“Is this part of a large multi-faceted campaign, like a go-to-market omnichannel effort?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. Just a message related to the upcoming July 4 holiday.”
“OK. How about if we publish your message six months from now, in late December?”
Um…
I think we can do better than that.
Blogging gives you the perfect vehicle to respond to current events and immediate needs.
Provided you prepare beforehand by answering questions such as these:
Why is this important to the reader?
How will this help my business?
What exactly am I talking about?
Once you answer these and other questions, you can draft your blog post, review it, finalize it, and publish it. All within days…or within hours if it’s critically important.
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.
22 types of content Bredemarket can create.
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.
AI-generated by Google Gemini.
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.
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:
Inward: Turning or moving toward the inside.
Internal: Existing or occurring within something.
Inner: Situated or located within.
Intrinsic: Belonging to or inherent in the nature of something.
Interior: The inside part of something.
Intramural: Occurring within a school or institution.
Intranet: A private computer network within an organization.
Intravenous: Administered into a vein.
Intracranial: Situated or occurring within the skull.
Intracellular: Existing or occurring within a cell.
Intralingual: Relating to or occurring within a language.
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?
Go-to-market initiatives have ONLY two audiences: the external prospects who are the hungry people (hopefully) wanting the product, and the internal staff in the company who deliver the product.
“Morpho worked with Microsoft Corporation to develop a cloud service for Morpho’s flagship Biometric Identification Solution (MorphoBIS). Morpho Cloud is hosted on Microsoft Azure Government, the cloud platform with a contractual commitment to support several U.S. government standards for data security, including the FBI’s CJIS Security Policy. Backed by the Microsoft Azure Government platform, Morpho Cloud complies with the stringent security standards for storage, transmission, monitoring, and recovery of digital information.”
You can’t just slap a few things together in three days and say your go-to-market is complete. You need a plan on how you will go to market, including the different tiers of go-to-market efforts (you won’t spend four months planning materials for your 5.0.11 software release)…
Unless you’re in very unusual circumstances, your go-to-market efforts will encompass variable efforts.
Release to me relates to the update of an existing product vs. a net-new addition to a solution offering. It’s common to have multiple releases a quarter vs. large launches 1-2x per year.
My former product marketing team devised a three-tier system, in which the top tier encompassed a full-blown effort and the bottom tier just had some release notes, a bit of internal education, and maybe a blog post.
Defined tiers
But as I said on August 30, you need to define the tiers beforehand. Don’t just shoot from the lip and say you want a blog post, a press release, and a brochure…oh, and maybe a cool infographic! Yeah!
Due to the nature of my business, Bredemarket doesn’t usually get involved in strategy. The clients set the strategy, and I fill the tactical holes to execute that strategy.
But I recently welcomed the opportunity to envision a strategy to achieve a strategy, and in the process defined seven essential strategy documents to kick off a product marketing or general marketing program.
Depending upon how you define product marketing, one of these seven goes above and beyond the product marketing function. I included it anyway, because if you ask 20 people what “product marketing” is, you will get 21 answers.
There’s a reason I dated this. I may want to refine it in the future. For example, some of you may recall how my “six questions your content creator should ask you” eventually became seven questions.
The seven strategy and process documents
Go-to-Market Process. I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. You can’t just slap a few things together in three days and say your go-to-market is complete. You need a plan on how you will go to market, including the different tiers of go-to-market efforts (you won’t spend four months planning materials for your 5.0.11 software release), the types of internal (employee) content you will release in each tier, and the types of external (prospect/customer) content you will release in each tier.
Performance Report. I listed this near the top because you need to quickly establish your metrics, define them, and how you will gather them. For example, if you want to measure “engagement,” you need to define exactly what engagement is (likes on a blog post? reshares on a LinkedIn post?), and ensure that you have a way to capture that data. Preferably automated data capture; manual tabulation is horrendous.
Product and Competitive Analysis. Plan how you will perform these duties. Even in my simplest analyses when I was still with IDEMIA, I planned exactly what data I needed, what data I wanted to capture, and how I was going to distribute it. I refined this during my time at Incode, when a team of four released battlecards in a standard format, with data that highlighted items important to Incode. My subsequent analyses for Bredemarket, which were more comparative rather than stand-alone, refined things still further.
Brand Strategy. I must confess that I have never created a formal brand book. But it’s important that you define your branding, at least informally, so that your products and services are presented consistently on all platforms. And so you spell things correctly (it’s NOT “BredeMarket”).
Customer Feedback. If you want to institute a customer focus, you need information from your prospects and customers. What information do you need? How much? (Shorter surveys get more responses.) How will you get it? What will you do with it? (“Trash it” is not an option.)
Positioning and Messaging Book. Once you’ve created the brand strategy, you need a set of consistent positioning (internal) and messaging (external) content. The positioning and messaging matrix can get pretty complex if you are supporting multiple products, personas, industries, use cases, and geographies. I will again confess that I do not have a standard messaging statement for Bredemarket 400 prospects who are Chief Marketing Officers who need blog posts in the identity/biometric industry discussing privacy concerns in the European Union. My loss.
Demand Generation and Content Marketing Parameters. Now in many organizations, demand generation and/or content marketing are separate from product marketing. But sometimes they’re not. What are your plans for demand generation? How will you achieve your goals? What content is necessary?
So what?
As I said, I recently had the opportunity to envision these strategies for a prospect, and have scheduled a meeting with the prospect to discuss these. (Note to “prospect”: these are iterative, and I fully expect that up to 90% of this may change by the time of implementation. But I think it’s a good starting point for discussion.)
The prospect may secure my services, or they may not.
And if they don’t, I can develop these same documents for others.
Do YOU need help defining strategies for your business? If so, let’s talk.
I mentioned something in passing in Bredemarket’s recent go-to-market post that I think needs a little more highlighting. So here is a deeper dive into the 22 types of content that product marketers create. (Well, at least 22. I’m probably missing some.)
And by the way, I have created all 22 of these types of content, from blog posts and battlecards to smartphone application content and scientific book chapters. And I can create it for you.
Why is it that so many business-to-business (B2B) marketers confuse product marketing with content marketing?
Because it requires a lot of discipline. That’s why.
B2B marketers who get it right understand the difference between these two fundamentally different types of marketing, what their purposes are and how to use them correctly.
Some firms (especially startups) don’t have the luxury to enforce such definitions. They don’t have separate teams to create awareness content, consideration content, and conversion content. They have one team (or perhaps one person) to create all that content PLUS other stuff that I’ll discuss later.
For example, during my most recent stint as a product marketing employee at a startup, the firm had no official content marketers, so the product marketers had to create a lot of non-product related content. So we product marketers were the de facto content marketers for the company too. (Sadly, we didn’t get two salaries for filling two roles.)
Why did the product marketers end up as content marketers? It turns out that it makes sense—after all, people who write about your product in the lower funnel stages can also write about your product in the upper funnel stages, and also can certainly write about OTHER things, such as company descriptions, speaker submissions, and speaker biographies.
As a result, I’ve written a ton of stuff over my last 29 years in identity/biometrics. It didn’t take a great leap for me to self-identify as the identity content marketing expert and the biometric content marketing expert (and other expert definitions; I’m an expert in creating expert titles).
I’ve compiled a summary of the types of content that I’ve created over the years, not only for Bredemarket’s clients, but also for my employers at Incode Technologies, IDEMIA, MorphoTrak, Motorola, and Printrak.
Not all of these were created when I was in a formal product marketing role, but depending upon your product or service, you may need any of these content types to support the marketing of your product/service.
It’s helpful to divide the list into two parts: the external (customer-facing) content, and the internal (company-only) content.
10 types of external content I have created
External content is what most people think of when they talk about product marketing or content marketing. After all, this is the visible stuff that the prospects see, and which can move them toward a purchase (conversion). The numbers after some content types indicate the quantities of pieces of collateral that I have created.
Articles
Blog Posts (500+, including this one)
Briefs/Data/Literature Sheets
Case Studies (12+)
Proposals (100+)
Scientific Book Chapters
Smartphone Application Content
Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, Twitter)
Web Page Content
White Papers and E-Books
Here’s an video showing some of the external content that I have created for Bredemarket.
While external content is sexy, internal content is extremely important, since it’s what equips the people inside a firm to promote your product or service. The numbers after some content types indicate the quantities of pieces of collateral that I have created.
Battlecards (80+)
Competitive Analyses
Event/Conference/Trade Show Demonstration Scripts
Plans
Playbooks
Proposal Templates
Quality Improvement Documents
Requirements
Strategic Analyses
And here are 3 more types
Some content can either be external or internal. Again, numbers indicate the quantities of pieces of collateral I have created.
Email Newsletters (200+)
FAQs
Presentations
Content I can create for you
Does your firm need help creating one of these types of content?
Maybe two?
Maybe 22?
I can create content full-time for you
If your firm needs to create a lot of content types for your products, then consider hiring me as your full-time Senior Product Marketing Manager. My LinkedIn profile is here, documenting my 29 years of experience in identity/biometric technology as a product marketer, a strategist, and in other roles.
I’ve already talked about product launches in my recent On “Go-to-Market” post, but having worked in product marketing for some time, I know that there are a lot of tasks that your firm has to perform even when you’re not launching a new product.
One of those tasks is product positioning. And it’s important.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
Why your product (or service) exists.
How your product benefits your customers.
What your product is (but note that I asked the first two questions before this one).
Other facets of your product (goal, benefits, target audience—if this is new to you, catch up by reading my e-book on the six questions your content creator should ask you).
Why the questions matter
If your product suddenly disappeared from the world, would your target audience (or, in marketing-speak, personas) care?
Would your target audience be just as happy with the competitive offerings, or would the target audience lose out if your product’s distinctive benefits were suddenly no longer available?
There are a number of popular memes that ask you to remove one popular food from a list of foods. What would happen if, instead of asking about pizza and tacos, you asked your target audience about your product and eight others? Would your product survive the cut, or would your prospects happily dump it?
Position your product so that it always remains top of mind for your prospects.
Answer the questions above.
Create content that is focused on the customer (not focused on your firm).
Create content that explains benefits (not features) to your prospects.
After I slept on my “trust funnel” post, I decided that it was too long and took the entire “go-to-market” section out. But I saved it and am sharing it with you here.
If you are creating content as part of the formal launch of a product or service, you are creating SOME type of go-to-market (GTM) plan.
Perhaps it’s a well-defined plan.
Perhaps it’s a simple document.
Maybe it’s a haphazard dictate to “go to market in three days.”
About the “three days” thing
(C, I told you I was going to write this.)
Oh, and by the way, you can’t go to market in three days, even if someone says you can. You can’t. Or if you do, there will be significant gaps or inaccuracies.
In her LinkedIn Learning course, Deirdre Breakenridge prefers to define a four-month go-to-market plan, with specific deliverables for every one of the months in the plan. Of course, she admits that this is ideal, and sometimes you can’t take a full four months to bring a product or service to market. Whether you take four months or six months or even two months, GTM execution for any robust product or service needs a significant amount of time to get all the pieces together.
One of the reasons that it takes months to execute a GTM plan is because a GTM plan requires inputs from several departments, including
product,
marketing,
product marketing (if it is separate from the first two departments),
engineering,
customer success/customer service,
finance,
sales, and
legal.
You won’t get all of THEM to produce inputs, or even agree what the inputs should be, in three days. It takes time.
But there ARE teeny tiny GTM efforts
One exception to the four-month guidance: if your “product” or “service” is VERY small (like a single blog post), you can obviously go-to-market much more quickly.
From the private Bredemarket Asana Content Calendar, back in the days when Twitter (TW) was still Twitter.
Sometimes. At other times I skip Asana altogether and just take pictures and post stuff, like what I did with my “Coldest Beer in Town” and “Classy by Definition” posts from earlier today. Variety is good.
Back to normal GTM
But when your product or service is more complex, then you need to plan your GTM campaign and make sure that it answers all questions about your product or service.
There are all sorts of GTM guidelines out there, and I was part of a team who collaboratively created three different flavors of GTM guidelines over the course of several months, starting with the complex and ending with the ridiculously simple. And the team STILL couldn’t get the other teams to agree on the parameters of the guidelines.
I’m not going to dictate MY ideas on GTM guidelines, but I will say that whatever guidelines you create, make sure that by the time a GTM effort created under these guidelines is finished, both your prospects and your employees will gain the appropriate understanding of your product or service, and the GTM content will answer all of their questions.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
If you don’t know what questions to ask, my six questions (why, how, what goal, benefits, target audience) can be adapted for GTM purposes.
What about your GTM content?
Are you executing a go-to-market plan and need to create some content?
Do you need customer-facing external content (blog posts, white papers, whatever)?
Do you need employee-facing internal content (FAQs, battlecards, whatever)?
Regardless of the content you need, Bredemarket can help you. Here’s a list of the types of content I’ve created over the years:
Articles • Battlecards (80+) • Blog Posts (400+) • Briefs/Data/Literature Sheets • Case Studies (12+) • Competitive Analyses • Email Newsletters (200+) • Event/Conference/Trade Show Demonstration Scripts • FAQs • Plans • Playbooks • Presentations • Proposal Templates • Proposals (100+) • Quality Improvement Documents • Requirements • Scientific Book Chapters • Smartphone Application Content • Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, Twitter) • Strategic Analyses • Web Page Content • White Papers and E-Books
Whatever you need, talk to me. And be prepared for me to ask you six (or more) questions.
Bredemarket 