Product Marketing

Five Reasons 2020 Will Be Product Marketing's Breakout Year

Whether you’re a global technology brand actively growing your stack through acquisition or a private software-as-a-service (SaaS) company looking to steal market share and create new categories, it’s never been more important to have strong product marketing that sits at the intersection of your product, marketing and sales functions. This is especially true because nailing market fit and product adoption right out of the gate will make or break software companies in categories full of innovation and competition.

Even today, product marketing’s fit within an organization can still be described as unusual or “hazy.” It’s not quite sales or product, but it’s not quite classical marketing either. However, when done correctly, product marketing can elevate all three: marketing, sales and product management.

Working in the product marketing function myself, I have five bold predictions for the next evolution of the product marketing role, its impact and career path — predictions I believe we’ll start to see this year.

Product marketing’s impact will transition from conceptual to empirical. 

In 2020, we’ll no longer see the days where product marketing’s impact was considered a volume play. Rather than lazily focusing on the number of campaigns, products launched or resources built, product marketing’s metrics will span the entire intersection of product, marketing and sales. The ultimate indicator of success will be product adoption and customer retention.

These are two metrics with values that anyone could understand. And they ultimately point to the fact that the capabilities we’re positioning and launching have market fit, are driving demand, are understood by sales and are being bought by prospects and customers.

Product marketing will drift further away from traditional marketing.

As an intersectional role meant to incorporate and unite multiple disciplines, product marketing doesn’t truly win unless all three functions it supports do. Product needs its capabilities effectively positioned and adopted. Marketing needs context and content to fuel programs to meet its demand metrics. And sales needs training, tools and intel to close new business.

If that’s the case, reporting to just one of these functions may not make sense. Is it possible to be fully accountable to three different divisions? Is it reasonable to report to three different bosses? I’m still not entirely sure. This is where the product marketing role begins to enter truly uncharted waters. But ensuring 100% alignment with these three areas of the business is going to be mission-critical, as products continue to deploy faster, needs become more complex, sales becomes more competitive and executive and board-level expectations continue to increase.

Product marketing will begin to develop its own subspecialties. 

The idea of marketing specialists isn’t a new one — in fact, you’ll find them across virtually every other marketing function! Under demand generation, you’ll find growth marketers, events marketers and field marketers. On traffic teams, you’ll find writers, back-linkers and technical search engine optimization (SEO) experts. And strong creative teams are made up of copywriting, graphic design and web design pros.

Expect product marketing to follow suit, especially as resource investment and head count increase. Eventually, it won’t be uncommon for product marketing teams to be organized by discipline rather than product, with some product marketers specializing in tactical product launches, while others focus solely on value messaging, persona and market analysis, or resource creation and enablement.

Product marketing’s path to the C-suite will become clearer. 

It’s anecdotal, but product marketing’s path into the C-suite has felt hazy. And even today, it’s far more common to see chief marketing officers (CMOs) with traditional demand generation and brand backgrounds in the role than product marketers themselves.

There are a number of reasons for that. Brand marketing is the most visible part of a company, and demand generation is the easiest to measure and most closely tied to revenue. All are good reasons. But perhaps product marketing’s direct path to CMO is still less common because CMO isn’t actually the most natural C-suite seat for product marketing!

The emergence of the chief experience officer (CXO) role offers similar intersectionality to product marketing, focusing on every single customer and using related touch points across a company’s journey. The role is gaining traction. It’s been reported (subscription required) that three-quarters of executives see improving customer experience (CX) as a high priority. With many companies establishing a C-level position to oversee CX, we may soon reach a point in business where it’s accepted that every company needs a CXO.

The next generation of marketers will choose product marketing. 

While it’s common for many product marketers (including myself) to have fallen into the path by chance, this will soon cease to be the case. I believe the next generation of product marketers will choose product marketing.

Once the great unknown area of modern marketing teams, product marketing is finally getting its time to shine. The launch and growth of the Product Marketing Alliance, industry awards and global influencer lists have provided recognition like never before. It’s now only a matter of time until these product marketing leaders get promoted into the C-suite and take full ownership of their brands’ marketing and experiences.

This increase in awareness and influence is likely to catch the attention of up-and-coming marketing generalists as they prepare to choose a track to specialize in. And it should inspire the next generation of product marketers to raise the bar and push the profession to new heights.

City council adopts pilot program to track tobacco product marketing

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

The Columbia City Council voted Tuesday to take part in a pilot program that will gather data on tobacco retailers in the city.

The program is run by Counter Tools - Truth Initiative. Truth Initiative is an anti-tobacco advocacy group. According to a memo on the city council agenda, Counter Tools offers consulting, training and software tools to help gather data on retailers.

The program will run until Aug. 22.

City leaders have been considering several ways to regulate tobacco products in an effort, in part, to reduce the number of teenagers who use vaping products such as JUUL.

In November, the council reviewed a report from the Columbia/Boone County Board of Health asking the council to temporarily ban the sale of flavored e-cigarette products within city limits.

A group of people protested the idea of a temporary ban using the slogan "We vape we vote." They stated there are already preventative steps to keep teenagers from smoking.

The council ultimately decided to ask the board for a more in-depth report.

In December, the Youth Advisory Council presented recommendations to the council to reduce the number of youth abusing e-cigarette products. The group wanted the council to consider regulating flavored nicotine products and potentially look into a minimum price requirement.

"This is part of our own ability to have the technical resources to know who's selling tobacco and nicotine products within the community and are they licensed, and then providing a framework for community education," said ward 2 council member Mike Trapp.

He said the program will also give data that could help city leaders come up with new regulations if they feel it is necessary.

“So this will at least give us a bottom-line list of kind of who’s intros space and when we have that more information we might be able to design future proposals based on public health needs,” he said.

Three Key Marketing Partnerships To Focus On In 2020

All too often, marketers stay in the comfort of their marketing silo. But as any great marketer will tell you, it’s nearly impossible to effectively market and make an impact on the business if you don’t have strong cross-functional relationships throughout the organization.

When marketers do pick their heads up and think about building cross-functional relationships, they tend to focus primarily on sales. And it’s true: having tight alignment with sales is critical. But there are three other teams within the organization that must not be forgotten.

People Ops

While marketing’s primary job is to promote the product and drive leads for the sales team, another important function is to market the company for prospective job seekers. Part of attracting great talent involves partnering with your people operations (or human resources) team to build up the company’s reputation within your local community by applying for awards and participating in local events. For example, “best places to work” awards offered through your local business journal or newspaper are great opportunities to show off what makes your company unique.

But with the rise of remote work, recruiting is no longer designated to a single zip code. Social media properties like LinkedIn and Glassdoor are fantastic tools for attracting prospective talent from any locale, and a thoughtful recruitment marketing strategy can yield results with significant business impact. For example, when my team started a coordinated social promotion program in partnership with people ops, we saw an 84% increase in traffic and a 9% increase in job clicks month over month. This increased the number of inbound applications we were receiving, therefore decreasing our dependence on outside recruiters (who come with hefty placement fees).

Business Operations/Intelligence And Finance 

It’s also incredibly important for marketing to have a strong partnership with finance and business operations/intelligence. Those teams frequently share responsibility for reporting, and when it comes to attribution and the tracking of marketing’s impact on bookings and pipeline, it’s critical to ensure that there aren’t discrepancies. Similarly, a strong partnership with finance will enable marketers to more confidently justify the return on investment (ROI) of marketing programs.

While that sounds fairly straightforward, any marketer who has ever been in charge of reporting knows that aligning the data from finance and operational teams is often easier said than done. Staying in lockstep on an ongoing basis is really the only way to ensure that these metrics are mutually agreed upon and trusted across the company.

In addition, in some organizations, a centralized business operations function may also have responsibility for managing your customer relationship management (CRM) and/or marketing automation platforms. While marketing should retain control over the strategy behind lead scoring, nurturing and campaign setup, staying aligned with business operations around the execution of these items is necessary.

Product Management

And finally, staying in sync with product management is essential in order to be able to maximize your company’s development efforts. Product marketing, in particular, should stay in close communication with product management throughout the conception, development and launch of new features or functionality.

As product management defines what to build and partners with engineering to figure out how to build it, product marketing should define what the message is and partner with the rest of marketing to figure out how to promote it.

In order for that to work, product marketing and product management need to make sure they’re on the same page about what’s being built and how it delivers value to the customer. This bidirectional sharing of customer feedback is essential in order to keep the company’s finger on the pulse of the market and to make product launches a success.

Collaboration Is The Key To Success

Whether your company is made up of 30 people or 3,000 people, cross-functional collaboration is critical to take your marketing organization from good to great. It’s easy to get laser-focused on our day-to-day tasks, but if we don’t pick up our heads to connect with peers in other departments, it becomes significantly more difficult to make the meaningful change we all seek.