Transcription
[Music] Hi everyone, and welcome to the Product Marketing Alliance YouTube channel. If you're watching this video, then you want to know a little bit more about what product marketing actually is. My name is Brian Piss, and in this video, I'm going to take you back to the basics and touch on some of the examples of product marketing, why it's important, and what it's responsible for.
In a nutshell, product marketing is the drive and force behind getting products to market and keeping them there. As April Dunford puts it, "Product marketers are the people responsible for being able to deeply understand and therefore articulate what is different and better and remarkable about your offering for your target people."
Product marketers are responsible for a variety of deliverables and are a fundamental part of the product life cycle. They're the masterminds behind making product features appeal to the senses, whether that's through email marketing, webinars, or other marketing functions, and are some of the world's most accomplished plate spinners, playing a crucial role in ensuring products appease the company's target customer. In six very simple circles, the role looks a bit like this:
[Music] Product marketing sits at the heart, the intersection, and the core of successful companies. Product marketers collaborate with key teams such as the marketing team, sales, customer success, and play a critical role in helping the business achieve its goals. It's vital, and it's exciting, but it can be a little complicated. But this is where the product marketing framework comes in.
Our product marketing framework covers all the necessary areas required to navigate a product marketing journey from A to B to C to D, the list goes on. The framework defines five fundamental phases of product marketing, and those phases are: Discover, Strategize, Define, Get Set, and Grow. We recommend familiarizing yourself with the full framework to really get to grips with each of the moving parts, but in the meantime, here's a whistle-stop tour.
Discover: This is the stage in which you gather the information and insight to turn your assumptions into an educated hypothesis. Customer feedback and sifting out the competition are just two of the key elements involved, and they're both product marketing gold dust.
Strategize: Whether it's product-market fit, your go-to-market plan, or your pricing, strong product marketing always comes with a strategy.
Define: This is all about identifying your personas and applying what you garnered from your discovery stage to shape customer journey and communications.
Get Set: Here is time to harness all your hard work so far with training, sales enablement sessions, and marketing campaigns, so your team is equipped to take the go-to-market by the horns and run with it.
Grow: And then finally, there's Grow. This is where your post-launch process needs to kick in to ensure your product continues to flourish and evolve in its market.
There's a lot of ambiguity around both roles, so you can be forgiven for confusing Product Managers with Product Marketing Managers, as many, many people do. While there are certainly some similarities, PMs and PMMs are all-rounders who can effectively work across product marketing and sales. Both are responsible for product launches, and both roles need to coordinate different teams within an organization to ensure that the product's release is successful.
One of the challenges of product marketing is that we're surrounded by it 24/7, and yet people have a really tough time defining it. The first step to understanding it might be understanding what it isn't. Think of Coca-Cola's polar bear commercials. There wasn't any particular product push in there. The message was just: "If you think of Coca-Cola, think of the largest living land carnivore and have happy thoughts." It didn't matter if you buy a bottle of regular Coke, a can of Diet Coke, or a Coca-Cola t-shirt. This is brand marketing.
On the other hand, the Diet Coke break ads are pushing a particular product, Diet Coke, and this is a small part of product marketing. But it doesn't end with ads. Coke's product marketers would have had to think about: What does the pricing of Diet Coke say about its position in the market? Is it a premium product that consumers are willing to pay for? Should we sell Diet Coke in stores or through a mail-order subscription service? Could we sell them in 330 ml cans or 500 ml? Who are our consumers? The office ladies or the buff construction worker? Do people even like the taste? After somebody at Coca-Cola's labs came up with a formula for a cola with a few calories, all these questions and thousands of others needed to be answered, and the answers need to feedback to the company so it can create products people want to buy, avoiding any New Coke-style mishaps.
Or, since the majority of PM members are in the B2B SaaS space, imagine a company's developers have come up with a new piece of marketing automation technology. A product marketer might find there is a gap in the market for marketing automation among small businesses. So, it will follow that the software should have a low price and flexible subscription options, as the website should make it clear that it's for small businesses, and there's little need for enterprise-level active sales care like dedicated customer contacts. The insight that the particular technology the company made would fit best with small businesses will affect everything from the go-to-market strategy to the name, and it's a product marketer's role to bring that all together.
[Music] Product marketing isn't just important, it's critical. Your company is going to sell products and services, and if it doesn't, it isn't a company. Those products and services need to be things people actually want to buy, and they need to be priced so people will want to buy them.
Take Quibi, for instance. This $2 billion faux pas is a classic example of the need for solid product marketing. The phone-only Netflix competitor tried to be the solution for a problem that simply didn't exist, offering 5-minute TV shows to be consumed as quick bites during downtimes, like waiting in line for coffee or the commercials in regular TV shows. The problem? People already have a million ways to pass their time on their phones during that time that doesn't cost $7.99 a month. A smart product marketer could have prevented this disaster with a quick customer survey to show that people didn't really want to watch more shows during shows. Instead, they went to market not knowing who their customer was, what problem could be solved for them, or how to sell it. This was not a company that was customer-obsessed.
A product marketer's responsibilities never fade, and they're at the heart of products and customers, before, during, and after launch. Our 2023 State of Product Marketing report covered the most common tasks product marketers work on, and these were: product positioning and messaging, managing product launches, creating sales collateral, storytelling, sales enablement, building personas, competitive intelligence, website management, and customer customer segmentation. As we touched on a little earlier, though, the role varies from industry to industry, company to company, and product to product, so what's a priority for someone else might not necessarily be one for you.
Click through to our in-depth video in the copy below where we unpack each of these common tasks in more depth. If you're looking to transition into product marketing and you're currently at a company that has the function built in, our advice would be to try and shadow some of their work and get as much practical experience as possible, as well as reading up on some industry resources too. We also have tons of podcasts, resources, and blogs full of lots of info for newbies and experts alike. We'll share those links below. Thanks for watching, and we hope this has given you some more insight into what product marketing is all about. See you next time.
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