It’s no surprise how important marketing is to a company’s brand and business. And with the rise of SaaS businesses, B2B product marketing as a niche has evolved multifold, so much so that it isn’t a niche anymore. Product marketers are everywhere, and rightly so. They are responsible for understanding the market, creating messaging and positioning strategies and leading go-to-market plans. They are the bridge between product management, brand/corporate marketing, and sales, ensuring that products meet customer needs and are effectively marketed to the right target audience.
What does the Product Marketing Role Mean?
Firstly, product marketing is not marketing. Traditional marketing focuses on broad promotional and advertising activities. Product marketing is more specialised, it concentrates on individual products, different channels, various content types and tools and involves a lot of internal enablement programs. Product marketing is a true ‘generalist’ role that requires professionals to be masters of many arts, as you will learn from this blog.
What do Product Marketers do?
Let's break down the key responsibilities of product marketers into the following categories:
1. Market Research and Analysis
One of the fundamentals. Product marketers should be deeply aware of the market in which they operate. What are the customer needs, what is the market growth, which direction is technology in that market headed, what are the challenges, etc. All this information can be found through surveys, research reports, review platforms, community forums, competitive analysis and research tools. This thorough research helps identify market trends, customer pain points, and opportunities that can shape the product roadmap.
Market segmentation: Usually, this is done based on demographics, user role in the organisation and their respective pain points, but there could be many other factors like size of the organisation, revenue of the organisation, etc. This allows for targeted messaging and product Positioning.
Customer Personas: This is one of the most important parts of product marketing. Knowing exactly who your ideal customer or buyer is. Create detailed personas that help marketing themes and messaging. Personas could be a user, an influencer or a buyer within the organisation. Who are you talking to? Your content copies should answer that question along with questions like what their problems are and the ideal value proposition for them.
For example, For a project management tool, a product marketer could be a user whose pain point is not being able to track tasks properly. A product marketing manager or any other manager could be an influencer (influences the buying decision) whose pain point is not having visibility into team members' work status. In this case, a buyer could be the Director of Marketing or Product Management or the VP of Marketing or Product with a pain point of being unable to generate reports and track company-wide goals.
2. Product Positioning and Messaging
Product Positioning is the process of defining how your product fits into the market and what is the customer perception about it. Product Marketers are often tasked with creating unique value propositions (USP) that show how their products are different (and better) from the competitors. Understanding the market, target audience and individual personas is essential before considering product or brand positioning and messaging.
Value Proposition: The core reason why someone should choose your product. Highlights the product's benefits and relates to the customer's pain points.
Alignment with the larger brand: Product marketers need to ensure that the Product Messaging aligns with the organisation’s overall identity, style and values.
Differentiation:
Identifying how your product is different or better than the competition. What is unique to your product should be reflected in your messaging. Showing how you are better than your competitors makes for compelling messaging.
3. Create Content
You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘content is king’. In the product marketing world, that is the absolute truth. After all, it is your content that the potential customer is going to interact with before deciding to talk to your sales team directly. The key to delivering useful content that customers love is to make sure your content is relatable and authentic and focused on delivering information and not selling. Here are some of the content types product marketers work on -
Product Descriptions and Messaging
Sales Enablement Content like pitch deck, battle cards, sales plays, etc.
Product Information Sheets or Data Sheets
Website Content like webpages, blogs, articles, videos, case studies, etc.
Email Content for Campaigns and Lead Nurturing
Online Ads and Landing Pages - Text Ads, Banner Ads, etc.
Social Media Content
Lead Generation Content like Webinars, Ebooks, Whitepapers, etc.
Support Content like Knowledge Base, FAQs
Many, many ad hoc content requests
4. Product Launch and Go-to-Market Strategy
If you’ve ever been in a product marketing interview, one of the most important questions you’d have come across is surrounding Go-to-market strategies (GTM). That is because Product marketers play a key role in planning and executing product launches. There is a lot of working with cross-functional teams like Product Management, Sales and Demand Generation to ensure a coordinated effort.
Cross-Functional Collaboration: Product marketers collaborate with product management, sales, demand generation, engineering, and customer support to ensure a successful launch.
Go-to-Market Strategy: This involves creating a comprehensive plan for introducing the product to the market, including pricing, distribution, and promotional activities.
Product Launch Activities: Product marketers organize launch events, create marketing campaigns, and coordinate with sales teams to drive awareness and adoption.
5. Sales Enablement and Training
Another important feather in the product marketer’s hat. Equip sales teams with all the necessary resources they will need to sell the product effectively.
Sales Collateral: This includes sales presentations, product brochures, playbooks, battle cards, and other materials that help sales teams communicate the product's value to customers.
Training and Education: Product marketers provide training sessions, also called sales enablement sessions and create resources to ensure sales teams are well-informed about the product's features and benefits.
Competitive Analysis: Sales team often face questions from prospects about competitors. Equip your sales teams with competitive material that they can use to address such scenarios.
6. Product Evangelism
Marketing is the voice of the product. And product marketers are the speakers. Product marketers are often required to function as product evangelists who play a vital role in building awareness, generating excitement, and fostering a community around a product. This involves travelling to seminars, conferences, and tradeshows, speaking at events, and meeting customers to collect their stories and feedback. Speaking at events provides an opportunity to reach a broader audience and establish credibility within the industry.
This is another reason why product marketers should be great researchers and presenters with good interpersonal skills.
These events can also be used for gathering customer feedback that can provide valuable insights to product development teams, and success stories which can be published and promoted as case-studies.
7. Customer Education
Marketing is mostly about ‘helping’ users and less about ‘selling’. That is a by-product of the former. This is why product marketers also focus on creating informational and educational content for customers to enhance the customer experience.
Customer-Facing Content: Product marketers create user guides, tutorials, and FAQs to help customers understand and use the product effectively.
Customer Feedback: They gather customer feedback to identify areas for improvement and ensure ongoing customer satisfaction. This also helps collect valuable testimonials, reviews, and case studies.
8. What skills do Product Marketers need?
Product marketers require a diverse set of skills to excel in their roles. However, as we said before, they are generalists. Their capability lies in not only drafting creative content copies but also mastering several useful tools.
Strong proficiency in language: As product marketers, the primary responsibility is to create grammatically correct content that is concise and clear.
Communication and Collaboration: Strong communication skills are essential as product marketers work with various teams and stakeholders. They must be able to convey complex information clearly and concisely.
Strong Presentation Skills: Product marketers are often involved with webinars, and online and physical events like tradeshows, seminars and conferences. Presentation and public speaking skills, therefore, are essential.
Analytical and Strategic Thinking: Product marketers must analyse data and decide strategically about product positioning and go-to-market strategies. This analysis also applies to campaigns where metrics can be analysed to draw useful insights and optimise future campaigns.
Creativity and Problem-Solving: Creativity is crucial for developing engaging marketing campaigns, while problem-solving skills help address market challenges.
Project Management and Organisational Skills: Product marketers manage complex projects and coordinate with multiple teams, requiring strong organisational skills.
9. The Marketer’s Toolkit
Product marketers rely on various tools and technologies to perform their roles effectively. Here are the most common tools that product marketers rely heavily on:
Content Writing tools like MS Word, Google Docs, Zoho Docs, etc., where all the content is created.
Project Management tools like Asana or Trello, where all the tasks, goals and progress are captured, and cross-team collaboration occurs
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools like Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, etc. that help track customer interactions and manage relationships
Marketing Automation Platforms like Mailchimp, Marketo, Hubspot, etc. that help automate marketing campaigns, allowing for more efficient outreach and engagement
Analytics Tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Tableau, etc., to track customer behaviour, measure marketing effectiveness, and make data-driven decisions.
SEO tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, etc., to get insights to improve organic performance
Product marketers sometimes also rely on tools like Canva, Photoshop and Camtasia. Remember, as product marketers, the more tools you know, the more you can achieve in terms of speed and quality.
10. Career Paths in Product Marketing
Product marketing as a career path is a great choice for people who lack the technical know-how to build software but are quick to understand the technical concepts of software products. With a little creativity, technical concepts can be simplified into easily understandable descriptions. That’s the essence of what product marketers do in their jobs.
If you are just starting out and want to explore product marketing as a career, look for roles that say - content writer, product marketing associate, product marketing specialist, etc. Entry-level roles usually involve market research, content writing and support tasks.
As you progress in your role, you become well-experienced in leading product launches, engaging in customer conversations, and planning and executing product marketing campaigns.
Skills like SEO, SEM, Public Speaking, Data Analysis, etc. make product marketers more valuable, thereby increasing career prospects.
Product Marketing is a blend of creativity, analytical thinking and collaboration. Product marketers play a crucial role in translating complex engineering language to content copies that customers understand and can relate to. Ensuring that products meet customer needs and are effectively marketed to drive business outcomes is a never-ending challenge product marketers tirelessly work on. From content writing, market research, product positioning, GTM strategy, sales enablement, customer education, and product evangelism to campaign analysis, product marketing jobs involve many things. If what you read in this blog excites you, then product marketing is definitely for you!
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