Even as Product Marketing becomes a standard part of sales and marketing teams, there remains a lot of confusion about the road to becoming a Product Marketer. While there are common skills for Product Marketing that recruiters tend to look for when hiring a PMM, there are other important factors to consider when trying to land your first role in the field.
How to Get Your First Product Marketing Role
Generally, Product Marketing is not the first step in a Marketer’s career path. Most often, the first Product Marketing hire comes after the marketing team is well-established and is looking for someone to strategically plan quarters and years ahead. Therefore, it’s important that you bring in a solid understanding of marketing as a whole, and lean into the special skills you’ve acquired in past roles to show off your unique take on how to drive product adoption and retention. With that in mind, here are some things you can do to prepare for your Product Marketing job hunt and land your dream role:
- Get involved in the Product Marketing community: From Slack channels to LinkedIn groups to using your own network, it’s a huge advantage to have contacts in the Product Marketing space who can help guide you through your search. Being involved in these groups also helps you keep up with ideas and strategies that will help you perform better as a Product Marketer.
- Keep learning: Conferences, webinars, and workshops are your best friend when it comes to learning about product positioning and strategy formation. The events you attend equip you to create and sharpen your own Product Marketing personality, and also give lots of opportunities to network with other Product Marketers.
- Create content: Putting out your own Product Marketing-related blogs and posts establishes you as an authority in the field, which always looks great to recruiters trying to decide if you have what it takes to guide their marketing efforts. As with all of the other things to try on this list, it also keeps you learning and innovating, which is crucial to succeed.
- Become a Product Marketing expert: At the end of the day, recruiters want to make sure you are on the same page about what Product Marketing is and what it isn’t, and where your efforts will be most valuable for the company. Look at other people’s careers and see what’s worked for them, and go into each interview with ideas about how you will bring value to the team and thrive in your role.
Product Marketing is an important part of many companies, and the role itself is an exciting one that gives you something new to work on each day. If as you progress in your marketing career you find yourself becoming interested in how exactly to bring a product to market, including building its entire voice, structuring its target audience, and carving its spot out in the world, then perhaps it’s time to take a look at Product Marketing as the next step.
Check out Chet’s Product Marketer pathway to find out everything you’ll need to break into the field, from basic knowledge to interview prep.
