Why is building a product marketing function important?
Product marketing serves as the center of the wheel or air traffic controller – it ensures that the foundation is laid correctly for other Marketing functions to do their job. Product marketing is responsible for creating the messaging and positioning of a product, which is essential for sales, marketing, and product teams to be on the same page and work effectively toward their objectives. The goal is to create a feedback loop from customer support and sales into product marketing–so that all of the other functions benefit from refinements made as a result of new knowledge. If sales thinks one thing, and marketing and product think another, then you can’t be productive and meet your goals.
Product marketing is responsible for much of the messaging and content your customers see – product marketing plays a central role in the creation of content, and in forming guidelines that other functions will follow in the content they create, and in interactions with customers.
How does product marketing differ from other marketing sub-functions?
Product marketing creates the materials that other marketing sub-functions will execute on – product marketing is responsible for creating the GTM plan, which includes revenue objectives, marketing plans, sales strategies, and launch plans. They create the messaging guide, which outlines what the product is, who it is being sold to, and what pain points it addresses. They work closely with demand generation teams to create and execute campaigns that drive revenue and meet objectives, such as acquiring beta customers or generating a specific amount of revenue.
Product marketing has to interact with Sales, CS, and Product – product marketing is responsible for providing sales with the necessary materials, such as battle cards, scripts or other quick reference guides, to effectively sell the product. They bring customer input from CS into the product development process, ensuring that the product meets customer needs and expectations.
When do you need to hire your first product marketer? How do you handle product marketing before then?
Product marketing is typically your third or fourth marketing hire – as a rule of thumb, a dedicated product marketer is typically hired as the third or fourth person on a small marketing team. As your team grows, it specializes in different functional area responsibilities—demand gen, digital demand and content are usually the first areas that get covered, but dedicated product marketing comes next.
In many early-stage companies, demand gen is missing and product knowledge exists elsewhere – most organizations can jerry-rig a product marketing function from other resources across the organization. There’s typically an already existing wealth of product knowledge, but limited marketing/demand gen knowledge. This is why a demand gen hire takes precedence to start getting the message out and dollars in the door.
Even without a dedicated FTE, the product marketing functions should be covered from the get-go – even if you don’t have a dedicated product marketer initially, the functions should be covered by a combination of marketing team members and other groups such as Product and CX. Those groups have a wealth of product knowledge and can help create materials and provide insight to the Marketing team members prior to having a dedicated product marketing function.
It varies depending on the size of your company, the type of product you’re selling, and your overall marketing strategy – your Average Contract Value (ACV), the size of your company, and the complexity of your product will influence when you need a dedicated product marketer. If you have a higher ACV, and a more complex product, then you’ll need to add a product marketer sooner.
Product Marketing Responsibilities
What are the core elements of the product marketing function?
Audience and Personas – product marketing is responsible for understanding and articulating the target audience and personas, which includes knowing who you’re selling to, the market segmentation, and the ideal customer profile. This helps in creating tailored messaging that addresses the pain points of each persona.
Segmentation (and category) – product marketing plays a crucial role in identifying the different segments within your target audience and understanding the larger market category. This work allows you to position the product effectively and address the unique needs of each segment. Positioning your product in the ideal category is one part of the bigger question of where your product fits. Sometimes you’ll need to do work to position in a category and sometimes the answer is evident and it works itself out. Decide who you’re going after and what Gartner category you’re in. Some companies attempt to create a category, and that involves a lot more work.
Customer Engagement and Advocacy – product marketing works closely with customer experience (CX) and customer success (CS) teams to ensure that the infrastructure is in place to support customers and that customers can help build an external presence for the company. In your go-to-market plan, you’re going to be concerned about how you support your customers. Product marketing should collaborate with customer support and customer experience to ensure that customers are able to quickly get value out of the product. They’re always working with customers to get quotes, customer stories, and help build up the message to get it out to other prospective customers.
Positioning and Messaging – product marketing is responsible for understanding the messaging that resonates with the target audience and clearly communicates the pain points that the product or solution addresses.
Competitive Analysis – product marketing is responsible for identifying competitors in the market and understanding their strengths and weaknesses. Product marketing should be able to work with sales on how competitors compare and help in refining the product positioning and messaging. Oftentimes, this work comes out of product before you hire a product marketer.
Communications – product marketing handles both internal and external communications, including public relations (PR) and analyst relations (AR). Product marketers are often the ones who engage with analysts to discuss the product and its positioning in the market.
Launch – product marketing plays a key role in the launch of new products or features, ensuring that the messaging, positioning, and target audience are well-defined and communicated effectively.
Content – product marketing has a significant impact on the content that is created and distributed, ensuring that the messaging on the company’s website and other marketing materials is accurate and compelling.
Win/Loss Analysis – product marketing is responsible for analyzing data from wins and losses to refine messaging and marketing strategies, ensuring that the company’s approach remains effective and competitive.
What are the key artifacts or collateral that product marketing is responsible for?
| Go-To-Market Plan | |||||||
| What it’s for | A go-to-market plan is a strategic blueprint outlining how a company will bring its product or service to market successfully. It encompasses various elements such as: • Target audience identification • Marketing strategies • Sales channels • Pricing • Distribution tactics. It’s used to guide the company’s efforts in reaching customers and generating sales. It helps align the organization’s resources and activities, ensures effective product launch and market entry, and maximizes the chances of achieving business objectives. | ||||||
| Key elements | Launch Plan – a plan detailing the activities you need to undertake to get a product or new feature into market. Messaging Guide – a guide that can drive the day-to-day activities of the other functional areas of the company. It’s likely linked to within the GTM plan–see more on the messaging guide below. Business plan – what are your business objectives and the timeline you want to accomplish them over? How will you measure success? The metric for success could be 10 beta customers over the next 6 months if you’re launching a new product. If you’re evaluating an add-on product, you might look at ARR or customer count objectives. Marketing plan – it details all marketing activities to support the launch – including budget. It usually gets very specific by month or by quarter, outlining, “We’re running a webinar every six weeks,” or, “We’ll run these ads in these places.” This is where all the other functional areas come into the GTM plan. If you have website changes, internal and external communications, PR, AR, or even if you’re going to have cake to celebrate the launch with employees, that’s covered in the marketing plan. Sales plan – how are you going to structure sales, and how are you going to enable the sales function? Where are the leads going? CS/CX plan – are there any specific needs to support/provide a great experience for the customers. What type of training or enablement is needed? | ||||||
| Notes | Ultimately, Product Marketing is responsible for the GTM plan, but creating it is a collaborative effort – you have to work with product to think about when it will launch and how it’s competitive. Sales has to be consulted on how the sales structure, tactics, and messaging will change. CS/CX must be prepared. Once you’re launching a second product, you likely need a dedicated product marketing employee orchestrating the launch. How many GTM plans you need depends on your product portfolio – if you have multiple products you’ll have multiple GTM plans. If you have a single product, you might just have a single plan for GTM. | ||||||
| Messaging Guide | |||||||
| What it’s for | A comprehensive guide to the key messages, tone, and language for use across all communication channels – it serves as a strategic tool to ensure brand alignment, maintain a cohesive voice, and effectively convey the desired value proposition to the target audience. By providing clear guidelines and examples, the messaging guide empowers marketers to create compelling and impactful content that resonates with customers and strengthens the brand’s identity. It’s something you can pass out to everyone in the company that contains everything they need to know to sell, support, and pitch your product. | ||||||
| Key elements | Elevator pitch – a concise statement of 1-3 sentences that explains what your solution is and does. It has to be proliferated across your teams and departments because it’s the heart of who you are, what you do, and who your product is for. Background – why you came up with this product or the reason you’re releasing the product. Boilerplate text – a paragraph or two of approved language for your company that people can cut and paste if need be. It should include the features, benefits of the solutions and the pain points it solves. Target Audience – who is your solution for? This is key and you might link out to your ICP if the answer is complex. If it’s simple, you can cover it in a paragraph. Use as much segmentation as needed to get to the heart of your differentiation. Proof Points – market proof points or customer quotes to include in messaging to customers. You want your organization to internalize the language from these quotes so they can recycle it in their interactions with customers. Use cases – whether or not this is relevant depends on where you are in the lifecycle of the product and if there are several use cases—or if you’re a product with an opaque use case. Competitive information – oftentimes, this just links out to a detailed competitive guide if you have a complex market landscape. If you have a simple competitive situation, you can cover it in a paragraph. Sales enablement materials – competitive scorecards, powerpoints of the solution, a sales pitch deck, or other sales enablement resources. | ||||||
| Notes | Make sure it gets populated early on and is agreed upon by all stakeholders – the format/sections can vary depending on what’s needed, but generally Marketing, Sales, Development, and Support will need to agree on the information in the guide. They should all be speaking the same language and know where important documents/assets are. You can also organize new product/feature launches or M&A activities the same way (with a launch plan linked to), so everyone has the same info. This is an internal guide for your organization with some external assets – the guide document shouldn’t be emailed or sent outside the company. But there are sections (like benefits and features, marked “external” in the doc) that provide a rich, “cut & paste” base for folks like marketing program managers. Product marketing has a huge responsibility for defining the content that’s created to get the message out – product marketing has a responsibility for the messaging on your website, which is typically your primary digital demand gen magnet. The product marketing function needs to ensure the messaging is right and consistent across the website and other sales and marketing materials. | ||||||
See a full messaging guide template here:
| Ideal Customer Profile | |||||||
| What it’s for | A deeply researched profile of your buyer or user – eventually, you have to do deep research on your customers and build ICPs. These can get very specific going all the way down into the details of who the customer is. | ||||||
| Key elements | Cover traits like: • Demographics • Firmographics • Where do they get information • What are they interested in • How do they look for solutions to this problem • How do they view the problem • How does the problem affect them • How do they get information on the product | ||||||
| Notes | Oftentimes, you don’t need that much ICP detail – even if you’re $10M-$15M ARR, you don’t need that much detail. Do you really want to go and paint this big watercolor picture with all the details, or do you want to take a snapshot, put it in the photobook, and move on? Do the minimum amount of work it takes to get going and be as accurate as possible and then refine as you collect more data points and information. Ultimately, getting your materials right should be the priority. | ||||||
| Competitive Comparison | |||||||
| What it’s for | You have to be able to tell sales who they’re selling against – if the competitive landscape is simple, then you might be able to cover it in your messaging guide. If it’s complex, you may want a more detailed asset to provide your sellers. | ||||||
| Key elements | Detail where you win and lose against competitors – it could be a red-yellow-green stoplight asset where you show how you compare against competitors on different dimensions. | ||||||
| Sales Enablement Materials | |||||||
| What it’s for | There needs to be plenty of materials for sales to sell the product – sales enablement is the nut that has to be cracked before anything can be rolled out. The messaging guide will point them in the right direction, but they might need quicker templates and materials so they can be more dynamic across customer interactions. | ||||||
| Key elements | Quick reference competitive guides – you might have a red-yellow-green stoplight review for competitiveness across selection factors. Call Scripts – product marketing often creates scripts for the sales team to refer to during calls that give them the right messaging beats to hit. Trainings – product marketing can help design or conduct trainings so sellers can practice messaging and use cases during calls and conversations. Automation workflows and email cadences- what are the workflows for demand gen or nurturing prospects? Are the emails for drip campaigns and introductions written? Are the automation cadences ready? | ||||||
Building a Product Marketing Team
Where should you look for a product marketing hire? Does your first hire need to be someone who has done product marketing before, or are there other backgrounds that work?
Good product marketers combine multiple skillsets – they have to ride the fence between being product-minded and marketing-minded. A really good product marketer enjoys running the program, has a deep understanding of the product, and needs to be good at customer relationship strategy.
Look for:
- Experience at a similar-size company – product marketers from large companies transitioning to startups might struggle without the resources they’re used to.
- Customer-facing exposure – look for candidates who demonstrate a strong focus on customer relationships and can provide examples of how they’ve prioritized customer needs in their past work.
- Analytical and curious – able to analyze data at a high level and ask critical questions to identify potential issues or areas for improvement.
- Collaborative – product marketers also need to be able to work closely with other teams, such as product management and marketing, to ensure their messaging and strategies align with the company’s overall goals.
When hiring a product marketer, consider the experience of the candidate and their leader – if the person managing the hire has strong product marketing skills, it may not be necessary for the new hire to have extensive experience in the field (and they can come from a function like CS). However, if the manager lacks product marketing expertise, it might be more beneficial to hire someone with a background in product marketing.
What should you ask in the interview? Should you ask for work samples?
Ask candidates to walk you through their thinking around marketing activities and metrics – when interviewing candidates, ask for examples of marketing activities they have included in a go-to-market plan and the metrics they would collect. Rather than asking for specific assets, you might ask a candidate what elements are in their GTM plan or how they would go about segmenting your audience. You can request examples of demand-generation ideas candidates have implemented to promote a product or service. This will give you insight into their creativity and ability to drive results. Asking them how they have gone about training, enabling and communicating with groups such as Sales or CS/CX in the past will give you an idea of their collaboration with other customer-facing groups who are key to the objectives.
Avoid asking candidates to share internal documents or proprietary information – like a GTM plan from their previous companies. Instead, focus on discussing their approach to creating go-to-market plans and how they would segment their audience. You can ask candidates to share examples of external-facing content they have contributed to or created, such as websites or marketing materials. This will help you evaluate their skills in creating engaging and effective content.
How do you monitor the performance of product marketing? What metrics or outputs should you track?
Track whether the product marketing team is meeting the goals set out in the go-to-market plan – such as revenue and new customers within a specific timeframe.
Look at their success in collaboration – assess the product marketing team’s ability to work collaboratively with other departments, ensuring smooth communication and information sharing.
Feedback loop execution – evaluate the product marketing manager’s proactivity in conducting win-loss analysis, identifying what is working and what is not, and making necessary adjustments to improve performance.
Look at individual metrics for activities – each aspect of the marketing and sales plans should have specific objectives and metrics, such as the reach of a PR campaign. These individual metrics should also be tracked to ensure overall success.
As you scale, how many PMMs do you need?
PMMs should scale along with audiences rather than products – when adding new products, determine if they are for the same customer. If they’re for the same audience, a PMM might be able to cover both products. If they have separate buyer profiles, then you likely need a separate PMM for each.
Assess the similarities and differences in required assets for each product – ask how much of the messaging, audience, and differentiation is the same for each product. There isn’t a strict limit on how many products a PMM can handle, but it depends on the complexity and target audience of the products. For complex products with distinct target audiences, it’s essential to have separate PMMs. However, if the products are smaller and cater to the same customer, one PMM can manage them effectively.
Overall
What are the most important things to get right in building a product marketing function?
Know who your customer is and why you matter to them – it is crucial to understand your target audience and their pain points. This knowledge will help you create a product that addresses their needs and provides value.
Build strong relationships with customers – establishing trust and rapport with your customers is essential for long-term success. By maintaining open lines of communication, you can better understand their needs and preferences, leading to a more effective product marketing strategy.
Understand your product and its value proposition – clearly define the unique selling points of your product and how it addresses the customer’s pain points. This understanding will help you communicate the value of your product effectively and persuasively.
Foster strong internal relationships – Collaborate with other departments and team members within your organization to ensure a cohesive and well-rounded product marketing strategy. By working together, you can leverage each other’s expertise and insights to create a more successful product marketing function.
What are the common pitfalls of building a product marketing function?
Mistaking product knowledge for marketing expertise – the most common pitfall is taking someone who knows the product really well and assuming they can be a successful Product Marketing Manager. While they may know the product and the target customer, they may lack the necessary marketing skills to effectively promote and drive adoption of the product.Look for individuals that balance product knowledge and marketing expertise. They should be able to act as an “air traffic controller,” guiding the product’s marketing strategy and execution.
Inadequate collaboration with other teams – successful product marketing requires collaboration with various teams, including product development, sales, and customer support. A lack of collaboration can lead to misaligned messaging, missed opportunities, and overall inefficiency. Foster a culture of collaboration by encouraging regular communication and cross-functional meetings. Ensure that the Product Marketing Manager is involved in relevant discussions and decision-making processes to maintain alignment and drive the product’s success in the market.
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