Defining Product Marketing

If Product Management is one side of the product coin, Product Marketing is the other. Where Product Management focuses on what to build and why, Product Marketing focuses on what to say about the product, to whom, and how. In early stage companies in particular, product marketing is often not a function at all, but rather a role folded into Product Management. But once a certain level of maturity has been reached, it makes sense to carve this important role out to a dedicated team in the marketing organization.

Within the Marketing team the work Product Marketing does in many ways creates the raw materials used by the rest of the Marketing organization. I think of that work as being broken into four major categories — Opportunity, Go-to-Market, Messaging, and Launch. Yes, this is oversimplified and there are other ways to slice-and-dice the work, but for me this structure provides a reasonable sense of what the Product Marketers own. Let’s take a look at these categories:

Opportunity

I cover this topic in my post defining Product Management, and in a real sense they are equally responsible for being a voice of the market and a voice of the customer, and should coordinate and collaborate on market research. Both teams require a deep understanding of the customer to do their jobs well. They need a solid understanding of the problems target customers face, and the challenges target users deal with in working through those challenges. They need to know competitors and alternatives, and understand the buzz around them, whether it’s coming from analysts, customers, or the vendors themselves.

Beyond just understanding the customer and their needs, Product Marketing often has responsibility for market segmentation work, which can include many different elements, including:

• Understanding how needs vary across the overall market

• Identifying meaningful, useful ways of segmenting customers into discrete target markets, which might include different needs, different industry segments, different technology standards, different use cases or user groups, and more

• Determining the size of different markets and segments

• Determining product/market fit for each segment

• Making recommendations as to which markets and segments to pursue

It’s difficult to get to all of this detail with only second-hand knowledge, and a product marketer can’t depend solely on talking with Sales, Support, or Implementation people to get the insights they need (though a PMM should definitely have those conversations!) Rather, it’s incumbent on Product Marketing staff to spend time with customers listening to their stories. This can be done in several contexts — win/loss calls, case study development, or just outreach to customers to capture anecdotes for the benefit of the marketing and selling teams.

I’ll close on this topic by saying it’s hard to overstate the importance of being close to the customer as a product marketer. Just as with product managers, if these folks have limited market expertise their value to the organization will be fundamentally constrained.

Go-to-Market

I spent the entirety of my previous post on this subject, and as I said then, Go-to-Market (GTM) planning for the business overall is executive-level work that should have happened at the startup stage. At the product level, it’s work that a senior Product Management or Product Marketing resource can take point on with executive approval (CMO, but others likely as well), and it should be reviewed and updated with each major release of the product.

I generally want a GTM strategy to answer the following questions:

• What are we trying to achieve?

• What is our target market?

• What is our solution, and why should anyone care?

• What channels will we use to offer our solution to customers?

• What’s our offer?

• How will we market our solution?

GTM work is fun and exciting, because it’s difficult to be closer to the core of a business than when building the GTM strategy. The GTM strategy all about monetizing a product, and monetizing a product is most organizations’ reason for being.

Messaging

Assuming the Product Managers have done their jobs well, any given product should be well aligned with the needs of the customers, and at least hypothetically well-positioned to generate revenue. From there it’s up to Product Marketing to figure out how to tell the market the story of the value they could experience if only they were to buy the product. Without that story, the rest of the commercial team will struggle to connect with customers and their pains, and the product will struggle to achieve its potential in the market.

Creating this story often begins with a message map that identifies key elements for each market segment being targeted, including who they are, what they might struggle with, and why those challenges are important to solve. With the pains established, the map moves on to cover the ways in which the product addresses those problems, how it’s different from competitors, and the value customers can expect if they were to buy it. I’ve used a number of different approach to documenting this (and more) over the years, but in each case the ultimate goal is to pull these together into a reference work that can be used across the organization and kept up to date as the market, product, and customer all evolve.

With the elements of this story written down it becomes relatively easy for content writers, demand generation teams, and the Product Marketing team itself to create web copy, webinar content, data sheets, Ebooks, campaign copy, presentations, landing pages and other important marketing deliverables. And even more importantly, it’s relatively easy to ensure these deliverables are created on-message regardless of who does the writing.

Launch

Launches are important milestones for products, and if there’s a separate Product Marketing team, they probably own the launches with support from Product Management. Launch processes represent an opportunity to achieve a few things. Cross-functionally, a launch represents an opportunity to get everyone aligned and ready to support a new product before it goes out the door. With existing customers, a launch represents an opportunity to update them about what’s new, and ensure they are well-positioned to take advantage of the new capabilities about to be made available to them. And for the market more broadly, a launch is an opportunity to generate some buzz and start conversations that should ultimately lead to new business coming in the door.

Launches require many different skill sets, and usually depend on support and ownership from people around the organization. One of the most important launch skills is project management — a role typically played by the Product Manager or Product Marketing Manager — because someone needs to ensure dependencies, deliverables, due dates, and ownership are well understood and agreed to, and then drive the cross-functional team to adhere to their commitments.

Within a launch project, I normally break work into several categories, including identifying the goals you want to achieve with the launch, finalizing business decisions (like licensing, pricing and packaging), completing messaging work, creating content, planning announcements/communications, creating and deploying website changes, planning and executing marketing programs, and preparing and delivering sales enablement to all of the different teams (sales, pre-sales, partners, channels), including tools creation and updates. Each of these categories will likely have many individual deliverables or milestones, and some types of products will require other categories and tasks as well.

It’s not incumbent on the Product Marketing team to do all of this work themselves, but they are generally the creator of the vision for the launch, and they typically drive the creation and execution of the overall plan, and own or influence many of the key deliverables. Launch time is go time for product marketers, for sure.

The heavy overlap with Product Management means that both roles can vary substantially from company to company, and even from team to team. And note that there are several companies whose sole purpose is to identify best practices for both functions, suggest division of responsibilities, and provide organizational training to help implement effective teams and processes. That’s not my purpose, here — rather to offer a sense for how to think about the roles.

That’s all for now. As always, thanks for reading.

John