Designing your company website can be a challenging proposition. You’ve got to juggle the expectations of many stakeholders, and you can often hit obstacles that prevent new ideas from emerging.

I was the design manager for a large company website for nearly six years, and during that time, I found myself losing perspective of what our target audiences really needed.  Call it “tunnel vision.” When you work on the same website, it often helps to take a step back and think through new approaches. That’s the purpose of this blog post.

What follows are some tips, tricks, shortcuts and general advice for creating great website design. Can you try any of these to take your web design to the next level?

1) Design in shades of gray, then add color

If your web designer creates wireframes prior to visual designs, then you know the value of starting with shades of gray.  Turn your wireframe into a grayscale visual design, add your photography, then carefully add color to design elements one at a time.  

This will prevent an “overdesigned” website and help to place prominence on just the items that need it.

2) Use Keynote (Mac) to create rapid page prototypes

You don’t need Photoshop to create rapid prototypes of web pages, landing pages, call to actions or other web interface elements.  There’s an entire underground movement around using Keynote (that’s Apple’s version of PowerPoint) to create mockups.

There’s even an online repository containing user interface design templates for wireframing, prototyping and testing mobile and web apps in Keynote.

3) Add web fonts to your corporate style guide

It’s 2015, and if your corporate style guide doesn’t include web fonts, then you need to look into adding those so your website has the same governance that corporate documents and collateral does.

If you haven’t looked into this yet, Google Fonts is a great place to start. Find a suitable web font and define usage in your corporate style guide so you use it consistently online

4) Bury those social media icons

You did all that work to get people to your website, and yet you’re inviting them to leave? That’s what you’re doing when you place social media icons in a prominent location of your website, like in the header. Bury the icons in the footer.

If people are on your website, you want them to stay, learn and perhaps inquire about your services, not check out company picnic photos and bowling outings on Facebook. Social media should send people to your website, not vice versa.

5) Ditch the slideshow/carousel

When the homepage slideshow/image carousel came into fashion, it was a way to get lots of information on the first page of your website. The problem is that most people don’t stay on the page long enough to experience all of the tiles/messages.  

What’s more is that the messages and images usually aren’t relevant to your prospect’s first visit. What’s the one thing a visitor should take away from their website visit? Promote that one thing — usually what your company does in layman’s terms — and ditch the rest.

6) Simplify navigation

Reducing your visitors’ options might seem counter intuitive, but it can actually help guide people to your most productive content. Rather than overwhelming your website visitors with links to every page, simplify your navigation.

Eliminate dropdown menus and especially multi-tier dropdown navigation that only the most skilled mouse user can navigate, and go a step further by reducing the number of links in the header or sidebar of your website.

7) Remove sidebars

The sidebar has been an especially popular web design trend for the last ten years, especially on blogs. Many companies are finding that when they remove sidebars from their blogs, it encourages reader attention to the article and the call to action at the end.

Removing the sidebar on our company blog has increased the number of clicks on call to action graphics over 35%.

Try implementing this tactic by checking out the new Content Hub theme collection on the Envato marketplace.

8) Get color inspiration from nature

Struggling to find the perfect color combination for your website or a call to action graphic? Get your inspiration from nature. You can either use your own camera to photograph natural wonders around you or find landscape photos on the web, the use a color picker to select a color. Nature’s color palette never fails.

9) Step away from the computer

I believe that good design starts with great planning. Getting your ideas down on paper or on a whiteboard can help you iterate through a design, refining it and adding detail as you go along. Drawing on a whiteboard can also make the design process collaborative and allow other team members to give input.

It’s also easy to erase pencil from paper or marker from a whiteboard and make quick changes, and once you have something concrete to work with, snap a photo with your mobile phone and get to work on screen.

10) Use Pinterest to create mood boards

When you’re putting together inspiration and ideas for a new website, or you’re redesigning part of your website, you need a way to collect your inspiration in one place for future reference.

Did you know that you can use Pinterest to create a mood board of your favorite images, colors, layouts, patterns, sample websites and concept material? Another great advantage of using Pinterest is that other designers create and share mood boards too, and they’ve already curated a ton of resources that you can use.

11) Increase your font size

Typography is incredibly important in web design. Text is hard enough to read on a computer screen, so you have to make the important things stand out.

One way to do this is to increase your font sizes, especially for headings and important blocks of text. Consider increasing the size of your normal font, too.

12) Use white space

It may be hard to believe that using whitespace is a hack, but I evaluate websites every day that could use more whitespace. Not every blank area of the screen needs to be filled.

Even though whitespace and simplicity are in style right now, too many companies try to cram everything into a small space, or worse yet, “above the fold.”  Give your design room to breathe, and your website visitors will be able to find things easier.

13) Use the squint test

Want a quick way to learn what’s most prominent on your website? Back away from your computer screen and squint.  Most everything will become blurry, and only the larger, colorful, more prominent features will be noticeable.

It’s said that this technique helps a designer understand what a first-time visitor may notice when he scans your website. Will the visitor notice what’s most important?

While this is a big blog post about little design hacks, I’m sure you have some hacks of your own that I haven’t thought of here. What’s your favorite design hack? Why not share it in the comments below? Let’s see how many you can add!

The post 13 Quick Tips to Improve Your Web Design Skills appeared first on ProdSens.live.

What comes to mind when you think of SEO?

“Permalink” probably isn’t the first or second thing, maybe not even the 10th thing.

The truth is, permalinks and SEO have a lot more in common than you may realize, and — when done correctly — can play an important role in improving your website’s ranking. Luckily, they are also simple to master.

Let’s get into how permalinks work, how to create them, and set them on WordPress.

Let’s break down this post’s permalink.

You first have your domain (and subdomain in some cases) which is where your website lives. It’s followed by the path, which indicates the location of the page. In this example, the article is located under the “Marketing” category.

The last part of your URL is the slug — an essential part of your permalink and vital for SEO because it tells search engines how to index your site.

Each component creates a permanent link leading to a specific page on your website that is unlikely to change, hence the name “permanent.”

When you don’t customize your URLs using permalinks, you get a randomized ID. The problem is that this isn’t attractive to site visitors and isn’t optimized for search engines.

Let’s say you’re blogging about sponsored tweets and their value. Would you rather have the URL look like this:

yourdomain.com/sponsored-tweets-guide

Or like this:

yourdomain.com/post-id?=5726fjwenfkd

Probably the first one, right?

Great slugs should include the keywords targeted in the post. Take our example above: “sponsored-tweets-guide.”

From this permalink, the reader (and Google) know the page is a guide to sponsored tweets and targets the keyword “sponsored tweets.” This makes it easier for readers to find and share your content.

In addition, using keywords with high monthly search volume (MSV) in your slug can help you increase your ranking.

That’s why when using a content management system (CMS) like Content Hub or WordPress, you want to think about your permalink structure early on in your web development process.

What’s the difference between a permalink and a URL?

A URL is a web address that directs to a page or file. It can include a domain name only, or also a path, slug, and other information depending on the page you are accessing.

On the other hand, a permalink refers to a specific URL structure — a tool made popular by bloggers for sharing and SEO purposes. While every permalink is a URL, not every URL is a permalink.

The Best Permalink Structures

With several permalink structures to choose from, think about your content and your audience to determine what format will work best.

For instance, a news site can greatly benefit from having a slug that includes a date and title. This lets readers know quickly by scanning what the post is about and when it was written.

On the flip side, if you manage a blog that prioritizes evergreen content and has pages that get constantly updated, you’ll likely want to avoid having any dates in your titles.

That can signal to readers that your content is old and therefore, irrelevant. Instead, have a simple slug that only includes your article title.

It’s all about using a structure that will benefit you (and your users) in the long run. Once you decide on a permalink structure, you can set it up in your CMS.

How to Make a Permalink

To make a permalink, all you need is:

• Your domain name
• Your slug
• Your path (if you have several topic categories and want to organize your content)

Then, there are a few best practices to keep in mind when deciding on your permalink structure:

• Keep it short – Avoid articles like “the,” “a,” “an” and create a slug that’s a shorter version of your title. E.g.: If your article is titled, “How to Create an Instagram Story,” your slug can simply be /Instagram-story.
• Include your main keywords – Optimize your slug by including your keywords. Make sure the keyword you use directly relates to the content on the page.

Now, in terms of where you go to create your permalink, that’s typically on your CMS or Website Builder — such as WordPress, Wix, HubSpot Content Hub, and Drupal. The ideal time to do this is shortly after developing your site but before any posts go live. However, you can also do this at any point.

If you decide to change old URLs to reflect your new structure, be sure to update all backlinks or set up redirects for those pages.

So, you’re probably wondering how to optimize a permalink for WordPress. We’ll cover that next.

Using Permalinks with WordPress

When you create a post in WordPress, the permalink will not be optimized unless you have already set the structure. Otherwise, it will look like a random ID.

You can find the permalink on the page post while you’re editing, as seen in the example below.

Changing permalinks is a fairly simple process, and you won’t need to install plugins to do so. You can select from a few structures or customize your own.

More on this in the next section.

1. Open “Settings” and click on ‘Permalinks.”

Image Source

The first step in structuring your permalink is to open the “Settings” section of your WordPress dashboard. This should bring you to a list of options with various subheadings.

Once you click on this option, you’ll be taken to a screen with a variety of options to choose from. Depending on your preference of how you want your post to be archived and searched, you can pick the one that most aligns with your goal.

2. Choose a permalink structure option.

Image Source

Here are the different choices you’ll have and what they mean:

• Default — Avoid this default option if you’re looking for maximum SEO value. It’s the post identification number, with no other information.
• Day and name — This option sets up the slug to be the day the post went live and the name of your post. A good reason to use this is if you have multiple posts of the same name but want the differentiator to be the date it was posted.
• Month and name — The same as the previous option, this time with the month being displayed. This is a great option if you have a monthly column, such as a “Favorites” or “Best Of.”
• Numeric — Numeric is another choice that’s safe to ignore, as this structure is all numbers and provides little SEO value. If you’re archiving posts numerically, as a way to look back and see previous posts, numeric is the choice for you.
• Post name — Choosing this route is an okay method for SEO, but not the best, as Google likes to focus strictly on keywords when ranking posts.

Learn more about that “custom structure” option next.

3. Consider creating a custom permalink structure.

If you’re not too excited about the structures WordPress offers, you can create your own permalink structure in minutes.

You’ll create a formula for your permalink structure, and every time a post goes live, it will follow that formula.

For example, let’s say you have a lifestyle blog and a travel category (i.e., path) under which you post about your latest vacations.

If you wanted to set the structure to be the category followed by the year and post name, here’s what you would put in the box:

/%category%/%year%postname%/

Image Source

A backslash separates each custom structure, and each tag starts with the percent sign.

You can find all of the structure tag options available to you on WordPress here.

Change a Permalink Without Hurting SEO

If you decide to change a permalink, it’s important to do so with care. This is because it will affect both the internal and external links to the page.

Make sure to set up a 301 redirect. This notifies your visitors and Google that your page has a new location. 

Google will keep track of both the redirect source (the old permalink) and the new redirect target (the new permalink) — and will eventually update the new permalink in search results.

Without a 301 redirect, your website will have broken permalinks and missing URLs — which may create a negative user experience. Search engines, like Google, will also lower your organic search ranking to prevent sending visitors to broken pages.

When creating permalinks, the main thing to keep in mind is focusing on SEO (i.e., keywords) and user experience. They’re the virtual key (pun intended) to making sure your content is found by the people you want to reach.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in October of 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

The post Permalinks: What They Are & How to Structure Them for Max SEO Value appeared first on ProdSens.live.

Google rich snippets. What the heck are those?

They’re these awesome things that can help you improve your website’s SEO and generate more site traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs), and in this article, I’m going to tell you how to set them up.

Let me first pose a question to you: Have you noticed that when doing a Google search, certain listings just look a little sexier than others? For example, if you were doing a search for “apple pie,” which of these listings when you rather click on?

I’ll bet you chose option #2. If you didn’t, you must really not like apple pie.

Between the thumbnail image and the five-star rating scale, what are these sites doing to make their Google listings include this extra media? The secret to these fancy pieces of information are rich snippets, which these websites have optimized for using the HTML of their website pages. 

Google rich snippets — also called “rich results” — extract information from your website to display on your site’s listing in the search results, in addition to the typical page title, page URL, and meta description.

Each search result is guaranteed to display these three pieces of information, making up an individual snippet. The thinking is, the more information included in a search result’s snippet, the more likely users are to click on that result. With enough structured data on the page, you can earn a rich snippet.

Rich snippets are often overlooked in businesses’ SEO strategies because they are more difficult to implement than traditional on-page SEO. But with how complex Google search results look today, it would be worth your while to spend a little time learning how to do this. Adding this content-rich information to your Google search listings draws the eye and can increase your listings’ click-through rates, even when you’re not ranking in the #1 position.

There are a few options for how to install rich snippets, but I’m going to show you the easiest method: using microdata.

Keep in mind this process won’t guarantee that you’ll get a rich snippet. But giving these details special treatment can dramatically increase your chances of enhancing the appearance of your search result — and, in turn, the traffic you get from it.

1. Identify which details you want Google to focus on.

Your webpage’s topic and format will dictate which types of information you want Google to display in its search results. Are you writing an article? An event page? A book review? A product page? Here are some examples of details included in rich snippets for the several types of snippets available to you:

• Article: You can add tags for the article title, author, meta description, publish date, featured image, and more.
• Restaurant pages: You can add tags for food items, item prices, item descriptions, item images, item calories, and more.
• Product page: You can add tags for product names, product ratings, product prices, product availability, product images, and more.
• Event page: You can add tags for the event name, event speakers, event schedule, event dates, and more.
• Recipe: You can add tags for recipe rating, ingredients, image of final product, cooking duration, total calories, and more.

2. Define your webpage using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.

So, how do you create the tags listed above? Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as writing “Here’s the product’s price” in your webpage’s HTML and expecting Google to take the hint. To properly communicate this information to Google, the company offers a handy tool for creating structured datasets based on the type of webpage you’re publishing. It’s called the Structured Data Markup Helper. Use it here, and see it below.

As you can see, above, you’ll start by selecting the attribute that best describes the content you’re creating. Then, at the bottom of this page, enter the existing URL of the webpage to which your content has been published. (Note: To use this tool, you’ll publish your content first, and then retrieve the URL so you can structure your data accordingly.)

3. Create microdata for your webpage using your selected data type.

Microdata is a way to label content to describe what this content represents. An event, for example, has all sorts of information associated with it, including the venue, starting time, name, and category. You can then use a bit of code to basically tell Google, “Here’s my event and the most important information people would need to know about it.”

How Microdata Can Be Used

Microdata wraps your text in very simple HTML tags, such as or

tags, to assign descriptive terms to each bit of information. Here’s an example block of HTML showing some basic information about me — the author of this article — below.

My name is Diana Urban, and I was born and raised in New York. I’m on the marketing team at HubSpot, an all-in-one marketing software company in Cambridge, MA.

See those

tags at the beginning and end of the copy, above? This denotes text that is in standard paragraph style. There’s nothing unique about the text above compared to any other paragraph in this article. This makes it hard for Google to interpret it the way you might want it to be interpreted.

Now, here is the same HTML tagged with microdata:

itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Person“>
My name is title“>Head of Prospect Marketing at Creating Your Microdata

Once you’ve selected your data type in the previous step, you’ll be taken to a page where you can automatically associate certain details of your webpage with microdata that describes those details. To create microdata for an article’s author, for example, you’ll highlight the author’s name on the webpage — which Google projects on the lefthand side of the tool — and select “Author” in the dropdown that appears. See how this looks, below.

 

4. Create new HTML from this microdata.

Next, you’ll create new strings of HTML from the microdata you created in the previous step. Once you’ve finished assigning each part of your webpage a proper tag, click the red “Create HTML” button on the top-righthand corner of the tool, as shown below.

5. Tag your content with this microdata.

With your HTML successfully created, you’ll see every tag you created in step 3, above, listed in a block of code you can then insert into your article’s HTML. You’ll insert this code in your content management system (CMS).

Google recommends adding the HTML it created for you into the “head section” of your article’s HTML. If you use Content Hub, you’ll find separate HTML boxes designed just for this occasion, as shown below.

Learn more about adding HTML to webpages in HubSpot Academy.

Want another way to tag your HTML with various pieces of microdata? Review the different examples of rich snippets below this list of instructions. Each of these rich snippets link to separate Google instructions on how to optimize for each type of rich snippet. (When you load their page, always select the “microdata” approach to get the right instructions.)

6. Test your rich snippet.

Google Webmaster Tools has another nifty feature that lets you test your rich snippet. Click here to use their Structured Data Testing Tool. This will confirm whether or not Google can read your markup data and whether your rich snippets are appearing in their search results.

7. Be patient.

If you don’t see your rich snippets in Google’s search results right away, don’t freak out. It actually takes Google as long as a few weeks to crawl and index this new data. So go to the beach. Sip a margarita. Soak in some sun.

Okay, it’s more likely that you’ll just keep working on other stuff in the meantime, but a girl can dream …

Rich Snippets Examples

Let’s run through some of the different types of rich snippets that are available to use on your website. Each section links to Google’s instructions on how to actually install the rich snippets — remember to select the microdata option for the easiest installation process!

Business and Organization Snippets

A rich snippet about a business or organization can include location information, contact information, price ranges, hours, and customer reviews, if there are any available.

Learn how to create rich snippets for organizations >

Event Snippets

Event snippets include the date, location, and time of the event. If there are more than one option for the events, up to three will be displayed.

Learn how to create rich snippets for events >

Music Album Snippets

Using music album rich snippets will display links to individual songs in an album, or even lyrics to the song if available.

Learn how to create rich snippets for music >

People Snippets

The people snippet displays information such as a person’s job title, the company they work for (a.k.a. affiliation), and location. It can also display a photo, nickname, and more.

People snippets are different than author snippets. Here is the difference, with an example of yours truly.

Learn how to create rich snippets for people >

Product Snippets

Product rich snippets include things like a picture of a product, ratings, and price range of the product.

Learn how to create rich snippets for products >

Recipe Snippets

Recipe rich snippets provide users with additional information about a specific cooking recipe, such as the ratings (1 to 5 stars), cook/prep time, and calorie information.

In order to qualify as a recipe, you must have at least two of the following tags in place:

• A photo of the dish
• The tag: prepTime, cookTime, totalTime, or ingredients
• Calories
• Review

 

Learn how to create rich snippets for recipes >

Review Snippets

You’ve already seen a bunch of examples of snippets that have 5-star ratings included. But you can also set up a snippet that is just the review portion.

Learn how to create rich snippets for reviews >

Video Snippets

If you want a thumbnail of a video to display next to your search listing, the markup works a little different. Google recognizes the Facebook Share markup code, so you might as well kill two birds with one stone.

Learn how to create rich snippets for videos >

The post How to Breathe New Life Into Your Google Search Results With Rich Snippets appeared first on ProdSens.live.

]]> https://prodsens.live/2024/04/03/how-to-breathe-new-life-into-your-google-search-results-with-rich-snippets/feed/ 0 https://prodsens.live/2023/12/20/what-to-expect-from-a-career-in-product-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-to-expect-from-a-career-in-product-marketing https://prodsens.live/2023/12/20/what-to-expect-from-a-career-in-product-marketing/#respond Wed, 20 Dec 2023 15:24:49 +0000 https://prodsens.live/2023/12/20/what-to-expect-from-a-career-in-product-marketing/

Finding yourself at a crossroads in your career? Perhaps you’re looking for your next professional challenge. You may…

The post What to expect from a career in product marketing appeared first on ProdSens.live.

]]>

Finding yourself at a crossroads in your career? Perhaps you’re looking for your next professional challenge. You may be looking to specialize, or your path could be steering you head-on into the world of product marketing. Is this the career for you?

A career in product marketing will take you to the highest of places, with a chance to experience growth, success, and glory – and it will take you to the lowest of places of frustration, despair, and doing some of your least favorite tasks.

Product marketing is fast becoming one of the most popular marketing disciplines to specialize in, but it ain’t for the faint-hearted. For those courageous enough to take on the challenge, a role in the field can bring great rewards and make you a trusted advisor to many in your organization.

Key PMM responsibilities

The journey of a product marketing manager (PMM) can be an exciting yet challenging one with lots of ups and downs, trials and disappointments, and great learnings and successes. You may find yourself facing in all directions almost at once, leaving you spinning. Plus, you’ll often find yourself at the center of the stakeholder universe, with all eyes on you.

As a key member of your marketing organization, you’ll become the go-to for other marketers, much like a design resource is to a marketing team. There will always be something that someone would like you to do. 

You’ll become the glue that binds all facets of marketing. From weaving product messaging into campaigns, to providing insights for new markets, regions, or product opportunities, your role becomes the source of knowledge that your co-workers will lean on.

Your cross-functional stakeholders

Product marketers work hand-in-hand with product and engineering teams to orchestrate product positioning, messaging, and go-to-market activity. These teams rely on your communication chops to translate the technical into consumer-facing language, and to deliver products, features, and communications to market at exactly the right time, in the right place, to the right audience.

Walking in lockstep with client-facing teams like sales, customer success, and support, you’ll need to uncover the inner workings and behavior of prospects and customers, create enablement assets, build ideal customer profiles, and craft customer personas.

As if that weren’t enough, you’ll also need to identify ways to influence and impact the customer journey with your brand and product – paying particular attention to what your customers or the market are saying about it. 

The feedback and insights you collect are worth their weight in gold, and it will be up to you to ensure they’re communicated back to your internal stakeholders for future product development or to create new, better opportunities for engagement and advocacy.

In your role, you’ll report to senior leadership and be comfortable communicating up the line to an executive or board. In the same vein, you’ll build relationships across the entire organization, creating connections with individuals who operate in different spheres to you. 

Get used to working with finance and operations – they care about performance and so should you. You’ll most likely be talking to them about pricing, how to communicate price changes to customers, and how your work is affecting the budget and targets. Internally, you‘ll also be breaking down discipline-specific language barriers across departments.

What I’ve described here is not an exhaustive list of responsibilities. Product marketing roles vary from organization to organization, between industries, and depending on the maturity of the organization and the level of resources at its disposal.

Is product marketing the right fit for you?

Through my years of working in product marketing and connecting with some of the best product marketers I know, I’ve learned that there are certain superpowers you need to survive and thrive in a PMM role. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at what those superpowers are. If these descriptions sound familiar, then product marketing might be for you!

Curiosity 

A product marketer needs to be engaged in a constant quest for answers about all things, product, customer, and company – how product features work, what customers think, why customers behave a certain way, what the data shows, how to improve the customer journey, and how to do things better and faster next time. 

The brains of product marketers often zoom from one thought to the next, but that’s a skill that enables them to focus on the thing that most deserves their attention at that point in time.

“Endless questioning and exploration!… You can uncover that mysterious x-factor that brings everything together by going down the rabbit hole. But you do need to be self-aware and able to practice self-restraint to come back to the surface before you waste all your time!” 

Kristen Lee

A passion for the product you’re marketing

It’s vital to love what you do, and that should extend to the products or services you promote and sell. You need to have that conviction to bring people on the journey with you and make potential nay-sayers realize the value of an idea, product, or service. 

So, resist taking a product marketing role in a company that doesn’t align with your values or ethics. You won’t pull it off and if you do, you’re going to be exhausted trying.

Never lost in translation 

Communication skills are key. That’s because, as a product marketer, you play an essential role in communicating the value of your product to potential customers. Your job is to take the technical information provided by the product team and translate it into language that is easy for the marketing and sales teams to use. 

It’s crucial to use the right tone of voice and language that will resonate with your target audience. By doing so, you can effectively connect the dots between your product and the problem it solves for your customers.

“The power of translation allows an effective product marketing manager to connect the solution to the pain point of your target market, and customer base, in a way that the value can be concisely understood.” 

Chloe Wilson

The ability to pivot and move quickly 

The world of product marketing is seldom boring. If anything, it’s the marketing discipline most likely to keep you on your toes. You need to have the ability to operate in a fast-paced environment and be prepared to pivot. 

While you may have the best laid-out plans, they can quickly come unstuck with shifting priorities, moving targets, and product delays, all of which are common in the world of SaaS. Your ability to go with the flow and have a backup plan up your sleeve will save you a lot of tears and heartache.

“​​Act as a puzzle master. You need to be able to not only spot the problem but find multiple ways to solve it. One is never enough… You need to be ready to pivot fast to option B… Or C!” 

Kristen Lee

“Hold the power of adaptation. The market is constantly changing, as a PMM, be someone who can quickly adapt to new customer demands and technology will thrive.” 

Eduardo Siqueira

Resilience

Many of the decisions that cause you to pivot will be out of your control, especially when it comes to product releases or top-down redirection. 

In these moments, you need to stay strong and recognize this isn’t a failure on your part. You’re just one star in the universe that needs to align for an activity to proceed successfully. You can prepare by building great relationships; that way, you’ll know what’s coming up on the horizon before it slaps you in the face.

Thriving in ambiguity 

As a product marketing manager, you’re going to face some uncertainty, whether that’s unclear briefs on tasks, shifting deadlines for releases, changing direction of the product ecosystem, or simply changes in the company structure. 

You need to be okay with feeling uncomfortable, and happy in a position where you might not have all the answers but are willing to search for them. You need to take this all in your stride and be the rock that doesn’t crumble. When people are unsure of how to proceed, you need to be the one who steps up and searches for the information you need to march on.

A connector of people in the organization

As a product marketer, you don’t necessarily have to be an extrovert. However, it takes a bit of courage as an introvert to step out of your team and mingle with others. As marketers, we share a common understanding regardless of our discipline, be it field, digital, brand, or growth. We share the same objectives and work towards the same goals within the organization. 

However, as a product marketer, you have to be the bridge between people from different worlds such as product, engineering, finance, sales, and support. You need to be willing to learn the language they speak, what drives them, and the objectives they have. It’s a journey of enlightenment and understanding, leading to newfound friendships that will reward you tenfold.

“You need to be a people person and be great at building relationships with other teams and stakeholders” 

Bonita Reck

“As a PMM you need to be a shapeshifter. You need to be able to wear many different hats and have a tone of empathy to become “the glue” between teams to make a product successful.” 

Javier Casanova

The ability to speak with customers. 

One of the critical roles of a product marketer is to delve into the world of the customer, listen, and take on their insights and feedback. Often this relates to general product usage, inclusion, and insights into beta trials or collection of testimonials and case studies. 

Sometimes that means having an uncomfortable conversation with an unhappy bunch of customers and then switching over to calls with true admirers of your product. 

While you may have technology at your disposal to assist you, in this role you need to have the confidence to speak with customers, whether that’s in-person, online, or over the phone. This is a skill you can learn, but you need to be prepared to jump in and sometimes do the uncomfortable tasks.

“Ultimately, customer insight either directly or indirectly is critical to the role of the product marketing manager; you need to be able to connect and speak with them”.

David Allinson

---

There are plenty of resources and communities available to support you as you start your product marketing journey, whether you’re the sole product marketer in a company or part of a team

Finding a mentor who can help you is a great place to start. It’s as simple as connecting with a marketing leader or product marketing professional and asking for their guidance. 

Product Marketing Alliance is just one global network that provides learning resources, certifications, and a community to support your journey in this dynamic role.

The post What to expect from a career in product marketing appeared first on ProdSens.live.

]]> https://prodsens.live/2023/12/20/what-to-expect-from-a-career-in-product-marketing/feed/ 0