Are you planning to hire a new product marketing manager for your team to take the marketing initiative a step ahead? Do you wish to take the load off your product manager and share the workload of product marketing?
A product marketing manager is a prevalent role in tech companies, whose primary job is to act as the enabler between marketing, sales, and product development teams. They aim to attract and retain new customers by optimizing the marketing strategy and product onboarding experience.
But how are they any different from a product manager?
Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager
A product manager handles the entire product life cycle from development, marketing, and sales to expanding the features/ offerings. They prepare a dedicated roadmap to achieve product success.
Contrarily, a product marketing manager handles the marketing aspect by planning and collaborating on marketing strategies for product marketing success. They research and curate a marketing campaign to convey the brand's message to customers.
A company must create a distinct line between the two to ensure a manageable workload and improved decision-making. Additionally, both managers will be able to invest themselves without any burnout and collaborate effectively.
But what exactly does a product marketing manager do?
Role Of A Product Marketing Manager
Product marketing managers focus on business marketing efforts, unlike product managers, who have a broader scope of work. PMM focuses primarily on customer attraction and retention via marketing channels.
What do product marketing managers do? Here are the key responsibilities of a product marketing manager, which will help you define the job role for your company.
- Understanding the business inside out, including the products/ services, target customers, user personas, bottlenecks, etc.
- Analyzing the current product strategy to implement a new complimenting product marketing strategy.
- Conducting deep-level research on the industry and competitors. It involves understanding competitor products, how they market their products, what are customer pain points, etc. The aim is to understand the product's position in the market.
- Developing tools and campaigns for launching and sales enablement. This includes creating strategy and picking marketing channels such as webinars, advertising, PR campaigns, trade shows, etc.
- Setting OKRs to measure the effectiveness of the marketing and sales efforts. This involves metrics aligned to business goals, such as:
- MQL/ PQL
- Conversation rate
- Feature adoption
- Trial to paid user conversation
- New user activation rate
- Expansion revenue
- Product positioning and messaging for customers, industry analysts, media, and the public. This involves creating engaging copy for cross-channel digital marketing, marketing brand materials, bottom-of-the-funnel content, and other relevant product-related content.
- Planning and training the sales and support team by preparing a dedicated curriculum and gathering resources.
- Onboarding customers through product demos and presentations. This could include optimizing the onboarding experience by A/B testing and leading interactive walkthroughs.
So, a product marketing manager can flip over the entire customer journey and business marketing efforts. They are pivotal to product and marketing teams by being the joining bridge between the two. But how can you get your hands on the perfect product marketing manager for your business?
How To Hire A Product Marketing Manager For Your Company?
Now, that we have clarity over the role and responsibilities of the product, we have clear expectations from this job role. Recruiters can start the hiring process: sourcing, engaging (interview + networking), and hiring. Here is a 3-step guide to hiring your next product marketing manager.
Step 1: Sourcing Candidates
Recruiters spend time curating the perfect JDs or job post ads for job boards. But is that enough?
The first step in hiring is to source qualified candidates for the role. Instead of relying on traditional methods, such as job boards and referrals, opt for a strategic multi-channel sourcing approach. But what does it mean?
The multi-channel sourcing approach combines inbound and outbound recruitment strategies to tap and build a larger candidate funnel. Recruiters must expand their sourcing channels to social media, communities, slack job boards, etc. This will give them an edge and strengthen their chances of reaching their desired candidate.
Does it seem overwhelming to use so many sources with the hassle of tracking the effectiveness of each?
We at Nurturebox make multi-channel sourcing effortless. With the download of a simple plugin, recruiters can use various sources such as LinkedIn, indeed, or any other website to source the desired candidates quickly. Our tool will take over all admin tasks, such as managing the data, collecting and recording prospects' details, reaching candidates on various platforms, etc.
However, a multi-channel approach doesn't mean skipping the job boards or any other traditional way. The aim is to increase the sourcing channels and improve the chances of candidate engagement. This calls for a specific job description and consistent communication with the candidates to set clear expectations.
Here is a template to start with. Remember, a job description is not just about mentioning the roles and responsibilities. It further shares the company journey, vision, expectations, perks, and other relevant information to persuade the most suitable manager.
Product Marketing Manager Job Description Template
XYA Ltd. is looking for a product marketing manager to handle the marketing initiative and team of 20+ marketing professionals. We offer a (product/ service offerings) to (target audience/ clientele base). We have been working with leading companies such as ABC, GHI, LMN, etc. and delivering quality products for over 3 years.
Responsibilities:
- Managing and training a team of 15 sales rep
- Performing market research to curate the product marketing strategy
- Planning and developing marketing materials and resources
- Creating customer personas and marketing strategies based on research
- Collaborate with product development, marketing, and sales team to ensure product marketing success
Requirements & Skills:
- 4+ years of experience in the marketing field
- Bachelors in marketing-related field
- Strong research and problem-solving skills
- Ability to lead large teams and train them to achieve marketing success
- Excellent communication skills to collaborate and curate marketing message
Ps:- In addition, you can include perks, experience requirements and salary expectations.
Step 2: Interviewing Candidates
Once you have a pool of qualified candidates, you must assess their capabilities. This can include interviews, assessment tests, group discussion rounds, aptitude tests, etc. The tests will vary on the job role, and the business needs to find the perfect fit for the company. Here are a few sample questions you might want to ask when hiring a product marketing manager:
- What kind of results can be generated with product marketing?
- What are KPIs critical to measuring product marketing success?
- How do you collaborate with the employees?
- How do you keep big teams aligned during a big cross-functional project?
- How do you encourage participation and resolve conflicts, if any?
- Could you elaborate on a recent product marketing campaign you worked on? What were the shortcomings, and how did you manage them?
- How will you communicate a price rise in a marketing campaign message?
- How do you ensure product engagement?
- How do you leverage digital marketing for lead generation?
- How do you analyze complex data? When was the last time you had to deal with complex data & how did you draw conclusions?
- What attracted you to our product? What will be your short-term goal upon joining our team?
- Who do you consider our audience & how do you plan to attract them?
- What are some of the loopholes in our existing product marketing campaigns, and how will you fix them?
This is a partial list of questions. You can analyze the job role requirements and ask questions accordingly.
Step 3: Hiring and Onboarding Candidates
The final step after sourcing and engaging (plus interviewing) is selecting the right candidate for the job. The recruiter must evaluate the skill fit, team fit, and long-term relationship and results.
But what does a recruiter look for in a product marketing manager? What are the key skills of a product marketing manager? Here is a checklist of PMM skills required.
- Conceptual ability
- Collaborative skills
- Project management
- Goal setting
- Creativity
- Customer focus
- Product Orientation
- Data analysis
- Analytical
- Communication skills
- Storytelling
- Empathy
- Research & Analytics
- Problem-solving
- Marketing skills
- Advocacy
- Copywriting
Once you have selected the product marketing manager, you onboard them to join the team. The first step is clearly defining and conveying the responsibility to avoid overlap with the product manager. Discuss the scope of work, and specify the task ownership to mitigate work overload or confusion.
Discuss the quarterly goals to get kick-started. Familiarise them with the workflows for collaboration and smooth functioning. Offer a complete product tour better to understand the product/ service offerings and business goals. This is achievable via dedicated resources or a 1:1 discussion with the product manager.
Onboarding is critical for product marketing managers to give them a robust head start. Communicate all the vital information, including business goals, to see visible desired results.
Effortlessly Hire Your Next Product Marketer With Nurturebox
Want to make your hiring experience smooth? Here are 5 skills to look for when hiring your next product marketing manager:
- Strategic Skills- Can they strategize the marketing efforts?
- Collaboration Evidence- Can they collaborate efficiently with the team? Do they fit well in the company culture?
- Quantitative Skills- Can they quantify the results and analyze the big data to measure effectiveness with numbers?
- Qualitative Skills- Do they fulfill the soft skill requirements such as problem-solving, empathy, advocacy, etc.?
- Industry Fit- Do they have experience and grasp over the marketing industry along with expertise in dealing with products/services like yours?
In addition to assessing the PMM, the company must spend sufficient time sourcing qualified candidates. A multi-channel approach will be your ultimate solution for effortlessly capturing top talent. Need help?
Download our plugin to automate and scale your hiring within minutes. You can download the Nurturebox plugin to integrate with your HR tech stack and seamlessly build a more substantial talent pipeline. Get away with all the admin tasks and focus on what's important!
Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.
Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.
Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.
From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:
- Build positive brand awareness
- Make your audience stick around for longer
- Get better traction on social media
- Gain more trust of your audience than ever
- Generate qualified leads
- Improve conversion rates
- Boost business visibility with SEO
- Position your brand as an authority
- Cultivate loyal brand fans
While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.
What is The Role of a Content Marketer?
A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.
As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.
To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.
Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:
- Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly.
- Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
- Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
- Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
- Types of content to be created
- Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
- Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.
- Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.
While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with
- Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
- Continous publishing and distributing content
- Measuring and analyzing performance
How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?
Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.
Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.
Top Must-Have Skills in a Content Marketer
Apart from having relevant industry experience, a good Content Marketer must possess the following skills.
- Excellent Writing Skills
A Content Marketer’s prior skillset should be writing excellent attention-grabbing content. From long-form blog posts to website copy, ad copies, social media content, video scripts, emails, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, and more – a Content Marketer should be able to adapt to the business’s specific requirements and create quality content.
- Audience Research
Identifying user behavior is vital for framing the story in the right direction. So a Content Marketer must know how to identify and analyze the needs and pain points to develop a buyer persona. User research can be performed through social listening, relevant communities, in-person calls with customers, analyzing sales call recordings, and more.
- Keyword Research
Creating valuable thought-leadership content isn’t enough. Researching the right set of keywords is an essential skill to further educate your target audience on the Whys, Hows and Whats of your business, and have your website rank on Google.
- Data-oriented Content
Content that’s not backed by relevant data points does not build enough trust. Experienced content marketing professionals would always prefer data over hollow claims. No doubt that only data doesn’t help a content piece succeed, but it’s essential..
- Project Management, Planning, and Publishing –
A Content Marketer is also expected to break down and analyze the pain points to turn keyword research into content ideas. So a professional must be able to identify and solve content gaps.
Further, they must know how to create a content calendar, decide the different types of content, and choose relevant platforms to publish and schedule marketing campaigns.
- Content Promotion
Creating a valuable content piece, for example - an ebook, isn’t enough. Your content marketing team needs to promote it proactively for bringing enough attention and engagement.
- Performance Analysis
Setting up goals and plans is one thing, but continuously executing, measuring, and analyzing content performance is another. A Content Marketer should always be monitoring key performance parameters to figure out the upcoming plans with the necessary updates required.
Not to forget - stakeholders and marketing heads need the performance reports regularly. So Content Marketers must be able to collect and comprehend all the data to make it worth presenting.
Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona
Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:
- What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
- How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
- What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
- Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
- Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
- What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
- Where do they look for a new job?
- What are their career and life goals?
Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.
Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process
Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?
You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.
Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.
Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.
As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.
Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description
Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.
Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:
- Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.
- Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.
- Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.
- Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.
- About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?
Content Marketer Job Description Template
Role
The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.
Responsibilities
- Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
- Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
- Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
- Include and optimize all content for SEO
- Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
- Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence
Requirements
- Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
- Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
- A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
- Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
- Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
- Fluency in English or any other required language
Soft Skills
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Excellent writing and editing skills
- The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
- The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
- Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables
Step 4: Source Candidates
Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.
- Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
- Why should candidates apply for the position?
- Highlight the growth opportunities
- State the company vision and mission
- Briefly describe the recruitment process
Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:
- LinkedIn
- Indeed
- Instahyre
- ZipRecruiter
- Monster
- GlassDoor
- CareerBuilder
Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.
Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones
Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.
Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.
Step 5: Make the Hire
Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.
Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.
Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.
- Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
- Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
- Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
- Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
- Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.
Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox
Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?
Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.
Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:
- Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
- On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
- Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
- Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.
