What Product Marketing Is and What a Product Marketer Does

Product marketing is the process of communicating your product’s value to your target audience. 

Without it, your potential customers likely won’t know what your product is, let alone how it can help them alleviate their most tender pain points. (yes, product marketing is that important). 

It’s no wonder PMMs (Peanut M&Ms? Nope. Product Marketing Managers, but we love those too) are so crucial to software companies.

In this article, we’re giving you the low down on product marketing.

We give you:

• A product marketing definition 

• The deliverables it entails

• A brief history of product marketing 

• For all the aspiring PMMs reading this, we’re also covering the goals and responsibilities of a product marketer

Product marketing is the bridge between the product and the market, ensuring both sides understand each other—because they usually don’t. It involves figuring out what the market needs (beyond the buzzwords) and steering the product team in that direction. Then, it’s about translating product features into something the market actually cares about. Think of it as making sure the right problem meets the right solution without too many awkward silences.

However, many companies make the mistake of solely focusing on products going to the market. Instead, product marketing should also influence the creation of the product by taking insights from the market back into the product team.

When done masterfully, product marketing drives customer acquisition, retention, and overall product adoption. But how? What does product marketing actually produce? 

Product marketing connects the dots between what a product offers and what the market needs. And it’s not just about creating a buzz. It's about crafting key materials and strategies that fuel the entire customer journey, from awareness to digital adoption.

Deliverables that shape effective product marketing include:

• Messaging frameworks: Think of this as your product’s voice. It’s where you define the product’s unique value, its standout features, and the problems it solves. This is how you make your product talk to your audience. For instance, crafting messaging for in-app tooltips to drive feature discovery.

• Case studies: Nothing beats real-world success stories. These are your product’s happy customers, showing others just how great it is, making potential buyers say, “That could be me!”

• Buyer personas: Your product’s dream customers brought to life. These profiles help you zero in on exactly who you’re talking to, so every message feels personal, targeted, and spot-on.

• Demos and presentations: Time to shine! These interactive and engaging presentations put your product in the spotlight, making it easy for people to see how it works and why they need it. For example, interactive onboarding tours highlighting key product features to shorten activation time.

• Press and analyst briefings: Behind-the-scenes buzz. These carefully crafted briefings help you build credibility and get the word out through media and industry experts.

Sales enablement materials: Your sales team’s special tools. From pitch decks to product brochures, these options help them show off your product’s best features and close deals faster.

Each of these deliverables is like a puzzle piece that fits into the bigger picture. Together, they ensure your product’s story is clear, exciting, and consistent, from the first impression to the final sale. 

Product Marketing wasn’t always like this. 

In the past, technology products were sold through executive relationships and field sales teams. A new customer would receive a lot of sales attention and, once acquired, would transition to the onboarding/training and support teams (until renewal time). 

Sales were King, and every function supported it, including product marketing.

Now, Product is Queen, and customers value it more than relationships, services, or reputations. It’s the most important facet of a buying decision, and it’s the battleground on which competitors fight, catalyzed by lower switching costs and plentiful options.

Building the right product and delivering it effectively is more important than ever before. While we cannot rely on sales teams with inferior products,  we cannot stop at just building great products either.

Agile development is also a fundamental methodology for many SaaS teams, and continuous delivery is the new standard. Product is changing and updating as fast as ever, but people find it difficult to keep up. The new challenge in achieving PM fit and business success is driving adoption.

Product marketing is the key that can unlock this, and accordingly, the role of product marketing is changing. Responsibilities for Product Marketing Managers extend beyond launching and towards adoption, and there are questions on whether the function should continue to report to Marketing, Product, or Growth.

Of the dozens of Product Marketers we interviewed (from companies such as Gusto, Zillow, Front, and Hotjar), one common complaint was: “Colleagues don’t know how to work with Product Marketers.”

In most cases, product marketing suffers from being loosely defined, having limited executive ownership, few decisive KPIs, and almost no software budget.

What this means is:

1. PMMs need to better show their impact and exert strategic influence

2. Non-PMMs need to know how to leverage product marketing to drive success

We’ll cover both here, so you may wish to help your colleagues by sharing this article with them!

So why is product marketing suddenly becoming so important? It isn’t a new role, and it’s been around for years. 

Regardless, we’ll see the product marketing role become more refined and more consistent over the next five years. It’s a great time to be a Product Marketer!

Product marketing is very much the glue that brings together teams across the organization to enable the perfect match between product and market, and thereby create success for the organization.

As part of our interview, and survey sermarketingPorganizationuct Marketers, we found the following key metrics part of the PMM role:

As you can see, ‘Feature adoption’ and ‘New revenue’ are the most important aspects of a Product Marketer’s job. These goals are intrinsically linked for all product-first companies because feature adoption should drive greater value for the user, thereby increasing their willingness to pay.

Let's break down these responsibilities further.

PPMs ensure that customers understand and regularly use the new features you introduce. This process involves developing strategies and content, often in the form of case studies, tutorials, and webinars, to educate users on how to interact with brand-new features. 

In turn, higher feature adoption reduces churn and keeps your customers engaged with the product.

PPMs can greatly impact revenue by collaborating with your sales team to refine messaging, identifying market opportunities through extensive research, and communicating your product’s unique value to acquire new customers.

Doing so increases revenue directly and turns your ICPs into regular users.  

New users need to find value in your product as soon as they sign up. PPMs are the stars that push them to these “Aha” moments, whether it's through in-app UX or new feature announcements.

By creating onboarding experiences,  tutorials to guide users, and freemium models to get them using your product ASAP, PPMs can shorten activation time..

PPMs aren’t just about chasing down new customers. They also focus on creating cross-selling and up-selling strategies through identifying opportunities in your current customer base. Typical Product Marketing examples include target campaigns to promote premium features, upgrades, or even additional products. This expands revenue streams from your current users.

PPMs often collaborate with customer success teams, gather customer feedback, and analyze metrics to identify users at risk of churning. By identifying user problems, PPMs can strategize campaigns that focus on satisfaction and retaining customers.

Sometimes, we see teams treat their Product Marketers as an extension of their SaaS Marketing or Demand Generation teams. However, those aren’t the same things. If that’s news to you, here are their key differences to help you distinguish between them.

Traditional marketing is a broader function that is responsible for communicating value to prospects. This includes content marketing, performance marketing, brand strategy, and more.

Product Marketers should be a core component of the product development process and should work closely with Product and Growth teams within an organization.

There are some overlaps, like conducting market research, positioning, and messaging. This is why a good Product Marketing strategy involves both teams working closely together.

Product Marketing Managers can more efficiently do some of the tasks that Product Managers currently do on the side. Firstly, PMMs should bring the voice of the customer to the product team, who should then be responsible for translating it into user stories and features.

Secondly, PMMs should own product adoption. While this should be a collaborative effort with PMs (and should include UX improvements — why inputs from Product Marketers into product decisions are so important), Product Marketing should ultimately own the channels for communicating features.

In organizations that have created Product-Led Growth teams, there is often a mix of product management, product marketing, and design skills to help create and run experiments inside the product to drive adoption.

Sales enablement is a crucial element of B2B marketing. It equips the sales teams with the necessary resources and sales pitches to succeed. Sales enablement is one part of the Product Marketer’s role but it should not be the only part.

Within sales-led organizations, product marketers will do a lot of sales enablement, whereas, in product-led organizations, they will do more product growth work.

Both care about driving product usage and helping customers get as much value as possible from the software. However, PMMs focus on new features, new customers, and new revenue rather than existing features, customers, and revenue.

Customer Success teams also use channels like webinars, learning management systems, or knowledge base, while Product Marketers rely on in-product announcements and email marketing.

PMM positions typically require at least three years of experience in marketing. If you don’t have that experience, you need an entry point. Having one gets your foot in the door before you get your product in the hearts of customers. 

Some great entry points to help you rack up experience points include: 

🚪Associate PMM positions: Entails supporting senior Product Marketing Managers with tasks like market research, competitive analysis, and developing marketing strategies. From there, it’s smooth sailing to a standard or even senior PMM position. ⛵ 

🚪PMM peer positions: Sales, customer success management, marketing coordinators, or any position that lets you work directly with or under a PMM. This not only lets you learn the ropes but also helps you understand if marketing a product is the right role for you. 

Product marketing has a seminal role in the success of a product, and it will only grow in importance as we continue to embrace a product-first world.

To get ahead of the curve, your organization should clearly define the role and responsibilities of Product Marketing Managers and empower PMMs with clear accountability/ownership, sufficient tooling, and executive visibility.

Chameleon is software that helps Product Marketers manage feature adoption, user onboarding, and in-product engagement. So, if you’d like to become a better Product Marketer, you can also take our short course on in-product marketing.