As a Product Marketing professional, I’m often asked about the value our profession provides to organizations. Where does that value come from? And where are the swim lanes between Product, Product Marketing, and Marketing?

Short Answer: Product Marketing is relentlessly focused on removing barriers and capitalizing on opportunities to sustainably grow the organization. We sit between Marketing, Product, and Sales to unlock the earning potential of the full product portfolio.

Product Marketing is a relatively new function from the past 15 years. It has the highest concentration in the Technology and Financial Service sectors but is branching out to other industries with high rates of innovation and complex products.

Product Marketers come from various backgrounds, including Consultants, Product Managers, Marketers, Sales, and Strategy roles.

Typically, Product Marketers hold advanced degrees and are adept at working with data, research, and complicated offerings. As a group, we have high emotional intelligence, which helps us connect with customer audiences and internal stakeholders.

Here’s a bird’s eye view of Product, Product Marketing, and Marketing:

Product teams are responsible for figuring out what products and enhancements need to be built. Specifically, they solve for customers’ “jobs to be done.” Product Managers conduct voice-of-customer (VOC) research and typically consider building, buying, or partnering with another company to meet various needs within target customer segments. They oversee the entire product life cycle from ideation to product discontinuation.

If you think of a grocery store shelf, Product puts the product/solution on the shelf and decides all product sell-by dates.

Product Marketing figures out who is most likely to buy the products, who is involved in the buying process, what messaging will most likely appeal to buyers, influencers, and users, and where they’d like to find the product (online, in-person, through a channel partner, etc.). If there is a direct sales team or partners, Product Marketing provides sales materials and product training to prepare sales to sell. They also prepare marketing to target the right audiences with competitive, market, and behavioral insights to help Marketing focus on what they do best: drive engagement towards sales.

Depending on the industry and company dynamics, Product Marketing may focus more heavily on Product-related work like VOC research, go-to-market launches, and sales training. In other circumstances, Product Marketing may be considered a Marketing function with a focus on developing marketing strategy, writing content, and presenting at industry events. There are other models for Product Marketing, but as long as the focus is on growing the organization using data, storytelling, and strategy, it’s likely within the Product Marketing wheelhouse.

Product Marketing takes what’s available on the shelf (plus what’s soon to be released) and figures out how to make those products fly off the shelves as successful sales.

Marketing today is normally a well-oiled machine where marketers optimize awareness and engagement across a range of marketing channels (events, paid media, etc.). With near-instant metrics available on most channel performance, marketers can tweak programs to maximize the return on investment for marketing expenditures. Marketing develops the brand across all assets and interactions to create consistency around the experience between the organization and stakeholders (customers, regulators, media, etc.).

In the grocery store, they are the fleet of shopping carts taking products from the shelves to the ultimate point of sale at the cash register.

As you can imagine, there are areas within these functions that naturally overlap between Product Marketing and both Product AND Marketing teams. But there is more than enough revenue-driving work that Product Marketing can prioritize. Instead of starting turf wars, most Product Marketing teams define their swim lane based on where they can add the most value to the organization. There are many models from Product Marketing professional groups like Product Marketing Alliance and Forrester Decisions’ Portfolio Marketing to act as a starting point. I highly recommend building a program based on your company’s specific needs.

If you need any advice on how to build a Product Marketing function for your organization, please feel free to reach out to me.