State of Product Marketing 2019: The Birth of A New Era
Learn the current state of affairs for a head start
This meme pretty much sums up how every product marketer feels these days: eager to be recognized and respected as a true professional by…well, almost everyone within their company, without having to explain their role and how it fits into the organizational chart.
The good news is that a new era is taking off, all thanks to the first ever documented report on the State of Product Marketing, which aims to create a better understanding of the product marketing role and its implications.
Counting 600+ respondents, with the majority coming from B2B companies, the report is also brimming with insights from product marketers at the steer of SaaS giants: Intercom, Typeform, Spotify, HubSpot, to name a few.
You can’t ask for anything fresher than this!! So at Richard King’s grace — founder of the Product Marketing Alliance (PMA) — who was generous enough to let me in on the results in advance, here’s a few thoughts and conversation starters to ponder for all of us who’re in this for the long run.
Ownership paradox
The report caught my interest with a statistic that shouldn’t shock us due to the high share of B2B and SaaS contributors:
Out of the surveyed ones, 54% work at a “product-first” company, with only 34% at a “sales-first” and 5% at a “marketing-first” one.
Notice that the “customer-first” option wasn’t considered, which breeds the following questions: Where in this scheme would the “customer-first” mantra fit? Aren’t we already customer-centric? And if yes, to what degree should we involve ourselves into the overall customer experience without trespassing the duties of our fellow UX Designers and Customer Success Managers?
But this isn’t the paradox I was teasing. Here it comes:
72.1% report to Marketing, while 20% report to Product.
So although we’re hired by companies with a product mindset, we still belong to the marketing department. The report doesn’t say why, but my guess is that product marketers are by default perceived as less techy — hence are asked to back off on product roadmap and other technical details.
What I’d like to see in the next year’s report is who’s better: a PMM with a marketing background (focused on activation and retention), or a PMM with a product background (who has eyes only for the product roadmap and revenue). Something tells me a new sort of breed with both traits will prevail — like someone with data science experience — but it’s just my hunch.
Bandwidth
Mayday, insufficient!!
32% of the PMMs are responsible for more than 5 products.
This enforces the fact that product marketers lack resources and time to focus on the more strategic side of their duties, being bogged down instead with routine tasks that are more operational in nature (take website management).
The cause can stem from the all-rounder character of the role: you might create short copy for a set of ads, edit a guest post, pitch the press, and write a video script — all in the same day. Or perhaps from owning just a small segment of each of those products, like the marketplace or affiliate program.
What I find interesting is that 26.4% PMMs are responsible for only 1 product, followed by 16.3% PMMs who’re responsible for 3 products. A weird sudden drop and surge. Is it due to the small data pool, or because the single product contains enough modules to fill a product marketer’s day? This happens to be my case, since Paymo has 12 modules whose collaterals require constant care and attention 😁
Main responsibilities are product-related
To factor in the main duties of a product marketer:
#1 product messaging and positioning, #2 managing product launches, #3 creating sales collateral, #4 customer and market research
Product messaging and positioning is generally accepted by the broad body of product marketing, no doubt. Managing product launches too, although it gets a bad connotation when it comes to last-minute launches as far as I’ve talked with other product marketers at both growing and well-established companies. Not including PMMs at the beginning of the product development process only leads to “launching machines” — to quote Jasmin Jaume, Group PMM at Intercom — rushed into pushing products on the market under a set of ludicrous targets and deadlines.
Creating sales enablement materials continues to be an expectation in the field, a finding which calls for a close relationship with the sales team. Indeed, product marketers need to drive product sales. Yet I still think this unsexy task should be outsourced to someone in a better position like the Growth or Demand Generation Managers, as not all PMMs are great at writing short copy. Market research is given, nothing to add here.
Metrics and tools
It turns out that PMMs are goal-oriented creatures with a high focus on the following KPIs:
#1 Generating revenue, #2 Increasing MQLs, #3 Retain customers, #4 Upsell customers, #5 Activate customers
A big relief that the focus is less on revenue-based metrics (like CAC and LTV) and more on activation and retention—something that I’ve talked about in a previous article — which have a higher impact on the company’s well-being.
It’s no surprise in this context that the majority reported using analytics and measurement tools (like Google Analytics) as their weapon of choice in order to convince and align the higher-ups on the same goals. Email marketing and project management software were next in line, highlighting the dependency on tools to reach new and existing audiences and improve the internal processes.
This also reflects in the fact that 58% of the PMMs reported to spend most of their marketing budget on tools and software 🤯
Influence: not great, not terrible
For someone who is supposed to be the voice-and-soul of the brand, product marketers don’t feel confident in their powers.
From a scale from 1–10, PMMs felt they had 6.5 influence over the company goals and 6.2 over the product roadmap.
Not great, not terrible, to put in Dyatlov’s words (the Chernobyl deputy supervisor). You know what’s next, right? An mini-disaster or perhaps stagnation for the businesses who’re not willing to give PMMs (or at least the senior ones) the same strategic importance that C-level executives enjoy.
Yes, I’ve exaggerated more than I should, but you can’t expect us to bring in new revenue and grow the business without the necessary authority.
Rise in the new era
I kept the best for the last, even though it was one of the very first discoveries of the report:
The industry is just in its infancy!!
A phenomenon highlighted by the high share of product marketers who have less than 3 years of experience in the field, as well as the high levels of optimism with 66% determined to further advance in this career and 17% happy with where they are. Imagine being a CEO and having 8 out 10 employees in love with what they do — wouldn’t you be reassured?
However, ot’s still unclear why this is happening. The role is a bit tricky, in the sense that it starts to make more sense once you’ve onboarded an established company with several product lines and a clear career path, leaving the ones working at startups at the stage of generalists.
So until someone figures it out, I have a question for you:
How will you put your mark in this new era?
If you’re serious about product marketing or know someone who’s just starting out on this career path:
- Clap this story 👏
- Share it with them 😊
