Product Marketing Manager: Job Profile and Role

A product marketing manager or PMM is responsible for the successful promotion of a company’s products and services. To ensure this success, a product marketing manager is tasked with creating and implementing marketing strategies. A product marketing manager also needs to understand the needs and shopping behaviours of his or her company’s customers.

The following blog explores the job profile and role of a product marketing manager. We will give you the relevant information on the annual salary, potential employers, and the required qualifications and soft skills. Furthermore, we will take a look at the day in the life of a product marketing manager. We conclude this blog by giving you important tips for thriving as a product marketing manager.

Short Summary

• As a product marketing manager, you are in charge of promoting services, products, and brands of the company you work for.
• As a product marketing manager, you are tasked with overseeing all relevant marketing developments, activities, and trends.
• As a product marketing manager, you are responsible for looking after a team of marketing experts and liaising with other departments connected to the success of your product marketing management ventures.

Job description

A product marketing manager is responsible for promoting a company’s products and services. A product marketing manager can also be tasked with promoting a company’s brand, thus attracting new customers as well as binding existing customers to his or her employer. In short: a product marketing manager comes up with marketing strategies that function as a roadmap for a product, service or brand. Moreover, a product marketing manager often is the bridge between various departments, such as product development, sales, and marketing.

Responsibilities

• Content Creation
• Market Research
• Sales Enablement
• Customer Insights
• Product Positioning
• Customer Advocacy
• Performance Metrics
• Competitive Analysis
• Product Lifecycle Management
• Messaging and Communication

Different types of Product Marketing Managers

• B2B Product Marketing Manager
• SaaS Product Marketing Manager
• Technical Product Marketing Manager
• Consumer Product Marketing Manager
• Traditional Product Marketing Manager

Salary

UK-based product marketing managers are typically paid between £52,900 and £65,700 per year. The overall annual salary is affected by the employer, the company size, and the location. Currently, the highest annual salaries are being paid in the South of England, whereas northern salaries are considerably lower.

Note that usually, product marketing managers receive bonuses which amounts to about 10 per cent of their base salary. These bonuses can increase your annual salary as a product marketing manager.

Working hours

Typically, a product marketing manager’s working hours are between 35 and 40 hours, assuming the PMM works full-time. Additionally, the working hours are influenced by evening and weekend work as well as overtime during peak times, such as campaigns or product launches.

Note that you may have to travel as a product marketing manager, for instance, to attend (inter)national meetings and networking events. The time spent travelling increases your weekly working hours. Also, note that travelling will not be necessary every week.

Employers

A product marketing manager can find employment in any sector or company that specialises in products, services, and sales. The company size can range from startups and small businesses to medium-sized businesses and large corporations. Which employer is the right fit for you depends on your personal interests in product management. Note that the company size will likely affect your salary in this profession.

Qualifications

When you want to become a product marketing manager, you can usually choose between earning an academic degree or an advanced apprenticeship. Appropriate fields of study are business management, marketing, and digital marketing, whereas an advanced apprenticeship can be completed as a marketing executive.

Further qualifications for a product marketing manager can include a basic knowledge of copywriting and an advanced knowledge of analytical software, for example, Amplitude and Mixpanel.

Skills

As a product marketing manager, you need to have excellent communication skills since you interact with colleagues, superiors, suppliers, customers, and other departments daily. As a product marketing manager, you also need strong leadership skills. You are in charge of a team and this team both looks up to you and needs you to tell them what to do (at least, to a certain extent). These are only two important skills a product marketing manager should have.

Let’s take a look at a few more skills a product marketing manager should have or should develop.

Multitasking

As a product marketing manager, you are likely asked to perform various tasks at once. Strong multitasking skills are therefore vital if you want to succeed in this job. In fact, experienced product marketing managers consider this skill necessary to survive in this job. Being an excellent multitasker will enable you to juggle all the different marketing tasks in a harmonious and stress-free way – be it market research, customer service, or strategy planning.

Product Orientation

To be an excellent product marketing manager, you need to have an in-depth knowledge of both your products and your customers. Therefore, you need strong product orientation skills. These help you understand even the most minute details of your various products. By knowing how they work and which customer needs they address and fulfil, you can max out your products’ full potential and reach an even broader customer base.

Competitive Intelligence

Competitive intelligence means collecting, analysing and interpreting your competition’s data and information. With strong competitive intelligence skills, you can also collect, analyse and interpret data relevant to the environment in which your competition operates. This, in turn, helps you to make informed and sound decisions which will give your company a competitive advantage and a stronger market position.

Career Path

Your career as a product marketing manager starts with an entry-level position, such as a marketing assistant or junior marketer. After a few years of gaining relevant experience, you can get promoted to a more senior position. This can be the job of a product marketing manager. This position can set you up for even more senior and prestigious positions, for instance, as a brand director or an account director.

Educational Background

If you decide on an academic approach to the job of a product marketing manager, you need to earn a basic degree first, like a Bachelor’s degree. You can earn this in marketing, business management, or digital marketing. To progress to the position of a product marketing manager, you typically need to earn a postgraduate degree, such as a Master’s degree or even a PhD.

Note that you may have the option of a company graduate marketing management scheme. We recommend that you check with your employer whether this option is available. If so, you can benefit from fast-tracking your career to become a product marketing manager.

Besides the academic approach, you can advance to the position of a product marketing manager by completing an advanced apprenticeship, for instance, as a marketing executive.

Note that these two approaches require a certain number of GCSEs and the appropriate grades. Mandatory GCSE subjects tend to be Maths and English.

Gaining Experience

The job of a product marketing manager is an advanced position in the marketing field. Therefore, you will have left your entry-level times well and truly behind. In your first jobs as a marketing assistant or junior marketer, you have gained your first work experience. Gaining experience has set you up for being promoted to the product marketing manager position. And gaining experience will be the thread that runs through your career after you have been assigned this position. You will become better and thrive by having multiple successes and failures alike.

Continuous Learning

And both success stories and failures grant you important lessons, thus enabling you to continuously learn. In future, you will know how to stay successful. In future, you will also know what mistakes to avoid and which positives from said mistakes to implement to become an even better product marketing manager. Continuous learning also extends to staying on top of the latest market developments, marketing trends, and software updates.

A Day in the Life of a Product Marketing Manager

Certain tasks that you need to perform as a product marketing manager are par for the course, including starting your computer and checking your emails. However, being on top of your virtual communication is not what makes a day in the life of a product marketing manager special or even exciting.

In this section, we will explore the various tasks that make a product marketing manager’s working day a daily excitement.

Copywriting

Regardless of the rise of text-generating AI software, human copywriting is still needed to create unique and compelling content. As a product marketing manager, you will do some copywriting as one of your daily tasks. Unique content is essential to attract customers and sell products. May we suggest that your copywriting is supported by some very strong storytelling skills which will make the content you create even more fascinating and compelling?

Customer Research

Part of your job as a product marketing manager is to take your customers’ feedback on board. Customer feedback is also part of your customer research since it gives you valuable insights into your customers’ opinions on your company’s products and services. In turn, you apply the feedback to your products and services to improve them. Moreover, customer research includes data analysis which refers to your customers’ buying behaviour and needs.

Campaign Management

Since we live in a very digital (shopping) world, most products only sell with the help of successful and unique campaigns. As a product marketing manager, campaign management is one of your daily tasks. You need to monitor both ongoing campaigns and campaigns that are about to be launched. Campaign management also includes advertising on social media, email marketing, and PPC campaigns.

Tips for Thriving as a Product Marketing Manager

Do you want to progress to an even higher position than the one of a product marketing manager? Our following three tips for thriving as a product marketing manager will help you achieve your goals.

Let’s take a look at our three invaluable tips for thriving in your chosen profession:

• Interdepartmental collaboration
• Storytelling
• Compelling strategies

Interdepartmental Collaboration

As a product marketing manager, you have a team of marketing experts working for you. However, your team is only one important personal factor that has a strong influence on your job as a product marketing manager. To thrive, you need to collaborate with other departments, such as the financial department or the production department.

Storytelling

You know that one of your daily tasks is copywriting. We have already hinted at the fact that your copywriting should be supported by storytelling skills. In fact, improving your storytelling is a good way to thrive as a product marketing manager. By knowing how to tell an intriguing and emotionally compelling story, you will sell more products and attract more customers. Excelling at storytelling is therefore an important way to thrive as a product marketing manager.

Compelling Strategies

Your storytelling needs to include your strategies, be it social media campaigns or seasonal promotions. The more compelling a strategy is, the more likely that you will sell more and attract more customers. Compelling strategies will also divert more traffic to your company’s website and/or online shop. Therefore, coming up with compelling strategies is another valuable tip for thriving as a product marketing manager.

The Top 5 of the Most Important Things in Product Marketing

In marketing, there are five important P’s that are also important for the job of a product marketing manager. As a product marketing manager, you should, therefore, always keep these in mind: product, price, promotion, place, and people. This PM framework helps you come up with successful long-term product marketing strategies.

Frequently Asked Questions