How your team can prioritize product marketing for growth? – PART 1

There’s been a definite shift into a more product-orientated world in recent years.

With a hyper-focus on product-led business comes a movement in the way they operate and how they prioritize growth strategies.

Once upon a time, we relied on traditional marketing and sales teams to champion products, and more recently still, we’ve seen the introduction of the aptly coined « Customer Success » teams – reducing customer churn by helping customers understand and make the most of their product.

Today, another shift is on the cards. Product marketing teams are seeing a surge in demand as businesses are realizing that a product-led strategy can help build, market, sell, and retain – excelling all areas of a product’s lifecycle.

We’re about to explore the ins, outs, and in-betweens of product marketing and why, today, it’s essential for business growth.

A. What is product marketing?

According to Pulkit Agrawal, Co-Founder and CEO (Chief Executive Officer) at Chameleon, « Product marketing connects the dots between the product and the market in both directions ». Pulkit hit the nail on the head and then screwed it in with his definition of what product marketing is today.

Product marketing definition

Product marketing is a combination of marketing efforts with an end-goal of driving demand and sales of a company’s product or service.

Product marketing is a flow in two directions: Understanding the market and communicating the product.

• Understanding the market: The first part of product marketing is understanding the market, the problems they face, and the solutions they’re looking for. This area of product marketing includes persona research and development, competitor research, product development support, and pricing. This part of product marketing will see its teamwork with product development and business growth teams.
• Communicating the product: The second part of product marketing is communicating the product. This is where the lines often blur between product marketing and traditional marketing responsibilities. So, what’s the difference?

Product marketing focuses on three areas of communication:

• Sales: Product Marketing Managers work closely with sales teams to build sales collateral and help win conversions.
• Advertising: Product Marketing Managers work with the paid marketing team to build campaigns as well as organizing product and feature launches.
• Marketing: Product Marketing Managers work with the organic content marketing team to ensure evergreen interest in the product. They help it rank without the need for an ad spend, and position it ahead of competitors.

B. What does a product marketing team do?

By now, you should have an insight into what a product marketing team does, and how they differ from and support other teams in a business. However, let’s dive a few feet deeper and look at a product team’s core responsibilities.

Managing product launches

A product team needs to work closely with other teams across a business to coordinate a successful first launch of a product or new feature. They’ll unite marketing, sales, PR (Public Relations) to create as big of an impact as possible and ensure everyone’s communicating the product the same way.

Market research

We all know the importance of market research for sales and marketing – defining personas, and understanding the target demographic is Marketing. A product marketing team takes market research a step further and provides product-led insights to help build and shape the product itself and the communication of it to fit the marketplace better.

Email marketing

There are areas of the email marketing flow that’s best left with the product marketing team. New product and feature release campaigns, customer onboarding, success journeys, and customer retention strategies are perfect projects for the team to head up.

Sales collateral

The product marketing team can benefit other areas of the business, not only those that are customer-facing. Let the team guide the creation of sales collateral, one-page briefs, product demos, internal team training, and more. Think of areas or market segments within sales that need help, and let product marketing support them.

User feedback

Whether you measure feedback quantitatively with smart user tracking tools or ask for feedback qualitatively with NPS (Net Promoter Score) micro-surveys and other strategies, it makes the most sense for your product team to manage the collection of all this data and distribute the results where they see fit.

Content creation

A product marketing team should be responsible for content creation. It is not the responsibility of the photographer, designer, or videographer to entirely understand a product and its benefits. It’s their job to follow a detailed brief, and this is usually headed up by product marketing.

User onboarding

Solid onboarding is so essential for customer retention metrics. An effective product marketing team is able to manage the expectations of new users, keep them engaged throughout that all-important starting 30-day period, and hold onto them for the long haul. Besides, something as small as a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits from 25-95% – it’s worth focusing on.

Webinars

Webinars are traditionally hosted by customer success teams. However, product marketing teams have an ear to the ground with user struggles, customer churn, and product positioning, making them the perfect candidates to host webinars.

Release notes and product update logs

SaaS (Software as a Service) release notes showcase the hard work your product team is putting in behind the scenes. They also let your customers know you’re listening to their needs, and are a positive opportunity for your business to touch base with users. Leave these with product marketing, to make sure updates and new features are accurately represented in an appropriate, customer-facing, way.

As you can see, a product team’s responsibilities don’t entirely fall within the marketing spectrum. Studies have found that although most product marketers report to marketing executives, there’s a growing trend in reporting to growth, product execs, or directly to CEOs (Chief Executive Officers).

C. The idea product marketing plan

Now we’ve been through the responsibilities of a product marketing team; perhaps you’re kicking yourself thinking: « I need me one of those » but are unsure of where to start? Look no further.

Head of Product Marketing

This role leads the entire product marketing growth strategy. They handle budgets, project timelines, and the product manager’s workload. The candidate best for the role is someone who has experience in product design or research and customer-facing marketing. This role should report directly to the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and work alongside your Head of Marketing and Head of Sales.

Product Marketing Manager

Your Product Marketing Manager handles the day-to-day product marketing strategies; they’re given budgets to work with and may need to get scrappy with their resources to bring projects to life. This role manages data and content strategists.

Content strategist

Your content strategist is your biggest creator on the team and needs to be flexible with their skillset. Ideally, they’re able to write, design, or shoot fantastic content for each initiative. A jack of all trades; however, these skill sets are hard to come in just one person.

As your team grows and starts to prove how fantastic they are, you can start to build out new roles that are more specific to certain parts within the product life cycle and content creation niches.

Consider a sales enablement writer, end-user PMMs (Product Marketing Managers), a product videographer, a data strategist. All of these roles will bring a huge benefit to your product team’s overall success.

Lastly, on this point, it’s important to build a cross-functional team that maintains relationships with other teams within the business. It can be easy to work in silos when you have individual or team goals on the table. However, a product team truly shines when it collaborates with sales, growth, biz dev, and marketing.

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Read the rest of the article:  How your Team Can Prioritize Product Marketing for Growth? – PART 2