One of the biggest challenges in marketing today is becoming too focused on tactical, buying ads, designing emails, creating blog content, etc. We often forget that the most successful aspect of marketing is understanding what the customer wants, and how to align products with their needs. This is handled through product marketing, and it’s among one of the most important areas of marketing at any organization.
What is Product Marketing?
Product marketing is ultimately the sum of all the efforts necessary to research, message, position, promote, and support a new product so that it successfully resonates with the target audience.
Product marketing requires participating in discovery, delivery, and ultimately, a go-to-market strategy. Now that’s all fairly broad. So let me give you some examples of these specific efforts.
So specific tasks that you might encounter:
- Coordinating with the product teams to understand roadmaps and deliverables
- Conducting market research to understand customer needs and wants
- Forecasting results
- Competitive intelligence to understand the market
- Go-To-Market campaign strategies
Furthermore, being successful in product marketing means you’re constantly hedging against risk. Ideally, the work starts well before the product is developed.
You have to understand the market, what the customer really wants, and how your product will deliver. All too often, companies make the fatal mistake of handing a marketer a finished product and saying, here, go “market this”.
To be successful, you need to be armed with not only the knowledge of how product marketing works but also the confidence to put on the brakes and push the company to shift directions if you sense disaster ahead.
Product Management vs Product Marketing
Describing simply, the Product Manager’s job is to get the product to the shelf and the Product Marketing Manager’s job is to get it off the shelf. The Product Manager develops the product, the Product Marketer packages it attractively and designs campaigns to motivate consumers to purchase it.
Despite their different job roles, product managers and product marketers have a few things in common:
- They both invest tremendous effort in knowing who their customer is.
- They collaborate with teams across the entire organization and they must work together to see meaningful results.
The Product Marketing Manager typically takes on the following responsibilities:
- Researching the market and segmenting the target customers. Positioning and messaging the product and its features.
- Understanding the competitive landscape.
- Securing product and message market fit.
- Driving demand and adoption of the product.
The Product Manager’s responsibilities focused on:
- Being the voice of the customer and championing what they want internally.
- Decide what to build and organizing that process.
- Understand the technology and managing scale.
- Ship the right product and
- Prioritize what to build.
Both roles must work hand-in-hand, but it’s not always easy. Product managers are often using a different set of success metrics to determine what they’re prioritizing. They may be focused on positive user reviews, whereas product marketing might be measuring success by consumer activations or overall brand awareness. To prevent friction, clarify goals with product management. Agree to align your goals towards what the company’s major objective is. Take time to meet weekly and be transparent and thorough in your communication.
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