Question Page

How do you go about creating a product marketing plan from scratch for an early stage start-up?

What are the components (I assume competitive analysis, buyers, etc)?
Jasmine Jaume
Jasmine Jaume
Intercom Director, Product MarketingNovember 10

I think the first step is to understand your buyers and market, so you can define who you're targeting and how you want to position your product. So as you say, competitive research, understanding the pain points of your buyers and customers, talking to your sales team to understand why you win/lose deals and creating an outline of your target buyers (or personas, if you're into those!)

I'd then develop a GTM starategy, including defining where you want to position yourself in the market, and a messaging guide to outline how you want to describe the product, outline benefits, key differentiators etc. This also includes gathering any evidence you can such as customer testimonials. It's important to get aligned on this with all stakeholders incl. product and sales leaders.

From there, create a PMM roadmap of sorts, defining goals and intiatives depending on the needs of the business, what already exists and what needs to be prioritised. For example, if the company is focused on outbound sales, there might be a need to prioritise sales enablement activities. If it's very inbound, it might be improving the website, or increasing adoption. If the product hasn't launched yet, this will likely be working with product on their roadmap, developing a pricing strategy, and defining a plan for launch. Look for where PMM can add the most value.

Given that in early stage startups, PMM may be the only - or one of very few - marketers, this plan may need to be more of a 'marketing plan' than just a PMM plan. It really depends on the business model and stage, but hopefully that gives some ideas!

2151 Views
Product Marketing KPIs
Thursday, November 14 • 12PM PT
Product Marketing KPIs
Virtual Event
Cynthia Akupue
Kevin Rollinson
Anja Erntgaard
+261
attendees
Top Product Marketing Mentors
Mary Sheehan
Mary Sheehan
Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing
Jeffrey Vocell
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing
Brianne Shally
Brianne Shally
Nextdoor Ex-Head of Product Marketing
Marcus Andrews
Marcus Andrews
Pendo Sr. Director of Product Marketing
Kevin Garcia
Kevin Garcia
Anthropic Product Marketing Leader
April Rassa
April Rassa
Clari VP, Solutions Marketing
Susan "Spark" Park
Susan "Spark" Park
Monzo Director of Product Marketing
Jeff Hardison
Jeff Hardison
Calendly VP of Product Marketing
Leah Brite
Leah Brite
Gusto Head of Product Marketing, Employers
Julien Sauvage
Julien Sauvage
Clari VP, Brand, Content and Product Marketing