Product Marketing 101: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

Product marketing is one of the most demanded jobs this year. To understand more about what actually goes on behind these scenes in product marketing, I recently spoke to Girija Joshi, Head of Product Marketing at AngelOne, who shared a very realistic perspective on what it takes to be a PMM and how one can break into the role.  While it is easier for core tech and product professionals to transition into a PMM role, this in no way should stop professionals from other fields as well to apply for PMM roles! Below is a summary of the micro interview where we share tips to strengthen your application and help you understand what you can expect from the role. 

1. What is the main goal / purpose of product marketing? 

In the simplest terms, a product marketer’s job is to convey the differentiator of a product to its target audience - to enable buyers to choose your product over competitors’. The reason why this role and this goal is so important, especially now, is that buyers have multiple products to choose from for every problem that they want to solve. Hence, it has become increasingly difficult for companies to convey their value proposition and differentiation to potential buyers. This is where product marketers come in to create a distinct image of the product in the minds of the right audience. While the purpose of the broader marketing function is to work towards brand level marketing, PMMs focus on product level marketing and are involved in both hero product launches as well as smaller updates to the product. 

2. What are some of the key jobs to be done by product marketers? 

• Defining and mapping ICP customers

• Planning the go to market strategy

• Crafting product positioning and messaging

• Sales enablement

• Cross functional collaboration with sales, marketing, design product, legal departments

• Measuring channel-wise impact of product marketing strategies

3. What is a typical ‘Day in the Life’ for a PMM?

The KPIs (eg. conversion of end clients) in a PMM role are very well defined and most part of the day to day activities revolve around achieving them. Apart from pre and post launch days, the day to day is broadly in two parts - 

• Self-serve - These are tasks that are done with very little / without collaboration with other departments and usually include working on landing pages, creating content assets, pushing right content at the right time on social media.

• Sales-led - These tasks involve collaboration with sales to enable them with the right collateral as well as aiding them when needed in deal closure.

4. What are the skill sets required / most useful to have when looking to enter product marketing?

• Content is one of the key aspects of product marketing. Hence, content creation skills like writing, visual content, design can be quite helpful. It also helps to have an eye for good content and awareness of good design principles, as that can help you in creating meaningful content that relates to the audience.

• Another important skill / prep is having knowledge about the sector in which you are looking to apply. While this is not a strong pre-requisite, it definitely helps in your understanding of the customer, product, market as well as competition. 

• Another thing that most hiring managers look for is your ability to work with people from multiple departments - cross collaboration.

5. How can one break into PMM / what can they do to strengthen their application?

As mentioned above, having some form of inclination towards content is helpful. You can - 

• Create a content portfolio that includes any form of content that you are good at - blogs, posts on LinkedIn, videos, podcasts, responses on quora / reddit - any proof of your inclination towards content is key. 

• As you look to apply for jobs, you can also start speaking with various stakeholders of a particular industry to understand the nuances of working in that industry and build your understanding of it. 

6. What can you do in the first 30 days of joining a PMM role?

There are two primary things that you can get started with - 

• There is usually a lot of backlog in terms of getting customer feedback. A helpful exercise would be to find newer ways to implement surveys to collect customer feedback. 

• Since this is a very cross functional role, you can also start by building relationships with sales, product, as these will help you further ahead in your role. 

7. What are some things people usually don’t know about PMM roles?

The PMM role is very collaboration driven and execution heavy. You are always working on multiple different projects with multiple departments. It is also a role where “the perceived impact might be less, but the level and intensity of efforts are quite high.”

8. What is the workflow of work done by PMMs?

• Ideally, product marketers should be involved from the very beginning of product development however, that might not always be the case - it usually only happens in hero product launches. Apart from hero launches, PMM involvement usually starts with planning of the Go-To-Makret strategy. 

• Once the product is ready, PMMs work on deciding what needs to be conveyed as the product USP and start the efforts to build content assets for different channels used to market the product. You also work on creating and launching campaigns to enable product roll-outs.

• There is usually inapp and website collaterals, PR assets, events as well as social media assets that need to be created before a launch.  

• Next, PMMs work on distributing these assets across channels based on what has worked well in the past.

• Post the launch, it is important to measure the impact of various initiatives / campaigns and get a funnel view of which channels worked, and which ones did not - this step feeds into the previous step of deciding which channels to leverage for the launch. 

• It is also essential to automate impact measurement and hence, knowledge of tools that can be used in this process can be helpful. Some common tools / tech used include Google suite like Ad Words, Campaigns, Play Console. Familiarity with SQL is also a great skill to have for impact measurement.

• Post the launch, PMMs enable sales teams with sales specific collateral (which is different from marketing collateral) and can be called into deal closures if necessary. 

Hopefully, this article will give you an insight into what you can expect from a PMM role and what all you can do to prepare yourself for it in advance! You can also reach out to PMMs of companies that you are interested in, to learn from their experience and build a better understanding about the role.

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