Marketing is the foremost step in the journey of a product reaching its audience. The primary role of a product marketer is to collate actionable information and devise strategies that best deliver a product’s values and benefits to its potential customer. While providing dynamic direction to a product’s marketing efforts, a product marketer collaborates with various teams such as research, sales, media, etc at different levels to provide optimal solutions that meet the business objectives through marketing.
A day in the life of a product marketer includes, but is not limited to the below tasks and responsibilities :
Research
Strong, insightful research is the first rung of the product marketing ladder. Researching the marketing efforts of competitors, studying national and global market trends, and utilizing the derived data to further product growth and expansion is an integral responsibility of a product marketer. It is also their job to ensure that this collated research then reaches the right teams as well.
Strategy
Even the best kind of market research may as well be a mere collection of words if one does not know how to turn them into actionable data that can be used to create a product that is loved by the audience. It is the job of a product marketer to always be at the center of this action – devising, developing, strategizing more and better ways to ensure that the marketing efforts take the right message to the right audience.
Communication
It takes consistent involvement and efforts of several teams at different stages to successfully market and grow a product. One of the most important jobs of a product manager is to facilitate transparent, open lines of communication between these teams to ensure that all stakeholders involved are working in tandem towards the product’s marketing efforts.
Press Relations
A product marketer’s job is continual. Post the launch of a product, they are responsible for ensuring that the right kind of information reaches the press and PR teams involved, and that all teams are briefed in sync with the overall marketing strategy designed for the product’s growth.
Pricing and Budget
Besides quality, price is a highly influential factor when it comes to customer preferences regarding a product, especially now that competition has risen in practically every industry and availability of a range of options for the customer to choose from. A product marketer plays an important role in determining the budget and pricing of a product based on customer insights, market surveys and sales data.
Marketing Collateral
Although a product marketer may not be directly responsible for creating marketing collateral, they are in charge of ensuring that the collateral in question is coordinated with the product’s overall marketing strategy. However, in smaller outfits with fewer levels of management, a marketer may be involved in curating marketing content such as press releases, brochures, social media posts, blogs, campaigns, landing pages, etc.
Product Testing
A small but important part of a product marketer’s responsibilities is to test out a product both before and after it penetrates the market. While pre-launch product testing is important at various stages to find and fix any nitty-gritties that may displease the customer, post-launch testing is just as important – it allows for improvement that goes hand-in-hand with the constantly evolving audience preferences.
The role of a product marketer is a multifaceted one that requires one to be a problem-solver, decision-maker and analyzer all at once.
