Rethinking (some of) My Go-to-market Concepts

My current two categories for go-to-market collateral, “external” and “internal,” are not sufficient. I want to fix that, but I’m still thinking through things, such as what to call the third category. As of this moment, my best option is “intrinsic,” based upon my conversations with my good buddy Gemini.

My current two categories for go-to-market collateral

Based upon go-to-market efforts that stretch back a decade (even before I formally became a Product Marketing Manager), I have traditionally divided go-to-market output into two categories.

• External content for your hungry people (target audience), such as articles, blog posts, social media, case studies, white papers, and proposals. This content goes to CEOs, marketers, engineers, IT staff, and many others at the companies that buy from you.
• Internal content for the people in the company who talk to your hungry people, such as battlecards, sales playbooks, and scripts for trade show demonstrations. This content goes to salespeople, marketers, product managers, customer success folks, and many other employees and contractors.
• Some content can either be external or internal, depending upon the audience.

Simple and straightforward, right?

My emerging third category

But during a current go-to-market effort for a client, I realized that these two categories are insufficient, since both the client and I are creating content that will never been seen by either the external clients or the internal clients.

I’ll give you two heavily redacted and anonymized examples for a #fakefakefake machine.

• Bob wrote a Word document that listed the pain points that MegaCorp’s client encounter when trying to put green round widgets on their end customers’ beanie caps.
• Judy created a picture with stick figures that showed how clients can use the MegaCorp WidgetPlacer 2000 for their beanie cap production needs.

Bob and Judy (names from this song) are NEVER going to show that document or that picture to the customers, or even to the company’s own account managers.

So why create it?

Because they will be the initial guides as the go-to-market team creates all the other external and internal collateral for the effort.

These foundation documents are a critical part of the go-to-market effort. Without them, the subsequent go-to-market collateral will be a contradictory mishmash of stuff, and you’ll need to undertake a lot of effort to align all the content after the fact.

And the third category is…

…well, I don’t know what to call this third category yet.

• “Internal internal content” seems a bit silly.
• “Foundational content” seems a bit grandiose.
• “Bob and Judy” content seems like an independent TV show.

Google Gemini, you’re my only hope.

My question:

If we call the first category “external” marketing content for customers, and we call the second category “internal” marketing content for employees, then what do we call the third category which is only for the people who create marketing content for customers and employees?

Gemini’s first batch of answers:

Internal Marketing Content for Marketing Teams

Marketing Team Communication

Marketing Team Resources

Internal Marketing Tools

Brevity is NOT a strength of generative AI. Even when I specifically instructed Gemini to provide single word responses, I got hyphenated words:

Intra-marketing (combining “intra” for within and “marketing”)

Meta-marketing (implying a higher-level perspective on marketing)

Team-marketing (emphasizing its focus on the marketing team)

The fatal flaw is that not all the people on a go-to-market team are marketers. (This is my fault because of the prompt I wrote.)

And if I lop off the last part of each compound phrase, two of my options are “team” (too generic) and “meta” (NO).

And “intra” is too close to “internal internal.” But perhaps it’s a start. So I asked Gemini for words similar to “intra-” and got this response:

The prefix “intra-” means “within,” “inside,” or “inner.” Here are 12 words that convey a similar meaning:

1. Inward: Turning or moving toward the inside.
2. Internal: Existing or occurring within something.
3. Inner: Situated or located within.
4. Intrinsic: Belonging to or inherent in the nature of something.
5. Interior: The inside part of something.
6. Intramural: Occurring within a school or institution.
7. Intranet: A private computer network within an organization.
8. Intravenous: Administered into a vein.
9. Intracranial: Situated or occurring within the skull.
10. Intracellular: Existing or occurring within a cell.
11. Intralingual: Relating to or occurring within a language.
12. Intrajugular: Situated or occurring within the jugular vein.

I kind of like “intrinsic,” but I’ll sleep on it.

In the meantime, what would YOU call the third category?