What is Product Marketing?

What is Product Marketing?

Product Marketing is a discipline that’s difficult to define. It’s fairly new, its scope varies from one company to another and it’s one of the reasons people very often ask themselves what is Product Marketing. When I interact with my counterparts in other companies, we first share how Product Marketing is organized in their company and I often hear comments like:

"There’s confusion about what is Product Marketing.”

“It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of Product Marketing in our company.”

“My teammates don’t understand the value of Product Marketing, and we struggle to have an impact”.

If you ever thought the same way, look no more. In this article, my goal is to share what we learned since we’ve been building the Product Marketing team at an open-core software company like Strapi to help you understand the role and responsibilities, what product is Marketing, and how to get organized to be the most productive possible.

Product Marketing in an open-core company is NOT ONLY marketing.

Product Marketing is an incredibly cross-functional role. Product marketers are the connectors inside an organization. They are at the corner of the product, marketing, sales, and customer success and help connect all these teams.

However, only 5% of Product Marketers are 100% sure that the role of Product Marketing is fully understood by other teams and stakeholders within their organization - based on the State of Product Marketing research by the Product Marketing Alliance.

Credits: Rocketblocks.me

In proprietary software companies, their role mainly focuses on business value. Product Marketing concentrates on bringing the product to market, making sure key decision-makers, sellers, and customers understand it.

In a developer-first, product-driven company like Strapi, Product Marketing is even more specific as it’s deeply linked with product education. It could be renamed Knowledge-based Marketing! As the source code is open for all to see, copy and customize, and as all updates are transparent, developers are the most engaged audience and the most likely to discover the product. Therefore, they are at the forefront of the decision process on buying a new technology product. They need to be able to understand the code themselves and see the value they’ll get from using your solution.

On top of the scope described above, Product Marketers must educate this community reluctant to traditional marketing tactics on every technical aspect of the product. With transparent and honest communication, they aim to make them understand the updates, choices, architecture, and future evolution of the product as mentioned on the roadmap.

What do product marketers do?

Product Marketers are very cross-functional and their responsibilities include researching, positioning, launching, and driving the adoption of the product.

• They position the product and create compelling messages: based on research, product marketers create user and customer personas and their journeys to understand what message should be said to whom, when, and how.
• They create content to educate each persona about the benefits the product brings them, and how to get the most value out of it for their specific use case. To do so, their product knowledge must not only include a deep understanding of how the product works but also how it has been built and how it can possibly be customized.
• They launch the product: they create the go-to-market strategy and execution plan to drive product awareness and adoption within and beyond the Strapi community. This includes collaboration with Product for rolling out the release plan, Sales to enable teams with relevant resources, User Success for documentation and support materials.
• They support product adoption and educate users: after launch, they continue to monitor the launch performance and first feedback from the community to understand the barriers to adoption, gather insights to optimize the product, and strive to accelerate adoption, by helping content creators to release educational tutorials and videos.

If you want to know how it’s like at Strapi, listen to Anastasiia, Product Marketing Manager, to know more! You could also have a read at our Handbook where we explain our ins and outs, in the most transparent way possible. Stay tuned, we’re regularly adding more pages in there.

Are you a product marketing expert?

We are currently recruiting a Technical Product Marketing Manager to join us on our mission! If what you read before excited you, come and join us here!