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.
If your company needs a full-time product marketer, contact me on LinkedIn.
If your company needs a part-time product marketing consultant, contact me on Bredemarket. (Subject to availability.)
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