Role Basics: What is Product Marketing?
Product marketing is… marketing the product. It focuses on communicating features, connecting them to the problems customers have and articulating how products solve problems and delight users.
Flavors of Product Marketing roles:
Product marketers sometimes specialize in a specific channel – especially in larger companies – for example, email.
Example projects in Product Marketing:
- Collaborate with product manager to write copy for a contextual onboarding flow (i.e. the “first time” experience in a product that orients and educates new users)
- Develop an onboarding email sequence designed to educate users about a product and push them towards activation
- Create a new landing page describing the product, the problems it solves for customers, how each of its features works, and why they matter
- Collaborate with performance marketers on ads tar
- Interview users to create a customer journey map
- Generate leads for a new product by driving traffic to an e-Book signup page, collaborating with performance marketing and content marketing teams
Common activities in Product Marketing:
- Writing… emails, landing pages, ad copy — anything that describes the product or the problem it solves for users
- Planning and executing new product and feature launches
- Designing and implementing landing pages describing products
- Conducting customer research via interviews and surveys
- Collaborating with product managers and other stakeholders in the marketing team on
Product Marketing metrics:
Metrics can vary a lot based on company or even project. Some include:
- Feature uptake — i.e. % of users using a feature
- Product launch success — i.e. new subscribers, conversion
- User activation — i.e. new users who perform actions expected to lead to consistent subsequent use
Product Marketing compensation:
Entry jobs pay $80 – 120, though these roles often require prior experience in related functions.
Product Marketing career path:
Product marketing is a great role – it can be an entry level role or a second job (after either social media or content marketing, or even roles in customer service or other roles). It can also be a feeder job into product management.
How accessible are Product Marketing jobs?
- Time to learn. 1-2 years.
- Selectivity. Competitive. Comparable to brand marketing – easier than product management or biz ops, harder than content or social media marketing.
- Ease of working remote. Moderate / Depends on the culture.
Job Requirements: What you need to be competitive for product marketing roles?
Key skills for Product Marketing:
- Great writer
- Good at listening and perspective-taking
- Able to implement landing pages with tools like Unbounce, Webflow
- Experience interviewing customers, writing surveys, and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data
Professional background for Product Marketing:
Typically people have prior experience in marketing or marketing-adjacent teams. These often include social media or content marketing, as well as consulting or marketing agency jobs. This is often a post-MBA role – especially for people interested in Product Management roles without the technical experience to be competitive for Product immediately.
Prior accomplishments to be competitive for Product Marketing:
- Managed successful product or feature launches, or succeeded as a stakeholder in a product launch (i.e. from sales, product management, ops, or other marketing function)
- Run a project to interview customers and use these insights to create a new product landing page
- Demonstrable success in adjacent roles that prove your ability to research and understand users and craft language that explains the product and attracts users (e.g. sales / sales enablement, content marketing, brand marketing, product management, social media).
Personal characteristics for success in Product Marketing:
- Empathy for users and customers
- Love writing and communicating
- Focused on user pain and user experience
How to prepare for and get a job in Product Marketing?
Projects to learn and prove yourself:
- Analyze product marketing for different products:
- Landing pages
- Lifecycle emails
- Transactional emails
- Feature release communications
- Conduct informational interviews to understand
- Product launch process
- Wait list / landing page development and messaging
- User interviews for marketing
- Create a portfolio of how you’d improve an existing set of websites
- Create a portfolio of MVP sites
- Find a product, small business or organization you love with a horrible website, and improve their website
- Improve email marketing for a product, small business or organization that’s not using email at all
- Practice usability testing for landing pages and product copy
- Practice customer journey mapping
- Learn to use Webflow by cloning a high-fidelity website
- Create a referral campaign for a company or product you like (MVP Using email, then using tool like kickoff labs)
- Create A/B tests using a tool like Unbounce
- Create a lead gen program for a company
