Job Description (FINAL)

Product Marketing Manager within the Communications Sector

Last summer, I was interning at a company as a product marketing manager as part of their larger marketing program. When most people think of a product marketing manager, they probably think of someone who just simply markets products to consumers. However, there is so much more to it. Good product marketing managers need to be able to tell a story, and that is exactly what I learned how to do.

Unlike the other product marketing managers who were on teams dedicated to marketing actual products, the marketing program placed me on the news team within the communications sector. So instead of focusing on man-made products, my team and I had to tell stories about our man-made products to excite our customers.

Specifically, my manager assigned me a final project where I had to present strategies about how the team can improve storytelling on a global scale in the future. To do this, I had to effectively do three core tasks and apply what I learned to my final Powerpoint presentation:

• Data analysis

• Conduct interviews

• Be creative

I’ll be going over how I learned to do all of these this summer with specific examples.

Data Analysis

At my company, we used Adobe Analytics to conduct data analysis. My team wanted me to specifically look at three separate statistics:

• Total news story page views

• Average time spent online reading a story

• What sites the story traffic came from

These statistics were the most important to my team, as they gave the most insight into the performance of our stories. To them, it was better to have higher page views, a longer time spent reading, and getting high traffic from one website. For example, one of our top global stories from the United Kingdom was about a pair of siblings that rowed across the Atlantic Ocean together. It had almost 7 million page views, an average reading time of over one minute, and traffic from multiple places. Although there isn't high traffic coming from one place, this is still a very successful story due to the extremely high amount of page views and the reading time. Knowing these statistics can be very helpful in deciding where we should go next with our storytelling.

Conduct Interviews

Another important part of my role and project was to conduct interviews with different storytellers to see how they apply their own strategies in their stories. For this, I specifically interviewed five different people that manage stories in distinct regions, including:

• Europe, Middle East, & Africa

• United Kingdom

• Latin America

• India

• East Asia

To interview them, I had to learn how to not only ask the right questions, but also listen and note down the right facts. Not only that, but I would have to make sure that my interviewees had enough time to answer all my questions. For example, for one interviewee that was giving longer answers, I had to lightly cut their response short to ask the next question. Then, immediately after each interview, I would have to summarize everything they said into easily understandable facts. I would then add these into my Powerpoint, as well as some key quotes they said. Examples of these include, “make sure our stories are people-first,” and “be clear and concise.”

Be Creative

Out of all the different tasks, this was personally the hardest, as I wasn’t exactly sure how to be creative. But in my team’s case, they wanted me to learn how to be more creative in both visual and auditory ways. For them, this included

• Picking out the best background music for our videos

• Recording audio from our featured guests

• Finding the right stock footage for our videos

For my last video project, I was in charge of helping my coworker with finding the perfect music and visuals for her story about a girl who passed multiple difficult exams using our products. By finding cheery music, and picking the most studious photos of the girl, my coworker and I were able to effectively tell her story and how triumphant she felt when she passed her exams.

For a product marketing manager, I didn’t do much marketing of a product. However, I am genuinely glad that I was able to work in the communications sector and learn how to tell stories that can appeal to all audiences.

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Readability:

Passive Sentences: 0%

Flesch Reading Ease: 56

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10.7