What is Product Marketing? A Data-Backed Definition
An insight into Product Marketing roles, responsibilities and KPIs after interviewing dozens of Product Marketing Managers.
The New Age of Product Marketing
The evolution of Product Marketing is one of the newest and most important trends in software marketing today, so it’s important to understand it and know how to apply it for your career or company.
Everyone is hiring Product Marketing Managers (“PMMs”) and there is a great demand for expertise in this space, so read on for a strategic and tactical definition of “What is Product Marketing?”.
The State of Product Marketing today
Product Marketing is like Customer Success was 5 years ago; misunderstood but easily thrown around.
Back then, Customer Success sounded cool, and more companies started to adopt the role. Often it was really still Customer Support, although there was a growing appreciation of the value that a true Success role brought.
Of the dozens of Product Marketers that we interviewed (from companies such as Gusto, Zillow, Front, Hotjar) one common complaint was: “colleagues don’t know how to work with Product Marketers”.
A common source of confusion was how Product Marketers differed from other types of marketers, and caused PMMs to be given under or mis-leveraged. Product Managers are amongst the most guilty of this, especially troublesome due to the close collaboration required between both roles.
In most cases Product Marketing suffers from being loosley defined, having limited executive ownership, few decisive KPIs and almost no software budget.
What this means is:
- PMMs need to better show their impact and exert strategic influence
- Non-PMMs need to know how to leverage Product Marketing to drive success.
We’ll cover both here so you may wish to help your colleagues by sharing this article with them!
What is Product Marketing?
We’ve seen others define Product Marketing; Hubspot says “its the process of bringing a product to market”, while Drift breaks it into two separate roles: “before” and “after” a product launch.
We think these definitions are too one-dimensional because they’re focussed on products going TO the market. Instead, Product Marketing should also influence the creation of the product, by taking insights FROM the market back into the product team.
A truer definition of Product Marketing:
“Product Marketing connects the dots between the product and the market, in both directions.”
This means that the Product Marketing role is responsible for two flows:
(a) understand the market (demand/need) and shape the product
(b) communicate the product (solution) to the market
In (a) shaping the product, Product Marketers will undertake activities such as:
- Customer and competitor research (to help identify unmet needs)
- Persona development and segmentation (to better define the target audience)
- Pricing updates (to better match value between product and market)
In (b) communicating the product, Product Marketers will undertake activities such as:
- Content and collateral creation (to enable sales, success, support teams)
- Promoting the product/feature (to educate the market)
- Launch management (coordinating the whole team in the delivery process)
Tania Clark (Senior PMM at Atlassian) classifies these as two separate “types” of Product Marketer: Inbound and Outbound. This reflects the traditional bias of companies, but we believe the modern PMM needs to have the responsibility and capacity for both.
Product Marketing is very much the glue that brings together teams across the organization to enable the perfect matching between product and market, and thereby create success for the organization.
As part of our interview and survey series with Product Marketers (please add your perspective here) we found the following key metrics part of the PMM role:
Product Marketing KPIs
As you can see ‘Feature adoption’ and ‘New revenue’ are the most important aspects of a Product Marketer’s job. These goals are intrinsically linked for all product-first companies, because feature adoption should drive greater value for the user, and thereby increase their willingness to pay.
It also ties in perfectly with the definition above, because driving adoption requires the right feature to be defined and built, and then effectively communicated to the customer.
Building the right product for the market is one of the first and most important stages of startup success, so it should be amply clear how critical Product Marketing is in creating Product-Market fit. Therefore we recommend that a PMM should be one of the first marketing/growth hires for early-stage teams.
And the first test of Product-Market fit is when new users are exposed to your product for the first time. If you’re able to connect a new user to value quickly such that they convert to paid, it is the strongest indication that your product is succeeding. Therefore helping your PMMs focus on user onboarding to drive better product adoption and new revenue should probably be one of their first key jobs!
Aside: our friends at Emergence Capital go into more detail on which type of marketer to hire at which stage here.
How Product Marketing got here 🤔
Product Marketing isn’t actually a new role; it’s been around for many years. So why is it suddenly becoming so important?
This is down to two key differences in software today:
- the delivery model has changed from licensing to SaaS
- we’re moving towards a product-first world
In the past, technology products were sold through executive relationships and field sales teams. A new customer would receive a lot of sales attention (with demos and discussions) and once acquired, would transition to the onboarding/training and support teams (until renewal time). Sales was King and every function supported it, including Product Marketing.
Now Product is Queen, and customers value it more than relationships, services or reputations. It’s the most important facet in a buying decision and it’s the battleground on which competitors fight, catalyzed by lower switching costs and plentiful options.
Other factors include a new stage in the buying cycle (‘product evaluation’), ‘PQLs’ as a sales qualification methodology, and freemium models that encourage usage before purchase.
All this means that building the right product, and delivering it effectively is more important than ever before. We cannot rely on sales teams with inferior products, but we also cannot stop at just building great products.
Agile is now normal, and continuous development and delivery is the new standard. Product is changing and updating as fast as ever, but people find it difficult to keep up. The new challenge in achieving PM Fit and business success is driving adoption.
Product Marketing is the key that can unlock this, and accordingly, the role is changing. Responsibilities for product marketing are extending beyond launching, towards adoption, and there are questions on whether the function should continue to report to Marketing, or to Product or Growth.
Which executives Product Marketers report to
Marcus Andrews (Principal PMM at Hubspot) even goes as far as to say that PMMs actually help create a product-driven company.
Regardless, we’ll see the Product Marketing role become more refined and more consistent over the next 5 years, and it’s a great time to be a Product Marketer!
Differences to marketing and other functions
Sometimes we see teams treat their Product Marketers as an extension of their Marketing or Demand Generation teams, so here are some of the key differences.
Product Marketing key activities
Product Marketing vs. Marketing
Marketing is a broader function responsible for communicating value to prospects. This includes content marketing, performance marketing, brand marketing etc.
Product Marketing specializes in helping your product get adopted by the market, and of course helping shape the product. Product marketers should be a core component of the product process and should work closely with product and product-growth teams.
Product Marketing vs. Product Management
PMMs can more efficiently do some of the tasks that PMs currently do on the side. Firstly PMMs should bring the voice of the customer to the product team, who should then be responsible for translating it into user stories and features.
Secondly, PMMs should own product adoption. While this should be a collaborative effort with PMs (and should include UX improvements — why inputs from Product Marketers into product decisions is so important), Product Marketing should ultimately own the channels for communicating features.
In organizations that have created Product Growth teams, there is often a mix of product, product marketing and design skills to help create and run experiments inside the product to drive adoption. Chameleon helps teams do this, and you can learn more here.
Product Marketing vs. Sales Enablement
Sales enablement is crucial in B2B organizations to equip the sales teams with the necessary resources to succeed. Sales enablement is one part of the Product Marketer’s role but it should not be the only part. Within sales-led organizations, product marketers will do a lot of sales enablement, whereas in product-led organizations, they will do more product growth work.
Product Marketing vs. Customer Success
Although Customer Success teams also care about driving product usage and helping customers extract value from the software, one key difference is that Product Marketing teams will care about new features, new customers and new revenue, vs. supporting existing features, customers and revenue.
Nevertheless, there are some overlaps here (e.g. driving deeper usage or upsell from existing customers). Traditionally we see product marketing using more traditional marketing channels to do this (e.g. email marketing) while customer success uses more traditional customer engagement channels (e.g. webinars, help articles, LMS etc.)
Take-aways and reading links
Product Marketing connects the dots between the product and the market, in both directions.
Product Marketing is a seminal role for the success of a product and startup, and will only grow in importance and value as we continue to embrace a product-first world.
To get ahead of the curve you and your company should clearly define the role and responsibilities of product marketing and empower PMMs with clear accountability / ownership, sufficient tooling and executive visibility.
Chameleon is software to help product marketers drive feature adoption and user onboarding, and we’ve written more about product marketing:
