What are the main components of your GTM strategy? How do those vary by product type?

Your GTM strategy for a launch starts by determining the audience and “tier” of your launch. I use a framework that has 4 different tiers:

• Tier 1: Large, newsworthy updates that happen 1-2x per year. These change the positioning for your overall product, will appeal to your current customer base, and will attract new customers to your product. These have full-court press by the entire marketing team and usually utilize nearly all of your channels. You should rally your team around these launches more than any other. 
• Tier 2: These are big product developments that either apply to your current customer base or will apply to a specific subset of the market. They don't warrant the big efforts of a Tier 1, but are still a big deal. Usually 1-2 per quarter depending on the size and speed of your org. These deserve standalone activities and effort but are usually a smaller, more focused list of activities to your current customer base.
• Tier 3: These are relatively small product updates that a subset of your current customer base will care about deeply. Usually, 4-5 per quarter that can be bundled together if needed. The launch is usually a very targeted set of activities to a subset of your customer base.
• Tier 4: These are small updates (often usability improvements) that do not warrant comms. They should be either unnoticed by your customers or straightforward enough that a customer can see them and understand what to do without prompting.

Based on the above, here are the main components of a GTM strategy that my team uses for a launch: 

• Product launch tier and strategy brief: You cannot execute until you have a clear plan, a clear goal and audience, and a clear POV put into a brief that your product team is aligned with and your marketing org can understand and act on. This includes a pass at a bill of materials that your channel owners review and contribute to.
• Messaging: This is, in my opinion, the most important part of a product launch strategy. Nail the messaging, nail the launch. Write your messaging in partnership with your PM and validate it with your customers. Messaging is not final copy and does not need to be 5 pages long. A tight, clear framework that helps everyone understand what we’re trying to communicate is the most helpful thing you can create for the launch
• Pricing decisions: If your PMM team leads pricing, you need to be clear about what the pricing plan for this feature is, how it interacts with other features, and if you’ll be pushing any upsells etc for this launch. Even if you don't leave the pricing decision, you need to create a plan that accounts for it. 
• Channel execution: PMMs should partner with their channel experts and partner teams to execute the materials they’ve set out in their bill of materials. Often this is, at minimum, a launch announcement (blog), email, in product announcement, and social/Community posts. Your bill of materials can also include things like video, AR/PR activities, webinars and gated content, tutorial videos, and more.
• Enablement: Training for internal teams (sales, CSM, and support) as well as internal comms coordination to ensure everyone knows exactly what is happening, when.

I’ll caveat: every launch is different. There is no formula you can follow every time, your GTM plan needs to be created for the product you’re launching.

See answer on core elements of a strong, repeatable GTM framework. These elements -- market adoption stage, positioning strategy, messaging, ideal customer profile, buyer and user personas, trusted customer journey, and use cases -- apply to every product type and create alignment throughout the go-to-market organization.

My product marketing team is responsible for bringing products to market so that customers will readily convert. We focus on the bottom of the funnel and expansion revenue.  

Measurement: We execute on our responsibility by measuring against the 4 As:

— Awareness: demand

— Activation: usage

— Adoption: upsell/expansion

— Advocacy: retention/evangelism 

Focus areas: product launches (full lifecycle e.g., pricing, packaging, positioning, messaging and enablement), competitive & market intelligence, customer marketing (reviews, case studies, surveys), lifecycle marketing, and ecosystem marketing.

At a high-level, Product Marketing is the process of bringing a product/feature to market and overseeing its overall success.

How it’s different from traditional marketing: A marketing team focuses on acquisition and converting prospects into customers. PMM typically starts at closed/won (bottom of the funnel) and focuses on the 4 As: awareness, activation, adoption, and advocacy for customers.

Main Focus: PMMs focus on understanding and marketing to customers, driving demand & product adoption with the goal of creating happy, successful customers.

Strategies by product: PMMs drive adoption and usage of the product by focusing on processes such as product positioning, enablement, product messaging, packaging and positioning, buyer personas, metrics, meeting customer enablement needs, and product activation.

Tactics: PMMs take an integrated approach to deliver results across the 4As. This ensures customers receive the right message, at the right stage of their user journey and positions the business for growth.

Before launching a product, you have to first start with a solid market strategy.

• Market & customer research. What's your market and how big is it? Who currently plays in this market? With what, and how much does it cost?

• Product strategy (led by product & finance). Should we build this product ourselves or look to buy or partner? What are the target margins?

• Customer research. Who are the target segments? What is their willingness to pay?

Once you've defined your product opportunity and target market, you can then develop your GTM strategy. I still think about the classic 4 Ps of the marketing mix -- simple and classic.

• Product - what is it? How does it stack up to the market? Does it include hardware, software, services? All of the above?

• Price - are you trying to win market share, or do you care about margins? Price is a core part of how you communicate value about your product. Do you want to

• Place - how are you distributing this? Can people buy directly from you online, do they have to talk to a salesperson? What about partners?

• Promotion - what are the campaigns that you're going to run to promote this? This depends on your customer -- where do they like to find out about new products? In-person events? Social media? Influencers?

There are a lot of tactics out there to achieve your goals. Before you figure out which tactic to use, it's most helpful to define your goals -- what do you want to achieve? Business goals determine the tactics.

Good question—there’s always some grey area on lines of responsibility so I’ll add which other teams might own/participate in each phase:

• Research: can be owned by or with the UX and PM teams but should include user research, jobs to be done, alternatives for your solution, and language used

• PRD (product requirements doc): owned by the PM but the PMM can help contribute problem and solution framing. This is what I treat as gospel for exactly what the engineering team will commit to building, by when, and whether there’s any contractural obligations for current or future customers.

• Build: owned by engineers but PMM needs to stay close to ensure all priorities committed are trending according to schedule—it’s not your job to prioritize work for engineering but you don’t want to be the last to know if something you’re already planning to market won’t be ready in time.

• Messaging: owned by pmm but should work closely with product in completing. Cover audience, benefits, and boilerplate messaging for web, slides, blogs, etc

• Content: often owned by pmm but if you have a content or corp comms function they may just need your messaging house as defined above. Think one pagers, demo videos, social, slides, case studies, beta testimonials, and PR.

• Pricing: often owned by pmm, in partnership with the data team of one exists, finance, sales, and product.

• Enablement: owned by pmm unless you have an enablement team embedded in the sales org (you’ll be heavily contributing content for training either way). Think calculators, cheat sheets, objection handling, persona-specific messaging and playbooks.

• Rev Recc: mostly handled by sales ops—how your sales team records opportunities.

There is no one-size-fits-all GTM strategy; it will vary significantly depending on the specific product, target audience, market conditions, and other factors unique to each business.

However, there are some general considerations I can share to help you structure your strategy.

Every strategy should have three main phases: Pre-launch, Launch, and Post-launch.

Pre-Launch Phase:

• External Analysis: Understand your market (target audience), competitors, industry, government policies (if applicable), threats, and opportunities.

• Internal Analysis: The easiest way to ensure you don't miss any critical components of your internal analysis is to cover the five Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Promotion, Place, and People. Ensure you create your strategy with all these elements in mind.

The Pre-Launch phase could take the longest, but it will also define 60% of your strategy's success, in my opinion. The other 30% is execution, and 10% is learning and improving.

Launch Phase:

• Define Clear Goals: This phase is all about execution. But before you can execute a plan, you must have clear objectives and KPIs to measure your success.

• Activate Your Sales Channels: Understand how to get your product to the end customer. Map out the best channels to achieve this. Be aware that more channels are not necessarily better in this case. You may want to stick to one profitable channel, especially in the initial stages of your product.

• Ensure They Know Who You Are and What You Offer: At the first stages, awareness must be your primary marketing goal. Whether you're introducing a new product or entering a fiercely competitive industry, if consumers don't know you exist or why you're a better option than everything else on the market, you'll struggle to get them interested in your product.

Post-Launch Phase:

• Feedback: Ensure you're getting as much feedback as possible from different perspectives: clients, consumers, and distributors. At this point, this feedback becomes your most valuable source of information. It's the actual feeling your product has in the real world, and you need to get the most honest feedback if you truly want to improve and grow.