What is product marketing?
Product marketing, like digital and traditional marketing, involves getting the product to market and making sure it reaches the right customers.
When we hear the word Marketing, we link it directly to Social Media, Email marketing and Websites, but product marketing is much more than that.
Product marketing is at the intersection of product, marketing and sales.
You may be wondering why it’s so important. But without marketing we wouldn’t use many of the brands of products we use right now. Without marketing we might not carry the cell phone we have or we might not have bought those sneakers.
Marketing tells the story of a product and helps communicate what the brand stands for. People use the products they buy as a way to tell a story about themselves.
What does a Product Marketing Manager do?
A product marketing manager is responsible for the positioning, communication and branding of a product. They will also collect and process customer feedback and manage some aspects of post-launch customer relations.
A more technical definition would be that they try to address the different phases of a product conversion funnel to move customers through a funnel that converts them from a general audience to potential customers.
A Product Marketing Manager will constantly work on different tasks for customers at these three levels of the funnel.
- Acquisition: attract the attention of customers, make people aware that your product exists and increase their interest.
- Social media, newsletters, blogs, copywriting
- Engagement: getting people involved in your fan community.
- Events, calls to action, lead scoring, special offers/campaigns
- Retention / Conversion: keep customers close (for subscription models) or convert them into paying customers (for one-time purchases).
- Building growth loops with Products
Product Management vs Product Management Marketing
What are the differences?
We could define in a generic way that a Product Manager is the voice of the product inside the company and a Product Marketing Manager is the voice of the product outside the company.
A Product Manager is more focused on building the product. They work more directly with engineers, coordinate the roadmap and make decisions about what features are created and who will do them.
A clear example would be, faced with the same situation, a Product Manager asks “does the product solve the problem?” but a Product Marketing Manager asks “how will we tell people it solves the problem?”
How do a PM and PMM work together?
A PM and PMM must work together. Both must have a deep understanding of the customer, so analyzing and sharing information together keeps them fully aligned.
Basically a PM will coordinate how the product should be manufactured and how it can best solve the user’s problems, while a PMM will figure out how to best reach the users.
If you want to define the entire life cycle of a new product from scratch contact Inprofit – Marketing and Digital Transformation Agency.
