How does your company define the difference between Marketing and Product Marketing teams and how do the responsibilities differ?

I have been fortunate to work for CMOs who have a firm grasp and strong working knowledge of all aspects of marketing. Often times you run into CMOs who only know brand, or only DG (or for that matter, only PMM), and the results can be disastrous. My past bosses have structured our marketing teams into three distinct pillars: Product Marketing, Demand Gen, and Corporate Marketing. The roles and responsibilities are quite clear, but keeping communication open is essential even within our own marketing function.

PMM owns GTM strategy, positioning & messaging, content strategy, product launch, and sales enablement. As the driver of GTM strategy, we are leveraged for our deep understanding of our personas to provide guidance to Demand Gen on everything from campaign themes, to email nurture, and website design. As a Product Marketing leader, I have also comfortable passing our messaging platforms, which provide core approved content, over to the Demand Gen team where they can craft campaign emails and web copy, tuning the core content as needed for their target audience or channel.

Similarly I have a tight collaboration with Corporate Marketing, which owns content marketing, external communications, and analyst relations. By mapping out the customer journey, PMM can craft a compelling content strategy, and thus align with the content marketing efforts of the Corporate Marketing team. And just like with Demand Gen, external communications and thought leadership are based on our core positioning and messaging, but adapted and extended as necessary. Last but not least, analyst briefings and inquiries are a team effort across Corporate Marketing, Product Marketing, and Product Management, with PMM generally owning the decks and demos.

With a strong product marketing foundation in place - e.g. persona definitions, journey maps, and messaging platforms - in combination with a system of trust, PMM's generally small footprint can scale effectively and our critical resources can be pulled in for content validation and approval on only the most critical pieces.

We have different types of product marketing teams:

1. Core product marketing - responsibile for working closely with engineering on influencing the product roadmap and developing the value proposition with associated assets to drive awarness, consideration and adoption of our solutions
2. GTM - responsible for training our field and partners to ensure they understand the value proposition and can clearly articulate it to drive consideration and adoption of our solutions 
3. Events - responsible for all first party and third party events where we will be present 

For us the Corp Marketing team is accountable for brand, demand generation, creative, and communication (PR/AR/etc.) along with execution of programs (e.g. project management on campaigns or tradeshow/event work). The content however comes from Product Marketing to deliver in these programs and events.  

In addition to above, since all content is so closely tied to how/where it shows up and who needs to see it, versus 10 yrs ago when product marketing would created a set of standard content and post on the website. I would recommend sitting down with Demand Gen team, PR/AR to figure out what is needed for a successful campaign and nurture stream. Then consider one or 2 core pieces of content - whitepaper, webinar or customer video -- which then can be further marketed across the campaign with derivative pieces. Kind of like the core piece becomes the "neuron" and each of the streams that emerge from it in social media banners, webinar based on the topic, a partner video on the topic - all reinforce the thought leadership/essence of the story. It helps to reinforce the message continuously and makes integrated marketing really come to life. 

I've seen that marketing teams are generally structured in this way -

Corporate Marketing - includes comms (press, analyst relations, internal comms, customer marketing), content marketing (defining a content strategy for each stage of the funnel, social media, blogs), brand (out of home ads, logos/colors, video production etc). This team is generally responsible for getting your company's name out there, make sure everyone knows who you are and what you do. Some of the relevant KPIs for this team are net promoter score, relevancy in significant analyst reports in your industry, blog performance (time on page, CTA lead gen, traffic source breakdown etc), brand awareness score etc.

Demand Generation - this is all about pipeline any typically includes Campaigns, Field Marketing, Integrated Marketing, Strategic Events, SDR, Customer lifecycle marketing (nurture for product usage and upsell opps). KPIs will vary per team but is largely related to inquiries, qualified leads, sales accepted leads, net new names, sales meeting set, and tofu pipeline (stage 1 and 2). This team is responsible for, you guessed it, bringing in demand so that everyone wants to purchase your products/services.

Digital - includes marketing growth teams, paid/organic ads, web, SEO. usually this team is heavy on the "test and learn" approach when introducing new messaging, web changes, targeted ads and aided vs unaided awareness strategies. KPIs for this team usually include impression, CTR (click through rate), cost per click, customer acquisition rate, customer lifetime value etc.

Product Marketing - the scope of product marketing teams varies a lot from company to company, but generally includes core product, tech marketing, solutions/industry marketing, pricing/packaging, competitive intelligence. in my experience, KPIs for product marketing is always tough but a couple of good points are tofu to mid funnel conversion, win/loss ratio (including deeper analysis into deals with competitors), analyst reports, product adoption rates, customer/revenue churn and free trial performance. this is the team that is responsible for getting deals closed.

Marketing Ops - all the tech - campaigns creation and performance reporting, intent data tools, tech/data management, email tools - tldr your entire martech stack. many of the KPIs mirror DG and digital teams, in addition to measuring revenue generated by channel and measuring in-house adoption of the martech stack.

One quibble with this question: I’d start with the assumption that product marketing is a part of the marketing team because product marketers are more marketers than product professionals. PMMs should work closely with the rest of the marketing team to ensure alignment across all outbound marketing.

I think the core responsibilities of product marketing are the following:

• GTM management. Lead the launch of new products and features.

• Sales enablement. Train your sales teams to be experts in selling your product.

• Market intelligence. Be an expert on your competition and how your product stacks up.

With this in mind, product marketing becomes the go-to expert for product and customer intelligence within GTM teams like marketing and sales. PMM creates the foundational materials to enable the rest of the marketing team to execute their core functions. For example, PMM should own the positioning and messaging that fuels the rest of the marketing organization.

The short answer is product marketing defines the go-to-market strategy to achieve a return on investment. The Marcom team executes the tactics in support of the GTM strategy.