How does a college grad, best position themselves to be a successful Product Marketer or Marketer in general? Any advice on getting your foot in the door?

Many of the best PMMs and marketers I've worked with are extremely analytical and/or have deep experience in advertising. If you're unable to land a dream PMM/marketing job directly, roles that give you experience working with data or advertising can be a great stepping stone. Some possible career paths to consider include:

• Consulting: Many of the top-tier consulting firms have great new-grad programs, and will give you a lot of experience relevant to PMM.

• Data Analyst: Working as an analyst will give you first-hand experience with large datasets, and deepen your analytical rigor. There's no better superpower than being able to pull your own data.

• Marketing/Brand Agency: You'll get a breadth of experience working across different types of campaigns and advertisers and build up an understanding of what types of strategies are most effective, as well as what kinds of industries are the best fit with your interests.

Well, first of all, congratulations on finding Product marketing so soon! I know many of us in the profession today didn't learn about PMM until much later in our careers and were "switchers" from product or marketing or even sales. That being said, there are not a lot of right out of college PMM positions available (with the exception of Google and Salesforce).

I would highly recommend building up your knowledge of all the functions that PMM has to consult on and work closely with. If you can get exposure through internships, reading articles, and networking to topics like sales, PR, social, paid ads, messaging, positioning, and product management it will help a lot.

Another thing I always recommend is putting together some projects where you showcase you understand what a PMM does. So, volunteering with a charity or startup to work on their webpage/messaging. Then, writing the experience up on a personal portfolio site. This can go a long way in interviews. :)

Best of luck!