software with very wide functionality (Marketo, Salesforce, Hubspot), Google Workspace, Adobe Creative Cloud.
Product marketing helps you develop how you communicate towards prospects and current customers – the most effective approach is usually not identical. It can also help you bundle the product's features into understandable packages instead of just listing features.
It can also help you productize services and features into standardized packages that can be sold more easily to customers.
Long Sales Cycles
A long sales cycle is very common with complex and/or expensive products. Buyers of these products want a lot of different kinds of information at different stages of the purchase process. For example, details about practical functionality and information about how your product stands out from competitors are typically required closer to the purchase decision.
Product marketing can effectively produce information required for these different stages. This helps your company speed up the purchase process, and win business from your competitors.
Large Sales Teams
When the sales team is small, it is easy to keep the the value proposition unified simply because it is easy to train and give sales materials to a few salespeople. But when the sales team grows, this is no longer the case.
You can typically spot that you’ve reached this stage when your salespeople start having issues such as:
Not finding the most up-to-date sales materials or salespeople starting to customize them on their own.
Not knowing what the key message should be for different product or functionalities.
Not having supporting assets prospects in their target industry require, etc.
Once you reach this stage, the product marketing function can be of enormous help. Product marketing can, for example, ensure that salespeople have the right materials for each sales situation and that they have an internal contact to ask clarifying questions from or request additional resources, and so on.
Industries With Heavy Competition
When the industry is highly competitive, it is more challenging for a product to stand out from the crowd. In such a situation, product marketing can be extremely valuable.
A product marketing manager can keep an eye on what kind of messages your competitors are using, what product features they emphasize, what customers value most, and so on. This helps you understand competing products better, and to communicate your own value proposition more clearly and distinctively.
What Are the Main Risks When Starting Product Marketing?
Task Overload
Since product marketing is a hybrid function, the biggest risk is that it becomes a catch-all for marketing activities that are not explicitly owned by anyone else in the organization. This causes far too many tasks to be pushed to the product marketing team compared to the number of team members and resources at their disposal. This can quickly result in an overload of work, which will destroy the team’s productivity and motivation.
For example, if there are already several people in the company's marketing team, it does not make sense to assign tasks previously owned by several marketers to one product marketing manager, even if those tasks would fall under the product marketing function by definition.
When the first product marketing person is hired, they cannot handle all of the tasks belonging to product marketing by definition – a larger team is required for that. You need to be on the lookout for this when making the first product marketing hire.
It is all too common – especially if you are late in hiring the first product marketer – that activities which have been on the back burner for a long time are simply dumped to product marketing once the first hire is made.
That's why it's important to select explicit focus areas for product marketing when starting out, and gradually expand the responsibilities as the team grows in numbers and experience.
Pictured: A product marketer who doesn’t own their pipeline.
Product Marketing MUST Own Their Pipeline
Another key risk is related to decision-making power. Product marketing enables many other teams to do their work better, but those teams cannot be in a position where one (or in the worst case, several) of them can decide what product marketing focuses on. Product marketing MUST own their own pipeline. If they do not, you will end up in a situation where asks from different teams pile up on product marketing’s todo list and prioritization becomes impossible.
The best way is to create a clear process by which other teams can request things from product marketing, but it is the job of product marketing to decide which things are worked on and when.
Responsibilities of Product Marketing vs. Other Marketing Functions
If product marketing is not part of the marketing organization, it is extremely important that the responsibilities of each are clearly defined and that the teams actively communicate. This helps avoid overlaps and misalignment in essential things like unique value propositions.
To avoid these issues, when product marketing is started, they should sit down with the other marketing teams or team leads, and explicitly agree on:
Who is responsible for what
How communication between teams should work
With what kind of cadence should the teams have syncs (hint: this should be very frequent especially early on).
How to Measure the Results of Product Marketing
There are several ways to measure the success of product marketing. I will discuss these in more detail in upcoming post but here are a few categories you can get started with.
Product And Feature Adoption
Product marketing should increase the overall usage of your product and its most valuable features. The actual metrics that make most sense differ depending on what your product is.
For software, metrics that can used to measure success can include, for example, average time spent per user, number of key actions completed, the amount of users per account, or the usage of specific key features.
Not every feature should have an adoption goal though. They are best reserved for the most critical features you have determined to bring most value, increase customer stickiness, or new major capabilities you are launching.
Sales And Sales Team Feedback
Did the new product launch result in meaningful sales? Did updated sales materials help your sales team close more business? Are salespeople giving positive feedback about the assets they have at their disposal? Do they say they have resulted in more conversations with qualified leads? All of these can be used to measure success of product marketing efforts.
Should product marketing have direct, ongoing sales targets though? Depending on your product, it might not make sense, but they can be very useful when you are launching new products. With software, product adoption targets can often make more sense.
Output Targets
Once you’ve identified the most useful assets that help in closing more business (typically case studies for example), it might be a good idea to set some numerical targets for producing more of them on a per-quarter basis. This helps your team to actively push for case studies for example.
However, keep in mind that these goals can be dangerous if you don’t look at the quality of output on some level as well. The number of case studies won’t matter much for example if prospects don’t find them interesting or the sales team does not leverage them.
“Where are all those product marketers hiding?”
There Is an Acute Shortage of Product Marketers
The need for product marketing experts has grown enormously in the last 5-10 years, especially due to the strong growth in the number of SaaS companies. A quick LinkedIn search reveals that there are numerous product marketing roles open across the Nordics all the time.
However, Product marketing is a relatively new field of marketing, at least in the Nordics (and perhaps all of Europe). This is even more apparent in industries such as software. Because the field is relatively new, there is also a dire shortage of talent.
Based on my experiences from the Finnish market, although tasks belonging to product marketing have been done in companies for a long time, they haven’t typically been centralized under this function.
Companies Need to Become More Proactive In Hiring Product Marketers
At least in Finland, companies typically wake up too late to the need for product marketing. Based on what I’ve seen in and heard from colleagues in the US and Europe, it seems this issue is fairly universal, especially at smaller tech companies with rapid growth.
When you realize your company needs to hire product marketers. Image source: memegenerator.net
The typical reason this happens is something like this:
Initially, the responsibilities that fall under product marketing are nobody’s main job. For example, product marketing tasks are often assigned to product managers, more general marketers, customer success, etc.
People in these roles have other, more critical responsibility areas, which causes them to spend very little time on product marketing activities.
Because of this, insufficient attention is paid to product marketing activities, leading to insufficient time and resource investments.
When the company grows past a certain point or the product reaches a certain level of maturity, people suddenly realize that product marketing activities need more attention.
This causes the company to try to hire for product marketer as fast as possible. However, due to a shortage of skilled, available talent this doesn’t always work out.
If you wake up too late like this and try to start building the product marketing function, it can be very hard to succeed. Finding a person fast is very difficult and training talent in-house can be slow. Therefore it is highly recommended that you use the checklist discussed above and start looking for a product marketer once you check at least one of the boxes.
How to Solve The Challenge
When you see a need for product marketing – or are simply wondering if it might be worth it to invest more in this area, there are a couple of key actions you can take.
Enlist a Product Marketing Consultant
Using a consultant can be very helpful because it allows you to get started fast, get the basic things right, and build a foundation.
This is the perfect solution if you need more time for recruitment or training a person in-house, or if you are at an early stage where you don’t yet need a full time employee.
A consultant is also extremely useful for training an in-house team if you are unsure of how to get started or if you already have in-house product marketers but need help with additional projects the team does not have time for at the moment.
Pre-emptively Train or Hire a Product Marketer
While this approach can be more expensive in the short term, it might be a good idea to start hiring for this role before you see an acute need for it. This lets the person grow familiar with the product and teams they need to be collaborating with, ensuring they are fully up to speed when the acute needs start emerging.
Training someone in-house can also be a very good strategy, especially if you have complex products. If you have sales or customer success reps, marketers, or product managers that have excellent communication skills and understanding of your product, branching out to product marketing could be an attractive career path for them.
Start mapping potential in-house hires early on. This will give them time to grow their functional product marketing skills, while benefiting from a strong understanding of your product from the start.
Combine Strategies
Often, the best strategy is to do all of the above. You can get the basics right fast with a consultant, and then start to hire a team in-house when the time is right.
When building an in-house team, the best results often come from having a mix of both external and internal hires. This way, your team can benefit from external hires with previous product marketing experience as well as in-house talent with strong understanding of the product and customer needs, both of which would take more time to build separately.
In Conclusion
Good product marketing is hugely beneficial for a company. It clarifies product communication, improves sales results, speeds up the sales cycle, and helps the company stand out from its competitors.
However, when you are just starting out, there are a few things to look out for. You need to make sure the product marketing team owns its pipeline, has clearly defined responsibilities, and has a clear and open relationship with other marketing functions.
While immensely beneficial, it is not easy to hire talent in this field. Often the best approach is starting early, leveraging external help, and hiring both externally and in-house.
If your company needs help starting or expanding product marketing, or you are considering training talent internally, get in touch. I’ll help you build a strong foundation and set the function up for success.
