What is Product Marketing?

Product marketing is one of the most ambiguous and vaguely understood roles within an organization. The scope can be fluid and often varies from one company to the next. It's also one of the most critical roles you can hire.

Many startup founders struggle to achieve product-market fit because they fail to segment their market effectively, tell their story in a way that makes prospects "get it", or create the category in which their product plays. Many marketing leaders, accountable for metrics such as MQLs and sales pipeline, underinvest in product marketing early on because it isn't the most direct line to generating or measuring demand.

Product marketers aren't the ones building or shipping products. We aren't the ones executing demand creation programs or directly generating revenue. But product marketing is the lifeblood behind the success of most great products and categories.

I've talked to startup CEOs and CMOs who've said if they could do it over again, they'd make product marketing their first marketing hire. Let's demystify the role in order to understand why.

I’ll admit that my background is as a B2B product marketer, working at companies that sell things to other companies. But while the perspectives you'll see on this blog have a very clear B2B bias, I do think product marketing in the B2C world shares some similarities.

Alright, let's get into it.

Product marketing sits at the intersection between your product team, your sales team, and the rest of marketing. A good product marketer is an expert on your market and products, a voice of the customer within your organization, and a general manager responsible for the success of their product in market.

OK, but what actually is product marketing? A lot of definitions have been put forth, including some particularly fuzzy ones that turn up in Google searches. It's ironic that, as product marketers, we spend so much of our time figuring out how to communicate what our companies do in a clear and compelling way, and yet, we often struggle to do just that when asked to describe what we do.

Here's how I define product marketing:

Product marketing is the practice of bringing products to market. This includes positioning and messaging your company and products to clearly describe the problems you solve and value you provide, enabling sales teams to confidently position your products, and driving go-to-market strategy to build reputation, demand and customer adoption for your products.

Product marketers primarily spend their time on three things:

Positioning and messaging - Communicating why your company exists, the market problems you solve, the value you provide and your differentiation in a way that drives clarity (i.e. "ah, I get it") and intent (i.e. "oh wow, I need that").
Sales enablement - Empowering your sales team with the plays, sales messaging, training and assets they need in order to be confident engaging the right prospects and positioning and selling your products.
Go-to-market strategy and execution - Leading your company's understanding of where you play in the market, who you target, and how you'll win. This encompasses everything from market and competitive analysis, to segmentation, positioning and messaging, pricing and packaging, and guiding and informing reputation and awareness, demand creation, and customer adoption activities. More tactically, PMMs roll up their sleeves to drive product launches, help create marketing content, lead analyst benchmark report submissions as well as inquiries and briefings, inform messaging and demos for sponsored events, speak at events

What Does a Product Marketer Do?

Product marketing doesn't always look the same from one company to the next. At times in my career, I've had a hand in pricing and product packaging. At other times I haven't. At times, I've done win/loss analysis, and at other times, product managers have taken that on. At larger companies, I've had a content marketing team to rely on to write eBooks and white papers. In early-stage startups, I've done it myself. The responsibilities of a PMM also vary based on whether your company prioritizes product-led growth or sales-led growth (or a blend of the two).

The Pragmatic Marketing Framework is a useful, though kinda academic, barometer to ensure you're generally focused on the right set of things, as well as clarify the scope of a product manager vs. a product marketer.

Here is my attempt at a canonical list of the main things (both strategic and tactical) product marketers do. When I've led teams, these are the things I ask my team to drive.

Positioning & Messaging:

Target Audience Definition (Ideal Customer Profile + Personas) - the characteristics of companies and teams that make a good fit for your products + the buyer personas and user personas who should care.
Market Analysis - how you define the market, including market problems, customer needs, market sizing, and segmentation.
Competitive Analysis - identify competitors and alternatives in the market and assess their positioning as well as their strengths and weaknesses.
Positioning - why you exist as as a company and how you want to be perceived in the market. Positioning is what you say internally to align on your differentiated role in the market, your relevance to your customers, and the perceptions you want to set.
Messaging - how you communicate your positioning externally to the market, including prospects, customers, partners, analysts, press, and investors.

Sales Enablement:

Sales Engagement Strategy - implementing sales methodologies to align your sales process with the way customers buy, and move prospects through the buying journey effectively and efficiently.
Sales Plays - defining your targeted ICP segments and prescriptive sales messaging and enablement playbooks for each.
Sales Playbooks - prescriptive guidance and assets to help teams navigate opportunities and efficiently guide prospects through the buying process.
Sales Trainings - sessions you lead to educate your sales team on customer needs, personas, discovery and prospecting, sales messaging, competitive landscape and positioning, objection handling, product launches, etc.
Sales Decks - presentations your sales team uses to conduct effective discovery, communicate your company narrative and POV, and support tech validation. Sales decks should always be accompanied by a fully-baked suggested talk track which lays out your sales messaging, in order to build your sales team's confidence and decrease the likelihood of messaging off-roading.
Sales Tools - the assets your sales team needs to find the right customers, build pipeline, and win deals, including market primers, discovery guides, persona guides, cheat sheets, solution briefs, economic value calculators, eLearnings, videos, and prospecting tools.
Demo Scripts - guidance to your sales engineers on what to show and what to say when demonstrating your product to prospects. Depending on your company size and to whom you sell, this deliverable may be owned by technical marketing engineers on your team.
Customer Meetings & Sales Support - a good product marketer is your sales team's secret weapon. At times, I've spent as much as 20% of my time as a product marketer on the road participating in customer meetings, sales calls, and speaking at workshops and regional field events. Spending time in the field is also THE BEST WAY to conduct primary research on the market, customer needs, and to test and validate messaging.

Go-To-Market Strategy & Execution:

Pricing & Packaging - how you price your product to balance market adoption and profit margin, and how you deliver your product and its capabilities to make it easy for customers to buy and use it.
Plan and Drive Product Launches - how you take new products to market, including launch strategy, internal readiness, enablement, AR/PR, blog posts, website updates, customer and partner communications, supporting content, events, demand generation activities, and customer adoption efforts.
Analyst Relations - serve as a SME spokesperson on analyst inquiries and briefings, and lead benchmark vendor comparison report submissions to ensure favorable placements in Gartner Magic Quadrants, Forrester Waves, GigaOm Radars, etc.
Speak at Events - evangelize your company and products at industry and corporate events where your target audience goes to learn.
Influence Content Strategy - help create and ensure that thought leadership content such as eBooks, white papers, blog posts, videos, etc., reinforce your messaging.
Influence Demand Generation Programs - help ensure that demand generation campaigns and programs align to your target audience and reinforce your messaging.
Influence Customer Adoption Activities - build content, communications and drive product-led growth activities to help prospective and existing customers successfully adopt and use your products.
Influence Event Strategy - inform your company's presence, messaging and demos at sponsored industry events. If you work at a company that puts on its own corporate events or user conferences, building keynote and breakout session content is also a common PMM responsibility.
Reference Customers - know who uses your products, how they use your products, and provide guidance to customer marketing teams on who they should target for case studies and customer advocacy.

What Skills Does a Product Marketer Need?

Alright, now that we’ve covered what a product marketer does, let's talk about some of the skills that are most helpful for a product marketer to possess, with the giant caveat that this is subjective and not intended to be exhaustive.

In the spirit of thinking like a product marketer, I'd boil it down to three main competencies: communication skills, technical curiosity, and strategic thinking.

Communication Skills

Synthesize and distill complex technology, products and ideas and communicate them in a way that's both easy to understand and compelling. The key word here is clarity. A good product marketer is masterful at helping others achieve clarity - they’re able to extract takeaways and meaning from complex information, and answer the “why?” or “so what?”.
Tailor the way you communicate ideas and points of view based on your audience, knowing that prospects, customers, analysts, press, sales teams, marketing teams, product teams, and executives all care about different things and require different levels of depth.

Technical Curiosity

Be curious and hungry to learn. Because product marketers are expected to be an expert on market needs, they need to have a genuine curiosity (and ideally, a passion) for their products. While the responsibilities of a product marketer and frameworks you use are repeatable across companies and industries, the content of your job will be different. Your company's positioning and messaging will be very different from one place to the next. The content of your sales playbooks and enablement will look different. Your conversations with prospects, customers and analysts will be different. This means PMMs need to continually learn and absorb so they can get up to speed quickly.
Demonstrate empathy for customers and sales teams. As I shared above, a product marketer needs to be a voice of the customer, which means they need to understand the world in which their customers live, the problems they face, what keeps them up at night, and what the promised land looks like. PMMs need to talk like their customers talk and use words their customers use in order to be effective at tailoring messaging. All of that requires genuine empathy for customers.
Be your product’s biggest advocate externally and its biggest critic internally. This doesn’t make you disingenuous. As a product marketer, you should be able to eloquently champion your product and its value when talking with customers, partners, analysts or press, but also share critical feedback and ideas for improvement with your product managers.

Strategic Thinking

Lead via influence, not through direct reporting authority. Product marketers often lead cross-functional initiatives that span stakeholders across multiple departments. They routinely collaborate with, and must influence, sales, corporate marketing, product management, customer success, engineering and finance teams. Product marketers need to be able to communicate clearly and persuasively, and rally others around common goals and the “big picture”.
Thrive in ambiguity. The problems product marketers tackle are not always straightforward; the answers are rarely black or white. Because the role wears so many hats and tends to be more unstructured, you need to be comfortable navigating organizational dynamics, driving alignment, balancing conflicting points of view, and making hard decisions where there may be no precedent or prescribed path.
"Pattern match” different information and diverse perspectives from prospects, customers, analysts and sales teams, in order to identify common patterns and trends, and draw conclusions about how they should shape your positioning, messaging, enablement, and go-to-market strategy.

Bringing It All Together

When its charter is defined properly, product marketing is an incredibly, strategic, fun, challenging and rewarding job. I started this blog to share ideas and tips to help product marketers continue to level-up their skills, and to help executive teams ensure the role is scoped to its full potential. If you liked this article, take a look around, check out some other posts, and share your thoughts.