Marketing is the first interaction between audience and product, defining the brand as the world will come to know it.
Product marketers play an integral role in the marketing team’s dynamic. They tap into the areas of product, marketing, and sales, and tie the three together to bring a product to market with a successful launch.
Our list for product marketers covers the most important hard and soft skills they’ll need to succeed in their role.
Product Marketing Through Writing and Presentations
You’re building the foundation of your product’s story, brand, and messaging, which requires clear written and spoken communication. You’ll need to convey the benefits it offers to customers, and work with your team to craft a strategic plan. The ability to write and present effectively is imperative, and you should aim to be persuasive to help get both customers and your company on board.
Collaborating Across Teams
Product marketing is a team sport. As a product marketer, you’ll be working with employees across the company to align on a vision and plan for the brand. From simple tasks like creating a pitch deck, to more intense undertakings like preparing for a launch, you’ll be working with a team the whole way to find what works best for the product. Working collaboratively with others to foster a solid team dynamic are must-have skills for product marketers.
Get Creative to Stand Out
Marketing and creativity go hand-in-hand. All of the best products have some aspect in their brand messaging that make them stand out. Coming up with a unique angle for your product and how to tell its story is a huge part of product marketing, and a good dose of creativity makes it a whole lot easier to reach your audience and stand out among the hundreds of ads they see each day. As a product marketer, it’s also your job to come up with solutions for any problems your team may face. Creative thinking is necessary to identify how to solve these issues in a way that makes sense for the situation.
Keeping Up with Product Marketing
With its wide scope and involvement in other areas of the company, there’s no “typical day” for a product marketer. Depending on what stage your product campaign is in, you’ll be expected to take on a range of initiatives and pivot as needed to tackle whatever is needed of you. Feeling comfortable in this type of environment makes not only a good product marketer, but a happy product marketer, and ensures there’s never a boring day at the office.
Problem-Solving Product Marketing
Problem solving is important for multiple areas of a product marketer’s job, starting with your own team. It’s likely that you’re working with colleagues who are looking to you for guidance on both strategy and execution, so it’s wise to be prepared to step in and help work through any issues that may arise throughout the marketing process.
Another central part of your job as a marketer is to connect with your customers and understand what they need. Problems, which come in the form of pain points that customers experience, must be taken into account and empathized with. This understanding can then be used to translate your product into one that can answer those problems and solve them. As a result, you can effectively market it to be better-geared towards your target audience.
Product-First Decision-Making
As a leader for your marketing team and a key contributor to the product and sales teams, quickly and thoughtfully being able to make decisions is necessary to keep things running smoothly. The best product marketers can take their expertise and knowledgeably apply it to the situation at hand. It enables you to take a clear stance on the best course of action and efficiently take it. From the smallest detail to large, overarching conceptual questions, product marketers can handle it all. You can then use your defined goals and desired outcomes to work backwards and strategically decide how to execute.
Product Expertise for Product Marketing
To successfully market a product, it’s critical to have a firm grasp on all of its features, benefits, and limitations. This foundation enables you to create a brand story that makes sense and reads as authentic to your audience. Additionally, taking the time to get to know your competitors’ products is extremely useful and strengthens your marketing abilities. It allows you to tailor your own brand’s campaigns to play up your product’s strengths and differentiate it from others. It also gives you a solid knowledge of your market and its trends, providing a strategic edge as you gear up for your product’s launch.
Product Marketing Tells a Story
Ultimately, a product marketer is responsible for conveying a product’s story and helping the audience connect with the brand. Perhaps the most important part of product marketing, this requires experience in many of the other qualities we’ve already discussed. It involves clearly synthesizing your company’s mission, why its product is unique, and how it stands out from the competition. This all culminates in a narrative that speaks to your target market effectively.
Data Drives Product Marketing
One of the best parts of marketing is the data that you can collect about your customers, product, and industry. It’s an invaluable tool that should therefore be treated as such. Being able to understand the data and turn it into actionable insights can make your next steps clearer and surer. It solidifies confidence in the brand’s strategies, and can help you more easily get people in agreement with your proposals.
Product marketing is an art that makes use of a range of hard and soft skills to fulfill its purpose and make a name for the company. Product marketers are at the helm of that, using those skills to guide individuals across teams to work together and create a story that captures the essence of the brand and draws customers in.
Be sure to check out Chet’s product marketing microcourses for the best resources to continue to learn from top professionals in the product marketing industry.
