Product Marketing (PMKT) is defined as the process of bringing a product to market and driving demand and usage. Other tasks of product marketing that help launch and drive a product into the market are the following:

• Competitive analysis
• Buyer personas
• Demos and presentations
• Developing case studies
• Product launch plans
• Market analysis
• Messaging
• Partner enablement
• Positioning
• Press and analyst briefings
• Pricing
• Sales enablement
• Target channel messaging

As a startup, you probably don’t have much of this laid out, and some of these tasks build upon others; i.e., Before launching a product, you need to have messaging and positioning. Before messaging and positioning, you need to understand the product benefits, market needs, personas, and competitors. Of course, you can’t have press and analyst briefings, demos, and presentations without messaging and positioning.

Of the many startups I have worked for, they also needed the following, which is not in a PMKT job description.

• Brand awareness
• Content strategy and content
• Definition of a platform, product and feature
• Demand gen assets and copy
• Executive presentations
• Funding presentation documents
• Market segmentation and targets
• Website content for SEO

Product marketing at a startup means you are a jack of all trades and should have experience in many tasks or be willing to learn and make mistakes.

So what are your first priorities as a product marketer at a startup? You have two main competing priorities:

1. Keep the growth engine moving. Get a good understanding of the product, features, and benefits and understand your unique selling points from internal sources. Then immediately plug holes in the messaging and position for your website, promotions, and copy. This messaging and positioning will not be your final, but you need to establish it to promote the product correctly for the customer’s needs. In addition, create quick assets for demand gen and sales to get leads and close deals. You have to keep the train moving.

2. Build the PMKT foundations and process. As you are keeping the train moving, you will need to build new railcars and rebuild the current railcars. This is the behind-the-scenes work to refine the messaging and positioning with research, create the GTM plan and release tasks, establish your brand messaging, and start building up your product and sales enablement assets. Then continue refining everything and launching products.

What is product marketing at a startup? It can be everything listed above or just a subset. This depends on the startup culture, market, customers, competitors and funding runway. The more a product marketing is a jack of all trades, the better they are a good fit for a startup.

BTW – Some startups like to begin with a consultant, like myself, who can quickly get everything going and start developing the processes before adding an FTE.

Let me know if you need any advice on product marketing for startups.