Product marketing in an organization

Every organization, from some point on, needs to formalize the role and function of product marketing inside itself, because it has to keep scaling and grow fast, effectively, transparently, in a coordinated and coherent way—or in other words, keep itself “competitive.”

The goal of product marketing is to put a finger on the customer’s concerns and gaps. Applying this knowledge in the following areas is also among the goals of product marketing:

• Applying knowledge in product design; as a result the product in question solves the customer’s problems and gives them joy.
• Applying knowledge in go-to-market strategy (GTM), so the product is available in the market and communications happen. That way members of a team act in alignment, in coordination, and with awareness, and the customer hears what they want to hear and knows exactly how a product helps them reach their goals.

Product marketing helps companies find their real market and customers.

After product marketing is formalized in an organization, the following events happen:

• Creating a strategic narrative for the company’s insight. (A narrative that tells you, as a company, who you are, where you were, where you are, and where you will go. This narrative also states why your company exists and what distinguishes you and makes you unique compared with others.)
• Creating sales-enablement materials to support actions related to bringing the product to market. (A strategic process that provides the company’s sales professionals with tools, technology, training, and other resources; it improves their performance in interacting with the customer and is effective in creating value for all stakeholders in the sales process.)
• Aligning sales, marketing, product, and other parts of the organization in the right direction in markets, channels, messaging, and the stage of execution
• Ensuring that all marketing and communication efforts around real audiences, with the correct messaging, sit in one direction
• Raising product adoption with planning and tactics for releasing it in the market

Daniel Cooperman, head of product marketing for Jira Align software at Atlassian: “Simply put, product marketing can be summarized as: the driving force behind bringing the product to market and keeping it in the market.”

When should a company introduce its product-marketing team?

When a company is small and the number of employees is no more than 5 to 10 people, naturally one member of the team takes on product marketing. Such a person is in constant contact with customers, talks with them during product-sample presentations, converses to persuade them to buy, and helps customers when they face problems, concerns, or if they have an idea about the products.

They use this knowledge only to drive product development, go-to-market strategy, and making the product available in the market.

After that, when a company grows, a shared understanding among all staff of the customer, the product, the message, and the benefits becomes important and valuable. With that shared understanding, teams can steer the company on the same chosen path and set customer expectations and then meet them. Here, product-marketing work comes up with its main goal: gathering expertise, creating a strategy from it, and sharing that strategy with the team. That way, members execute this strategy with a focus on their own role in the customer journey.

What are the benefits of having a product-marketing team?

Even if product marketing as a job and role is today fully advanced, recognized, and widespread, some companies still do not do it (do not take it seriously). On one side, in a startup, one of the senior managers may actually be doing product marketing alongside other responsibilities, and because of the time limit this senior manager has, this becomes a barrier to progress for all of their work. Or in a young company, product-marketing responsibilities may be split among other team members. This approach overall is not very effective, because they have expertise in their own profession and are focused on their own work.

Daniel Cooperman of Atlassian says:

“So, as we saw in both cases, not having a role and function under the name product marketing leads to inefficiency, a lack of transparency, and in the worst cases, a lack of direction, a lack of a high-level long-term view, and a lack of strategy.”

Now let’s look at companies that benefit from having a formal product-marketing function and work:

Benefit 1: Creating a strategy with a macro view

If we look at sales, customer success, product, and digital-marketing teams, none of them is focused on following customer work, developing a high-level go-to-market strategy, communications, and messaging. They are all busy with their own work in relation to the customer journey.

“Separate teams focus on particular aspects of the customer life cycle. In these teams, product marketing can add value by having a macro view of a wider market landscape. Product marketers, with a mix of a strategic view and executing it in the best way in practice, give internal teams the training they need and help supply the content and assets these teams need to put the product in front of customers.”

Louise Dunn, director of product marketing at Linnworks

In fact, product marketing adds value to each of the teams. Doing this is only possible if they have this high-level understanding of the market landscape.

Product marketers will have a comprehensive view of the whole customer journey only if they are integrated with one another and also pay attention to all other teams.

They know what the customer wants in each of these areas. They also know how to move the customer through the sales funnel, what words should be said, what content should be presented, and what actions the customer expects.

For example, they may have a shared view of competitors at the time of sale, and this helps them highlight the main benefits this product has compared with competitors’ products. They can also help so that sales that happen meet the customer’s need and are useful to them. In addition, product marketers use insights from sales, customer success, product, and market research to help design a product roadmap, highlight go-to-market strategy, and continuously improve materials and raise awareness of the content of a strategy.

Benefit 2: Aligned, informed, coordinated teams

Imagine a company that wants to do something new that is needed every two weeks or even less. Every company dreams that the process will go as smoothly and easily as possible; that is, all stakeholders act informed, aligned, and coordinated. That is:

• Its customers are informed of important updates and also have information about how to use those updated products.
• Sales knowledge and information are updated
• (The team or person for) customer success knows what this new work and duty is and can answer customers’ questions.

The good news is that product marketing does exactly this.

Like everything else in marketing, releasing the product correctly in the market depends on your audience. Elvis Liban, director of product marketing at Gong, shares his expert views for doing this correctly.

Benefit 3: The possibility of scale

If the company has more than one product in its portfolio, each of the teams may be focused on the product in their own area of work. Their focus may also be on the bottom of the funnel for content production, or on introducing a product.

“I can only imagine how, over time, more responsibilities will on average be assigned to product marketers…”

This sentence is from Eric Mansour, vice president at Criteo, in the 2021 Product Marketing Statement report.

Formalizing product marketing

From my personal experience and from what other managers say, I have noticed that product marketing may not always happen in the easiest possible way. Sometimes it does not have enough credibility for the company to want to make serious decisions about it; sometimes this role and function is not correctly understood by different parts. As a result they do not place much value on it and do not understand how this marketing can help them more every day.

Sometimes responsibilities are duplicated and other teams do the same work as the product-marketing management team. This leads to wasted repeated effort, double the time, and so on for this work. By contrast, introducing and formalizing product marketing from senior people gives it more credibility and makes it respected by other teams, because people see it as a new role and function as an important strategic move.

“Product marketing should be formalized as early as possible. In most cases, a marketing leader (chief marketing officer or VP of marketing) introduces it as part of the marketing team’s progress plan. In other cases, a product leader (chief product officer or VP of product) introduces it as a formal duty and function so this work completes the activities related to making the product available in the market.”

Daniel Cooperman of Atlassian.

Give product marketing a seat at the management table

As we know, product marketing is a mix of strategy and tactics; it shapes company insight, product message, and communications, enables sales, draws a roadmap for the product, and so on.

All of these are important factors for the success of any organization that senior management has approved and decides on. If product marketing does not have enough credibility to be formalized and for final decisions to be made about it, it cannot be held responsible for the resulting outcomes. In such conditions, nothing can be learned from the experience of this marketing either.

Teach other teams and set clear responsibilities for them

Teaching other parts about what product marketing is, and what it does for the organization, is important. By providing the necessary training, everyone can assess its value and have a clear understanding of how marketing adds value to each part. When people understand this, their natural resistance to it will go away.

Product marketers should sit with cross-functional stakeholders to present a summary of the scope of product marketing. Good models are available, but in my company we define product marketing with these titles: market intelligence, market positioning, GTM (go to market), customer awareness, and field enablement.

Given that this role is highly cross-functional, setting responsibilities among teams with the participation of all stakeholders is essential. This work leads to agreement on the boundaries of these responsibilities and reduces the risk of duplicated effort.

“When introducing and applying product marketing, common challenges arise, including conflict with product managers and confusion among the marketing team. To avoid these problems, you should carefully set roles and responsibilities and specify areas of ownership.”

Daniel Cooperman of Atlassian

Set clear priorities

Many product marketers wish they had 25 hours a day to work. According to the 2021 Product Marketing Statement report, one of the main problems product marketers face is “too little time to get the work done.”

“Agreement on a key performance indicator or objectives and key results is very important for success in defining product marketing. Having alignment between product marketing and sales to make sure our goals and wants sit in one direction, and also that we have prioritized the right actions, is important, because we never have enough resources to do all the actions.”

Dave Manickam, head (of marketing management and the weight-care services portfolio) at Lenovo

Priorities cannot be set from the start in a definite, unchangeable way. Of course they may change. But priorities should always exist so they prevent severe employee fatigue. Inform all teams of the things that, in any particular time period, are a priority and the things that are not.

Conclusion

In the true sense of the word, every company reaches a point where it needs to formalize product marketing. I hope this article has given the necessary explanations and clarification about the importance of considering multiple factors when introducing product marketing as a role and function from the very beginning.