4 minute read
Learn the hard and soft skills that product marketing managers need to succeed in their careers.
Product marketing is a challenging and engaging job that balances marketing, product, and strategic communication. Product marketers need the right blend of skills to develop thoughtful strategies and execute effective tactical marketing to succeed in this role.
Let’s dive in to understand the essential hard and soft skills for a career in product marketing.
- What does a product marketing manager do?
- Hard skills for product marketers
- Soft skills for product marketers
What does a product marketing manager do?
A product marketing manager develops and executes marketing strategies for products. They work with product management, development, and marketing teams to ensure their marketing efforts speak to the product’s unique value proposition for the target audience.
Product marketing brings finished products to market and promotes them throughout their life cycle, from growth to maturity and decline. Their responsibilities include:
- Crafting go-to-market strategies.
- Supporting the product after release.
- Promoting new features or to new audiences.
- Communicating with customers through deprecation.
Product marketing managers must be knowledgeable about marketing trends, tactics, and KPIs. Their efforts must align with the broader goals set by product managers, ensuring that marketing strategies support major product goals. In turn, those product goals must support organizational goals of acquiring or retaining customers, driving sales, and growing revenue.
Hard Skills for Product Marketers
Product Positioning: The process of identifying how the company wants the market to think and feel about your product and plans for how to communicate that. With product positioning, product marketing managers pinpoint how their product solves market problems. Product positioning is the “angle” a product’s marketing will take to communicate why a product is the best solution available.
Data Analysis: Analyzing data and interpreting results are essential tasks for any product marketer. They may analyze quantitative data sets, such as customer satisfaction surveys or third-party market research, and qualitative data sets, like customer interviews. To accomplish this, they may use software to analyze and visualize findings. A successful product marketer must leverage critical thinking to derive insights, communicate them effectively to stakeholders, and use these insights to inform data-driven, results-oriented marketing campaigns.
Go-to-market Strategy: A go-to-market strategy is a complete plan for how a company positions, prices, and promotes a product to its target market. Go-to-market strategies are distinct from marketing strategies because they focus on bringing the product to the target market.
Lifecycle Marketing: Lifecycle marketing involves strategically engaging with markets to drive sales, acquire new customers, and retain existing customers through all stages of a product’s life cycle. This type of product marketing extends beyond the go-to-market strategy to support products and customers after launch through growth, maturity, and decline. Product marketers work closely with product teams to understand upcoming features and releases. This ensures that all teams and messaging are aligned throughout the product life cycle and that customer-facing marketing supports the product appropriately at every stage.
Marketing Campaign Strategy: A product marketing campaign includes the strategic and tactical steps required to market a product, including prioritizing marketing channels, developing messaging for those different channels, creating assets for the campaign, and collaborating with channel-level SMEs such as content marketers, paid media buyers, or event marketers to ensure that all tactics are executed correctly on those channels.
Channel Mix Selection: Channel mix involves selecting specific marketing channels for product marketing campaigns. These channels might include digital marketing channels like paid search or organic social media; mass media buys such as TV ads or OOH media, and interpersonal and event marketing.
Budgeting: For product marketing managers, budgeting involves allocating resources and monetary budgets to different projects or marketing channels. This skill also requires prioritization to support the most effective channels and tactics for the product’s goals.
Soft Skills for Product Marketers
Empathy: Empathy is a critical skill for product marketers. They need empathy to understand the needs and concerns of their market and to put themselves in their markets’ shoes to develop product positioning and messaging strategies. Empathy also supports communication and collaboration because it helps you anticipate others’ needs, feelings, and questions.
Organization: While product marketing managers are not officially project managers, they are often responsible for bringing projects and campaigns to the finish line. To do that, you need strong organizational skills to monitor deliverables, meet deadlines, and ensure that all teams operate with the same information and work toward the same goal.
Communication: Communication is a crucial skill for product marketers because they need to be able to clearly articulate market needs, product positioning, and marketing strategy and goals. Communicating clearly and adapting communication to fit the needs and preferences of the intended audience is essential. As product marketing managers are often responsible for crafting creative briefs, developing marketing pitch decks, and sharing written project updates, written and oral communication skills can help ease the day-to-day work of product marketing.
Storytelling: Storytelling is essential for product marketing, as it helps customers connect emotionally with the product by framing it as a solution to their problems. Data storytelling, in particular, helps marketers explain complex information in a way that is easy to understand, engages the audiences, and rallies support for common goals.
Collaboration: Product marketing managers coordinate complex, fast-moving marketing projects. Minimally, they coordinate with product managers, sales teams, marketing SMEs, and executive stakeholders to successfully launch a product. Marketing products through their life cycle may also require collaboration with engineering, development, and customer service teams.
Prioritization: Prioritization can be challenging when many competing deadlines, priorities, and deliverables exist. Product marketers not only need to prioritize certain messaging for their target audiences, but they also need to prioritize marketing resources and budgets to get that messaging out to the market. Identifying which projects and tactics will support business goals, setting marketing priorities accordingly, and adapting strategies and tactics to match those priorities can help keep product marketing relevant and accurate.
Product Marketing vs. Product Management Skills
How are product marketing skills different from product management skills? This question comes up frequently among product professionals. The simple answer is that product management is responsible for creating the products, and product marketing is responsible for promoting those products.
Both roles require a blend of hard and soft skills, and while their day-to-day responsibilities may differ, there is significant overlap in the skills they require and how they use those skills. Ultimately, product managers and marketers have distinct roles but collaborate closely to achieve shared business goals.
