Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.
It can be difficult to understand how all the product marketing puzzle pieces fit together.
It’s a question that comes up often throughout our course, WTF is Go-To-Market?. What’s the difference between an ICP and a persona? Is an ICP the same as the target market? How about positioning, narrative, and messaging – do you need one for each persona?
I personally found it hard to grasp all of these intangible elements. They often appear disjointed, especially when used by those without deep experience.
Here’s my attempt to show how I think all the core pieces of the puzzle fit together:
In this post:
Breaking it down
The target market is the overall serviceable group of potential customers. Think “APAC fintech companies”.
Your go-to-market strategy encapsulates all the elements required to launch, sell, and market your product to the target market. This includes the. components listed below, as well as how your customers will buy (e.g. inside sales, product-led growth, etc) plus pricing and so on.
Your GTM strategy is based on your ideal customer profile, a niched definition of what a perfect customer looks like. We’re usually looking at a company or segment level.
Next we bring in your positioning and narrative. Positioning is about defining the space your business occupies in the mind of the customer. Narrative is the story you tell to your customers: why you exist, how you help, how their lives will be different. If you have multiple products and ICPs, these still need to make sense together as they explain your focus and priorities.
The ICP is the defined group of customers that you’re solving problems for. These are the customers that your sales and marketing team will focus on attacking to build traction. Think “Fintech startups based in India or Singapore, under $10m in revenue, over $10m in funding, using Stripe.”
Within each ICP, you’ll identify key personas. These are the people and roles that you’ll cater to in marketing and sales.
You’ll want to understand the buyer journey to craft a marketing and sales experience that has the best hit rate for turning those personas within your ICP into customers.
Finally, you can create stage-specific messaging along the buyer journey to drive prospects from problem awareness to purchase, activation, and expansion.
Over time, you’ll either expand your ICP to include adjacent customers, add additional ICPs to cover new segments, or pivot completely to a new ICP as you learn about your product/market-fit. This might require new/additional buyer personas (and therefore buyer journeys and messaging), or different go-to-market motions (for example, adding a self-service GTM).
Where’s best to start?
If you’re attacking a brand new business from scratch, I think it’s best to start by defining your ideal customer profile. From here, you can move down to deep-dive into the specifics of who’s involved and how you can reach them, and move up to build positioning and align the business around a go-to-market strategy.
What would you change?
I think every product marketer probably has a slightly different approach to connecting the dots and I’m excited to hear how you think about how the product marketing puzzle fits together. Drop me a note or comment below!
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