WHAT DOES A DIRECTOR OF PRODUCT MARKETING DO?
Published: Dec 03, 2024 - The Director of Product Marketing conducts ongoing market research to identify opportunities and threats across the portfolio while developing business cases for the introduction of new products and services. The role collaborates with the Customer Success team to align product strategies with customer needs, addressing gaps and weaknesses. Additionally, it focuses on developing robust roadmaps, pricing strategies, and compelling sales materials to promote value propositions and ensure consistent product marketing alignment across the portfolio.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Director of Product Marketing
1. Director of Product Marketing Duties
- Product Messaging and Positioning: Defining key product messaging and positioning
- Market Research: Conducting market research and socializing learnings across the organization
- Persona Development: Developing buyer and user personas
- Sales Enablement: Overseeing and creating the sales materials that support the sales team to win business and explain value proposition to each key audience throughout the customer journey
- Feedback Management: Developing tight feedback cycles between Sales, Customer Success, and Product
- Customer Advocacy: Partnering with Product and Customer Success to champion the voice of the customer and customer empathy-driven decision-making
- Cross-functional Collaboration: Facilitating cross-functional collaboration across sales, product, and the broader marketing team
- Pipeline Development: Partnering effectively with VP of Demand Generation on pipeline development
- Product Demos: Designing effective product demos
- Content Strategy: Partnering effectively with Content Strategy teams to develop topics for strategically aligned content and thought leadership
- Analyst Relations: Owning analyst relations (when applicable)
- Market Segmentation: Researching and identifying new market segments or broader product opportunities
2. Director of Product Marketing Details
- Product and Market Fit: Leverage this knowledge to collaborate with Product and Sales counterparts to define/refine product and market fit
- Project Management: Manage planning and execution of complex offerings through cross-functional teams inclusive of Epsilon and Publicis
- Thought Leadership: Developing market and category thought leadership POVs and market activation plans
- Collaboration: Collaborate with Website, Content and PR teams on planning and activation of marketing and thought leadership
- Product Positioning: Develop product positioning, value proposition and key benefits that differentiate products in the market, and equip the Sales team with a benefits-driven narrative for how products solve client challenges
- Sales Collateral: Develop compelling sales collateral to support the selling and ongoing usage of products across the full funnel, including sales narratives, case studies, white papers, one-sheets, blog posts, videos, and more
- Business Information Hub: Be the one-stop-shop to the business for information on product, target market, competitors, and customers
- Strategic Advisory: Act as a strategic advisor to Demand Generation, Communications, Content Marketing, and Analyst Relations to drive plans that positively impact business goals
- Marketing Planning: Develop annual marketing plans through collaboration with marketing leadership, product management, and business stakeholders
- Industry Representation: Represent Thales as a subject matter expert and thought leader at tradeshows and industry events, and with the press
- Relationship Building: Build strong relationships across the organization in order to drive product and service awareness and alignment
- Talent Development: Attract, develop and retain talent capable of meeting current and future needs of the function and organization
3. Director of Product Marketing Responsibilities
- Market Research: Perform ongoing market research to identify future opportunities and threats for each area of the portfolio
- Business Case Development: Develop business cases to support the introduction of new products and services into the portfolio
- Customer Collaboration: Collaborate with the Customer Success team to map customer requirements to product strategy, identify gaps and weaknesses, and develop plans to address
- Investment Prioritization: Prioritize areas for investment that provide the highest return based on customer needs and competitive analysis
- Value Proposition: Identify the value propositions of each solution and validate the assumptions with the market
- Go-to-Market Strategy: Identify the target market and develop go-to-market plans for each product/service in the portfolio
- Roadmap Development: Develop robust roadmaps for each solution based on market needs
- Business Models and Pricing: Develop and constantly refine new business models and pricing strategies for new products and services
- Positioning Strategy: Develop positioning strategies for each product/service in the portfolio
- Sales Enablement: Develop compelling sales materials that clearly and effectively promote value propositions
- Product Harmonization: Harmonize the product marketing approach between each product and service in the portfolio
- Strategic Sales Support: Support strategic sales activities with subject matter expertise
- Stakeholder Engagement: Persistently interact with customers, partners, and key stakeholders to ensure solutions and roadmap validity
4. Director of Product Marketing Job Summary
- Marketing Leadership: Act as the head of marketing for Church Management Software solutions
- Cross-Functional Collaboration: Working closely with teams across marketing, product, sales, and customer success to execute business/revenue objectives
- Market Analysis: Understand and define the total addressable market, inclusive of buyer personas and market segmentation as the basis for marketing strategy
- Go-to-Market Strategy: Build the go-to-market strategy and architecture for how we position solutions to the market, driving consistent messaging and positioning across all marketing and sales channels
- Messaging and Thought Leadership: Develop compelling messaging and thought leadership topics to increase awareness of ChMS brands and position them as market experts
- Integrated Marketing Plans: Own the development and execution of integrated marketing plans to acquire new customers and grow revenue from existing customers, leveraging experts from the demand generation and marketing operations teams
- Sales Enablement: Partner with sales and sales development leaders to understand competitors and build sales tools to help win deals
- Prospecting and Lead Nurturing: Evolving prospecting tools and tactics, lead nurturing tactics, pitch decks, and pricing strategies
- Sales Training: Conduct regular training sessions to continuously improve sales effectiveness
- Marketing Optimization: Continuously optimize all marketing efforts based on quantitative analytics and data-driven decisions
- KPI Tracking and Reporting: Track KPIs across the marketing and sales funnel and provide reports and recommendations to leaders on a regular basis
5. Director of Product Marketing Accountabilities
- Brand Strategy: Create brand and marketing strategies for Evernorth’s Clinical and Medical Benefits Management Solutions offerings partnering closely with business, product and go-to-market leaders
- Marketing Strategy Management: Manage marketing strategy and content needs
- Content Requirements: Identify channel and stakeholder content requirements
- Agency Liaison: Liaison to COEs and/or agencies to direct execution of marketing content across a variety of channels and stakeholders
- Content Management: Manage content processes, oversee/partner with COE or agency content production requirements
- Sales Enablement: Work with capability area sales team to define product training, support material, and tool requirements
- Marketing Planning: Responsible for developing business and product-level marketing requirements, GTM plan, and priorities
- Customer Engagement: Create and execute robust customer engagement strategies that drive solution adoption, utilization, and ongoing engagement
- GTM Coordination: Coordinate to ensure product-level marketing needs are identified and incorporated into GTM efforts
- Omnichannel Campaign Management: Responsible for designing and managing oversight of omnichannel marketing campaigns delivered by COE or agency vendors
- Demand Generation: Manage demand generation
- Lead Generation and Sales Integration: Liaise with sales teams to guide and improve lead generation, conversion, scoring, integration, processes, and reporting
- Channel Innovation: Lead channel innovation and emerging channel identification to influence future campaign planning, allocations, strategy, and execution