Product marketing as a function is still unfamiliar and confusing to many, and even some product marketers can't define it well.
The best way to think about it: product marketing is strategy.
It's basically the same thing. And we need to start explaining it that way.
Product marketers work to understand the market and what motivates customers. They choose the market segments to target. They determine what attributes the product needs to win against the competition. They design an effective go-to-market plan along with the required positioning and messaging.
That's essentially "where to play" and "how to win" - the pillar questions of strategy.
The classic business strategy focused on beating the enemy (competition) while marketing has always been about the customer. Too much of this, and you end up with sameness. Most customer insights are category-level insights, so everyone ends up solving the same problems quite the same way.
When competitors were added to the marketer's focus and customers to the strategist's focus, it has caused the jobs of marketers and strategists to converge.
Modern companies don't need both a marketing function and a strategy function. Product marketing is where marketing and strategy come together.
Michael is responsible for go-to-market strategy for New Relic products. When he’s not working closely with the sales, marketing and product teams at New Relic, you can find Michael advising organizations about DevOps, continuous delivery and observability, and running around on the soccer field.
Bianca has truly had a non-linear career path from elementary education to Social Customer Service pioneer and now product marketing. From tech to supply chain, she finds the best stories to tell.
Yaagneshwaran (Yaag) is an award-winning marketer, a best-selling author, and a TEDx speaker. Yaag is the Director of Marketing at Avoma, and is among the top 100 global marketing technologists, and is recognized by The World Marketing Congress as one of the Marketing Mavericks.
Charlene is VP & Head of Marketing at Fin.com, where she leads marketing for the rapidly growing Work Insights Platform backed by Coatue, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and First Round Capital. Formerly, she was Director of Product Marketing at Coupa Software. She has led go-to-market strategy and business operations for some of Coupa’s fastest growing businesses from pre-IPO through a 20x valuation growth.
Andrew supports an incredible team delivering on Coda's mission via Product Marketing, PR/Comms & Events, while taking over 100 feature improvements to market in 12 months. Privileged to work closely with Coda's Brand, Solutions, Partnerships, Product, Design, Engineering and Customers teams every day.
Clare has over a decade of experience in product marketing, branding, product and corporate strategy, and sales enablement. She is compelled to keep moving forward, and am driven by impactful work, and build strong relationships across an organization and beyond.
Varun is currently with Vymo as a product marketer. Previously, he's run his own creative agency catering to the enterprise market, worked as a marketing consultant with Series-A level startups. He's also the author of miracle-preneuring, a self-help book.
Peep is a former champion of experimentation and optimization turned business builder. Now he grows a portfolio of companies. Founder of CXL, Speero, and Wynter.
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April is a globally recognized leader in positioning.
She advises companies on new product introduction and market positioning, go to market strategy and how that intersects with marketing, product, sales and customer success.
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Marcus designs narratives, creates go-to-market strategy, and launches products at HubSpot. Prior to HubSpot he was at Google, bringing AdWords and YouTube products to market. He hosts a podcast for Product Marketers - The Product Marketing Experts, and is the author of Narrative Design for Business.
Louis fights marketing bullshit. He runs a popular marketing podcast, puts on workshops to help companies stand out, and consults on radical differentiation.
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Every product team wishes they are able to prioritize the right features for every sprint, so that their efforts lead to meaningful results. But how do you ensure that they are building the right features? Can we as product marketers help? Of course -- by making customer and prospect conversations the baseline intelligence across the organization. Through this session you will understand -- a) How to use conversation intelligence to get actionable data for product teams b) How to build asynchronous feedback loops instead of more meetings c) How to make customer intelligence collaborative cross-functionally for scalability.
Tracking metrics and KPIs in product marketing has always been a difficult task. Stakeholders come from all angles wanting you to measure what’s important to them, and sometimes you aren’t able to get the data you need in the first place. In this talk, Clare will walk through the steps to take, which metrics are important, the best tools to measure them, and how to get executive buy-in that you're working towards the right results for your company.
When your team ships at the start-up speed, how do you ensure you go to market with meaningful, empowering messaging that aligns with your brand values and drives user adoption? By adopting some simple strategies for crafting a Minimum Viable Message.
Building a solid foundation for Product Marketing means a solid outcome for your business, whether it’s a startup or around for 20+ years. From ground zero to a fully formed strategy, learn what it takes to stand a PMM function up: from initial auditing of what’s needed to setting up a VSEM framework to actually executing. We’ll also talk about the fun stuff: decks, decks and more decks. Oh and personas, GTM strategies, value props and the true teamwork it takes to make the PMM function successful and scalable.
Every product marketer dreams of their thing generating immediate brand recall and becoming a guaranteed line item in every customer’s budget. But if you’re trying to build a new market or redefine an existing one, it’s not easy to get there. How do you get your customers to think about a problem in a new way, or to want to solve a problem they didn’t even know they had? This talk will outline the importance of category design in building a sustainable market for your products, and lay out some tips for defining your positioning and creating messaging that make you stand out.
A common conflict that product marketers face is the constant push and pull from a sales team that just doesn't seem to be on the same page. However, this is completely avoidable. Effective product marketers should be in complete lockstep with sales, but this needs to start with alignment from the beginning. This session goes over the common pitfalls of collaboration between marketing and sales, how organizations and incentives should be designed to drive common goals, and what individual product marketers should do to achieve greater success with their sales counterparts. After all, everyone ultimately wants to win more and win bigger together.
101s are harder than we think. It’s not worth scaling if you don’t have a steady foundation to build upon. In this session, I’m going to deep-dive into some of the tactics we’ve employed to structure use-case verticalization, sales enablement and training, and working with marketing to drive top of the funnel.
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