If your product is for “everyone,” it’s actually for no one. Defining your target audience is crucial for a successful product launch. Without a clear customer in mind, it’s impossible to know if your product truly meets their needs or how to effectively reach them. For example, targeting mom-and-pop shops may be very different compared to a Fortune 500 company.

“Target Market = Your ideal customer, defined as specific as possible: small, medium, or large enterprise businesses? Male or female? Where do they live? What is their behavior? What motivates them? What’s their Budget or Price Point?”

Instead of trying to find customers for your product, focus on building products that solve the problems of your target customers. Therefore, talk to customers before developing or launching a product, such as those who are alpha or beta testing or those involved throughout the product lifecycle.

Understanding your customers helps gauge your Total Addressable Market (TAM), which includes the potential number of users, market growth, and projected revenue. Without knowing your market, it’s impossible to determine if your product fits or how to adjust it.

Achieving Product/Market Fit means having a product that satisfies the demands of a well-defined market—without this, even the best product will struggle.

“The biggest reason companies fail is a lack of market.”

Make a Hypothesis

Defining your customer is all about answering the simple question: “Who is this product for?”. List the challenges your product solves by talking to the people who worked on the product. What are the customer’s pain points? From there, create a hypothesis of who would use your product.

Look at Competitors

Who are they marketing to? What are they saying? Is this the same or different for your product? Why? Are there any “blank spaces”? Picking a market your competitors are not in can be a way to differentiate yourself from the competition.

Talk to Customers

Take the time yourself to talk to real people who are in your hypothesized customer base. Don’t outsource this to a consulting firm! You need to hear their language and see with your own eyes if their challenges are ones you can solve.

1. Email surveys: Tap into existing mail lists and send out a survey. Try segmenting your email lists in a way that makes the most sense. Different emails to each group of current, churned, or prospective customers. Use TypeForm to create surveys.
2. Phone interviews: Go deeper with 30-minute interviews with at least 5 customers. 5 is a minimum! Develop a script and ask every customer the same set of questions. Enter all responses in a spreadsheet and find patterns. Scheduling can be challenging, so use tools like Calendly for bookings. Always ask permission before recording the call.
3. iPad Surveys at a conference: Going to a conference geared toward your audience is a great way to get a lot of responses and talk to prospective clients. Use Google Forms on your iPad and offer a $5 incentive, like a Starbucks card, for completing the survey.
4. LinkedIn Messages: Allows you to target your ideal audience. Experiment with different headlines, such as leading with an incentive, to see what gets the best response rate.
5. Recruit interviewees using a tool like Vancery: Vancery allows you to target specific professionals to take surveys and/or set up customer/prospect interviews. It can be pricier ($100 per respondent) but provides quick insights.
6. Incentivize: People are busy and they want their time to be worth something. For quick surveys, consider these incentives:
   • Small rewards like a $5 or $10 Amazon gift card
   • A small credit or discount for your business
   • A donation to a charity
   • A raffle with a larger prize ($250-500) or something cool (latest iPad, lunch with the CEO, etc.)

Target the Decision Maker

Testing with just a handful of clients may not be representative. Your customer may be more complex, consisting of teams that are organized differently than just one person handling everything. Include early testing with businesses of all sizes and interview multiple teams involved.

Target the right person, such as the head of marketing, who is responsible for both teams instead of just one. This helps break down silos between reporting and budget management.

Just as a deep understanding of your customers is essential for building and marketing your products effectively, knowing your competition is equally critical for differentiation. Success isn't about being the best, fastest, or cheapest—it’s about standing out in a way that clearly shows customers why they should choose your brand over others.

Differentiation should be ingrained in your product’s DNA, from its branding to its marketing strategy. The goal is for potential buyers to connect with your positioning and recognize the unique value you offer. It's not only about having an exceptional product (Positioning); it’s also about guiding the customer throughout their journey, ensuring every interaction reinforces your brand's uniqueness. This should be reflected consistently across all marketing channels (Messaging).

The goal is to create a solid positioning statement and messaging that can be translated by a copywriter to any type of medium: advertisements, websites, sales decks, or any other launch assets.

Positioning

Positioning of a product is the perception of the product, relative to the competition, in a prospect’s or customer’s mind. It flows into everything else you will create. What makes your company different, not just better. The important thing about a differentiator is it allows your prospect to understand what makes you unique and to think of you in that context.

A typical position statement looks like this:
For [Target Market], the [Brand or Product] is the [Point of Differentiation] among all [Frame of Reference/Category] because [Reason to Believe/Proof Point].

Elements in the Positioning:

• Target Market: Your ideal customer, defined as specific as possible.
• Brand or Product: The product you are positioning.
• Point of Differentiation: This is what makes you different or unique.
• Frame of Reference: Also known as the “category” you’re in, what a group of companies similar to yours will be called.
• Reason to Believe/Proof Point: A compelling feature, customer quote, or data point that reaffirms your main differentiation point.

This is rather clunky and something internal, not something you would list on the homepage of your website. But once in place, you can fine-tune and develop messaging with the right frame in mind.

Key Ways to Differentiate:

• Branding: Through distinct colors, logos, and fonts.
• Industry Focus: Targeting an industry or niche that competitors overlook.
• Buyer/Persona: Focusing on a different buyer or user group than your competitors.
• Pricing Strategy: Positioning yourself as a premium or value brand (but not relying solely on price for differentiation).
• Customer Experience/Service Levels: Offering unique customer service, but ensuring it’s achievable and clearly defined at different price levels.

Example:

For women road cyclists in Northern California, West Coast Cyclists provides the most comprehensive service among all cycling shops, thanks to their unique offering of roadside assistance, bike maintenance training, and a 1-hour callback guarantee.

Messaging

A well-constructed messaging framework communicates why your product is the best choice for your target audience. It typically highlights key product benefits, features, or unique selling points (USPs).

The goal is to create 3-5 benefit statements and lists of supporting features and unique selling points (USPs). A great way to develop the messaging for a product is to take a step back and review the market problems the product is solving.

Quick 3-Column View:

• Market Problems: The specific problems that your persona faced that led your team to develop the solution.
• Problem-Solving Benefit Statement: In a few words, how does the product or feature solve the problem at hand? These statements can easily be turned into the 3-5 benefit pillars.
• Specific Features That Solve the Problem: How does the product solve this problem? Are any of the features unique or differentiated?

Example:

Benefit 1	Benefit 2	Benefit 3
The most comprehensive and trusted cycling service.	For women cyclists, by women cyclists.	Largest selection of bikes and bike equipment.
- Award-winning roadside assistance - Bike maintenance training to tech skills like fixing a flat tire	- Founded by women cyclists - 90 percent of customers are women - Bikes, seats, and apparel specially designed for women	- Largest selection of new and used road bikes in Northern California - State-of-the-art helmets, racks, and other accessories

Do Internal Research

Gather a small group of the brightest minds from the product, sales, and customer teams (limit to 3 people per session) and hold review sessions. Use these meetings to explain the rationale behind your positioning and messaging, and encourage their feedback. Walking through the details in person leads to better outcomes than simply sharing the document. Ask yourself two key questions:

1. Does the messaging and positioning roll up to “the why” of the company?
2. Is the messaging compelling or dull—do people care about the reasons we outlined to buy?

Seek approval from executives (or the most senior people involved in your launch) on the positioning and messaging only. Let them know that once this is agreed on, the copy will be developed directly from these assets, but you don’t want to burden them with reviewing every deliverable.

It’s also important to validate the main benefits and USPs with customers to make sure that they matter. If customers don’t really care, it doesn’t affect the buying decisions!

Do Competitive Research

Have a good grasp of the industry and competitors. Don’t mistake feature wars with differentiation. For differentiation to truly work, your product must holistically be seen as different from the competition, not just one feature here or there.

After drafting your messaging pillars, make a quick excel matrix with the pillars and your top competitors. Then do the work to fill in how your competitors position themselves for each of those pillars.

Competitor Analysis Example:

	Comprehensive Service	Focused on Women	Great Selection
Competitor A	X		X
Competitor B			X
Competitor C			X

Segmentation

It’s perfectly normal to have more than one type of customer, and these different groups are referred to as customer segments. Each segment may respond to slightly different messaging, marketing strategies, and promotions, so it’s important to tailor your approach to meet the specific needs of each group.

To test your segmentation effectively, consider creating segment-specific messaging aimed at different customer groups. One way to do this is by designing four mock homepages, each with a unique tagline that resonates with a specific segment. Then, gather feedback by asking your audience to rank their favorite homepage and explain why it appealed to them.

As an added incentive, run a contest with a $250 gift card prize for participants, ensuring high engagement and valuable insights that will help you refine your marketing strategy for each customer segment.

The positioning statement and messaging framework serve as the foundation for all external communication. These core elements are translated into copy for websites, product sheets, and various external channels. A skilled copywriter ensures the messaging is adapted to suit different mediums, while keeping the core message intact.

To be effective, the copy must align with both the audience and platform. Homepage copy should be concise and attention-grabbing, while sales scripts allow for more in-depth explanations. Tailoring the messaging ensures it resonates across every channel, keeping the brand’s unique positioning consistent.

External Channels to Communicate the Launch:

• Organic digital-search engine optimization (SEO)
• Press - hire a PR agency or someone internal to pitch
• Written case studies, whitepapers, and testimonials
• Video case studies
• Paid digital – search engine marketing (SEM), display ads, or video ads
• In-product messaging for product releases
• Blogs and social posts
• Content updates for the website
• External email announcements, email campaigns
• Update help center content
• Resellers: Partner with companies or individuals who sell your product for you
• Channel Partners: Work with other businesses who distribute or promote your product
• Every page of your website
• Webinars
• Speeches/speaking events
• Posters
• Packaging/labels
• Advertisements, including the voice-over on audio ads

Make sure you have the right team and a communication game plan for how everyone will stay informed. This section will help you master the art of getting the right people on your team, championing your launch, and making sure everyone knows the important details.

“The key to a successful launch is to have an aligned team.”

This means that you share at regular intervals the plan, explain the launch, the why, and the Go-to-Market (GTM) plan. Also, it’s essential for each person to clearly understand their ownership role in the launch. Communication is part of the daily job, but critical for launches.

Setup a Steering Committee

Have an executive sponsor to keep pressure on the product and engineering teams to deliver on time. The sponsor should attend weekly steering committee meetings to help identify problems early, and sometimes "translate" blockers from engineering to marketing and sales when things aren’t going as planned. Ensure you have an executive sponsor.

Steering committee members:

• Executive sponsor
• Head of product marketing
• Product marketer
• Head of product
• Product manager
• Business operations managers
• Legal representative

Setup a Diverse Launch Team

Select a diverse group as possible when forming your launch team. Look for people from different backgrounds, representing various groups, including age, gender, and race. Better decisions are made by more diverse groups.

Team members should include marketers and heads of sales to keep them abreast of launch activities and risks to the launch date. Ensure everyone knows their role when the launch happens.

• Head of design
• Web designer
• Digital media team
• Event marketing lead
• Content marketing lead
• PR liaison
• Regional counterparts
• Legal
• Sales representatives

Defining Roles and Responsibilities Using the RACI Model

The RACI model is crucial for structuring roles and responsibilities in your Go-to-Market (GTM) plan. It stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed, and helps clarify who is involved in key deliverables and their specific roles.

Defining RACI ensures that everyone knows who is doing the work, who is accountable for success, and who needs to be consulted or informed. You can create a RACI chart for each deliverable within your product plan, as well as for the launch itself. Keeping an updated RACI list in your GTM tracker ensures smooth communication and clarity.

RACI Breakdown:

• R (Responsible): The person or team doing the work to complete a task.
• A (Accountable): The person ultimately answerable for the outcome, usually a manager or executive sponsor.
• C (Consulted): Experts or stakeholders whose input is needed to guide the work. Their opinions influence decisions.
• I (Informed): Those who should be kept in the loop on progress or outcomes, but don’t contribute directly to the task.

RACI Chart Example:

Task	Person A	Person B	Person C	Person D
Develop Strategy	R	A	C	I
Execute Launch Plan	R	A	C	I

• Person A is responsible for doing the work on "Develop Strategy."
• Person B is accountable for its success.
• Person C is consulted as an expert.
• Person D is informed of progress.

Using RACI helps ensure accountability, clarifies roles, and prevents misunderstandings during complex projects like a product launch.

Align Product Marketing and Product Management

The most successful product marketers become partners with product management teams, not “order takers.”

1. Connect teams organically: Without adding more work, find ways to stay connected. Have them sit together for half of each day – attend daily stand-ups, participate in sprint planning meetings, and have spontaneous conversations. If remote, video conferencing and Slack can help.
2. Create Shared Goals: Successful teams set their goals together. Both teams should make time to understand and align their respective goals.
3. Be Each Other’s Content-Area Experts: Consult with each other on decisions both big and small.
4. Share Customer Feedback: Both teams talk to customers, and this information should be exchanged regularly.
5. Share and Celebrate Wins: When a goal is achieved, no matter how small, take time to celebrate with everyone involved.

Letting people internally care may be a big challenge in larger companies. “Battling for internal mindshare” can be tough, so it's best practice to make sure the message is received by your colleagues. It's your job to remind them of this upcoming launch!

The 10% Time

“10% of your time should be spent telling other people about the launch.”

It sounds self-promotional, but if the launch isn’t a hit internally, it’s going to be really hard to get the traction you need externally. Think of internal promotion as building the case for marketing budget and resources. How to increase visibility:

• Keep sharing launch updates in multiple channels. Try Slack, email, company all-hands meetings, pod stand-up meetings, posters – anywhere your internal audience might see the message.
• Remember to keep the message relevant: Why should they care? How will it affect them? Why is it exciting?
• Are there any stats you can reference that will make even the busiest executives perk up?
• Are there any internal case studies or stories you can share? Those tend to be a lot stickier.

Define the Right Internal Communication Channels

Not only is targeting the right stakeholder group key, but defining your broader internal communication channels will make or break your launch. Meet any risks to the launch date head-on and coordinate with the right stakeholders to minimize damage.

Communication Updates:

• Weekly update to key stakeholders: GTM checklist updated weekly
• Weekly steering
• Weekly email recaps: share progress updates, charts, links, and next steps
• Slack channels for updates
• Executive decks for monthly executive check-ins on launch progress
• "Roadshow" deck to all teams (sales, marketing, regional teams, even engineering)
• Biweekly meetings with the launch team for 3 months before launch
• Frequent presentations at all-hands meetings, even if just a 3-minute progress update
• Launch email once the product has launched

Activity Timing:

Activity	Timing
Weekly update to key stakeholders	6 – 12 weeks before launch
Roadshow to top internal teams	2 weeks before launch
Company-wide communication with all dates, links, resources, and what to expect	1 week before launch
Day-of-launch email with all links, resources, and any early feedback (from social media, internal stakeholders, customers, or press)	Day of launch
Recap of activities, links to all documents, press, and impact on goals	1 week post-launch
Monthly recaps and reporting on adoption metrics	Post-launch for 3 – 6 months

Write Effective Launch Timing Communications

Explain the launch, what the product is, and how the reader can help: share, download, use, provide feedback, etc. Try to keep things templated.

• Subject: 8 weeks until launch
• Include launch progress across the board (marketing, product, roadblocks, and action items).
• Include interesting stats about product development, product and marketing "sneak peek" screenshots, and customer quotes.
• Use the update as a feedback loop for product, messaging, and client feedback.

"Use the best internal communication channels for your launch updates, and make the message sticky and exciting!"

Have Efficient Meetings

Start with key dates for the launch and have the core team (Responsible & Accountable) meet once a week. The Consulted and Informed teams should meet once a month.

Sales Enablement Channels

Next to internal communications, it’s also important to have the right sales enablement channels.

• Product training
• Sales training
• Sales certification
• Talking points/pitch script
• Product slides
• One sheet
• Communication document / internal FAQ
• Announcements
• Goals/Incentives
• Post materials to the asset management system (intranet, Google Drive, etc.)

To maximize visibility, link your launch to press coverage or align it with a major annual customer event. This creates the best opportunity to make a significant impact and reach both customers and prospects. However, be mindful that live events often come with fixed dates and nonrefundable deposits, making them difficult to reschedule—similar to how changing a wedding date is much harder than adjusting a Zoom call. Combining a live event with a product launch can increase internal pressure, so careful planning is essential.

The best way to meet your launch deadline is to overprepare. Organize the right team, communicate the launch date clearly, and regularly address any potential delays to stay on track.

Tips to Hit Your Launch Date:

• Collaborative Launch Planning: Set a realistic launch date with input from product teams, factoring in seasonality, holidays, and workload. Tuesdays and Wednesdays typically get the most attention, and don't forget to consider international time zones.
• Create a Visual Timeline: Map out a timeline that all stakeholders can see and agree on.
• Learn to Say No: Protect your deadline by saying no to tasks outside of launch goals. Avoid distractions that don’t contribute to the core objectives.
• Be Accountable: Make sure each part of the launch has a clear owner. If something goes wrong, communicate the issue immediately and follow up to ensure corrective action is taken.

Even with the best plans, launches can encounter issues. Stay proactive by maintaining a broad view of potential risks, ensuring you have the right team to handle problems, and using clear communication channels to keep everyone informed.

When managing multiple launches, consider tiering, bundling related products, and understanding product stages to better prioritize and allocate resources.

Tiering

How big you want to go with a launch in relation to others depends on the time, resources, and budget you have available. Tiering a launch means you are prioritizing available resources and reception in the market. If everything is treated as the new iPhone, customers will become fatigued. The launch is meant to be an exciting moment to drive awareness of a product for a particular target market with specific results, so occasionally you have to push back against product or engineering teams that want to celebrate their achievements.

• Tier 1: Game-changing, strategically important
• Tier 2: Important to sales teams and core customers but not "game-changing"
• Tier 3: Cosmetic updates or bug fixes

Bundling

Bundling brings multiple related features together in a single launch. Multiple smaller products and features to launch can be bundled in one launch. The launch may appear bigger. Bundle around a theme. For example, release as an "innovation lab" of all new features.

Product Stages

Product stages help you get on the same page with your product managers and customers by releasing a product with an alpha or beta designation. Don’t talk about a product if it’s not yet in the beta phase. Until that point, you are testing whether that product will even work, whether it has “product/market” fit, or if it will be successful with your intended target market.

Channel metrics and plan: Channel metrics are specific objectives used to report on how each of your launch marketing channels is hitting committed goals. Content-level goals, e.g., email: 10k people on email list; 25% mail opening rate; 2% conversion rate = 200 conversions. Prospects need at least 3 touches with your company before the sales team will want to talk to them (qualified lead).

Define the Metrics that Matter

Measurement is mostly an afterthought or something slapped on at the end. But it should be part of your strategy and given as much thought as your overall GTM plan. To establish accurate data collection and solutions to their pain points. Expectation to drive business, and that requires measurement.

If your launches and other projects aren’t rolling up to the metrics that matter, what are you celebrating? If you don’t have goals to level up to, how do you know that what you’re working on is the right thing?

"Make product marketing more influential by aligning to goals and metrics that are meaningful to the business overall."

The 3 Steps to Metric Success

A tactical plan to get you to be more metric-driven in your approach to launches and other projects you are working on.

Know Your Stakeholders

What do the top stakeholders care about? Start the conversation about measurement early and ask the right questions: "I’m building my plan. What are the most important goals that we can align on?"

• Head of product/Product managers: Focus on product usage (monthly active use), growth, and churn/retention.
• CMO, head of marketing: How many leads are we attracting (MQLs), Customer Acquisition costs (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV), Annualized Recurring Revenue (ARR).
• Head of sales: Will we hit revenue targets? Can we close deals faster and increase the sales pipeline?

Choose Goals and Metrics Wisely

Choose the right top-level goals and understand the best metrics that can be tracked underneath those goals. Bottom-line KPIs are a top priority: Generating revenue, MQLs, Retention, etc.

1. Choose 3 top-level goals and map them out as such.
2. Pick the leading indicators that product marketing management can influence and track, such as new feature adoption, content downloads, demo requests or views, product landing page conversion, product activation, adoption, sales pipeline increase, customer win rate increase, product usage tracking, internal and external surveys, sales cycle length, initial sale, user adoption, trials, customer engagement metrics like content downloads and event attendance.
3. Link the leading indicators to the top-level goals in a matrix. For example, grow revenue influenced by the leading indicator "increased win rates."

Build Your Measurement Plan

Involve several teams to get answers to the following: What are the results of the metrics you have historically tracked? What are the mechanics of how you will track each metric you’ve committed to? How often will you communicate your progress to stakeholders?

Establish a baseline. Map it to a specific timeframe that will give you some data (yearly, quarterly, monthly view). Think about a few things as you’re setting goals: What does your promotion plan look like? Will you have a large budget to promote? Will staffing (on your team, sales or product engineering) be the same or different throughout the timeframe?

For example: 2021 baseline had a 50% increase win% quarterly / product usage active users (AAU); content downloads. Based on that, determine the goals of this launch.

The best way to manage a launch is to use a launch checklist. This is your organizational mainframe, your mission control, your "get things done" list. Create this list and make sure it’s always up to date and meets the demands of the launch you are running. The checklist includes a list of each task that needs to be completed within the due date, status, owner, priority level, and a space for notes and links. Here, all stakeholders can track launch progress, and it’s a great way to build alignment and confidence in the launch process.

The checklist should also contain a “Day of launch checklist” with owners and specific times. Timing should start the night before, as sometimes you’ll want your launch website to launch the product then.

• Press release publishing on the wire
• Publishing the website (if not the night before, should be early around 5:00 am EST)
• First advertisements go live
• Customer email
• Blog post publishing
• Internal Slack message/email (again, internal communications are extremely important)