Do Skills Matter More Than College Degree? Our Product Marketing Lead, Ervina Lutfi, Said It Does
Nowadays, marketing roles aren’t as simple as it used to be, especially in startups. While it used to be all about matching the right people with the right product at the right price, it has gotten a little bit more complicated. We talked to Ervina Lutfi, a Product Marketing Lead at Mekari about her role: the challenges, the rewards, and what it’s like to work in Indonesia’s leading Software-as-a-Service company.
According to Hubspot, product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market. Product Marketing aims to drive the demand and usage of the product. Roles in Product Marketing is a little different depending on the startup you are working for, but generally, they are responsible for the product’s positioning, messaging, launching of the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand, or as Ervina puts it:
“Product Marketing people has to make sure that the product can be accepted and sold to the market —if product managers are mini CEOs, then we’re more like mini CMOs [Chief Marketing Officers]”
Career Journey
After graduating with a degree in psychology, a lot of people doubted Ervina when she decided to pursue a career in digital marketing. Some of her peers thought she changed the course of her career because she wasn’t that good in her studies.
“I could’ve been a good psychologist, despite what some of my past colleagues suggested. I’ve gotten my paper published in several publications, like Anima (Social Psychology Journal.) The truth is, I’m lucky enough to have discovered digital marketing, something I’m both good at AND enjoy doing, before I commit to psychology as a career path.”
Ervina told us her interest in digital marketing started way back when she was in high school, as social media was a big part of her life. Back then, Indonesian Twitter was a friendly place, not as “rough” as today.
During her college years, she found that Jogja’s community in her college surroundings (both real life and online) felt like Twitter in the old days: warm, welcoming, and insightful, as newbies in a community can not only learn a new skill, they can also make new friends there. Ervina told us that even the local media has student programs for those who want to learn more about working in media.
Jogja’s warmth in both the online and offline community motivated Ervina to start volunteering in events as a digital marketer. Her first volunteer experience was for one of Indonesia’s biggest art events. There, she got exposed for the first time to digital marketing activities like media relations, writing news reports, and creating promotional content for a social media account. Fun fact: She’s still actively volunteering for one of the organizations from her college days which aims to make learning about tech businesses more accessible for students — this goes to show that when you take volunteering seriously, it could be a significant part of your career journey.
Her first professional role in digital marketing was for a local Marketing Technology startup. Aside from content writing and PR activities, she also learned the ropes to creating and executing strategic plans. While challenging, she was lucky enough to get mentored by an E-Commerce veteran which she learned a lot from.
While Ervina got her first official Product Marketing role in Mekari, she amassed product marketing skills throughout her various experiences in past digital marketing roles.
Life at Mekari
Current Projects
Currently, Ervina is busy coming up with new strategies (and running current ones) with our Talenta team. Her current responsibility, as her job title suggests, is like a mini CMO. She comes up with the positioning and key message of the product while making sure the various product marketing functions, namely: demand generation, activation specialists, SEO, product marketers, and content writers, collaborate productively.
She told us that times of peace and calm are seldom met when you are working as a Product Marketing Lead in a fast-growing startup. However, continuously adapting and learning is what makes the job fulfilling for her. Right now, Ervina aims to create a more established [inbound] marketing process for Talenta to maximize their growth.
Challenges
Similar to a lot of B2B startups, product marketers can’t just “sell” a product. Startups have to educate the market on what the product is and why the product is a solution before selling them. This requires staying updated on industry trends and a lot of creativity.
Why Product Marketing?
According to Ervina, the most rewarding part of the job is seeing your strategy, which you worked so hard on with your team, is successful. To B2B product marketers, this is reflected in the clients’ reactions: they will tell you that your product helped solve their problems. Sometimes, they also recommend others to use your products.
In our conversations, Ervina made it clear that she talked a lot about her experiences as a product marketer in a B2B startup. It is because if you’ve worked in a B2C startup, chances are your product marketing strategies don’t translate well in B2B. In B2C, product marketers have to convince a large and diverse market why your product is good. To sell your product to a business entity in B2B startups, you have to convince a company why your product is worth buying: this means you have to communicate to people at different levels of leadership while convincing them that your product is the best solution.
If you’re a fresh graduate or an aspiring product marketer, Ervina told us that now is the time to pursue Product Marketing as a career as the demand is steadily rising. However, you have to start reading up and get the necessary skills as the most sought-after Product Marketers are T-shaped people.
“In any role you want to pursue, think of yourself as a glass of mineral water: you go with the flow, and can be flavored with anything from the spicy and analytical data engineers, to the tangy creativity of digital marketers.”
If you want to work alongside people like Ervina in our Marketing & Creatives team, you can apply by clicking here
