Emily Kramer: prediction

Transcript context

…You talked about this briefly, but is there any simple heuristics to give you a sense of it's probably fuel, I need more great content, maybe some website updates versus I need to figure out how to get this out. How do you think about that high level? Yeah, I mean, it's kind of simple. You can just ask what are your top performing pieces of content or what's the top performing page on your website or things of that feature. Who is your product for? Why is it better? What are the benefits? How does it compare to competitors? If you don't have an answer for those questions, you don't have top performing content and you don't know your positioning and all that stuff, you got a fuel problem here. Oh, you wrote this really great piece of content and I saw it on your website, how are you distributing that? What are you doing? And they're like, I shared it on social, they didn't really go anywhere, you got an engine problem. Or if I say, do you know what your final stages are? You have two sales people now, how does the marketing sales handoff go? They're like, they share a list and block off everyone they should reach out to. I'm like, well, you have an adventure problem if this isn't going to scale. So it's just these basic things. Are you doing these things or not? And sometimes founders are really great at making the original sort of content and writing the early positioning. And they're the best suited to that and they just need someone to help them get that stuff out and that's when they need an engine person. So that's basically how you figure it out. And normally when you ask vendors that question, they get it pretty quickly. They're like, "Okay, I think this is my problem, I can kind of identify it. " And then it's like, okay, from here, well, what exactly do you need and what exact type of marketer do you need? And that's where everyone's answer is always, I think I heard from investors or I've been hearing from other founders that I really need a product marketer. And the question is, well what do you think a product marketer is? And you get a different answer every time. In fact, when I was at Asana our COO, his question that he liked to ask all the marketers or all the product marketers that we were interviewing was just, "What's product marketing?" And that's the scariest question you can ask a product marketer. It's like no scarier question for a product marketer then hey, what's a product marketer? They're like, "Oh, shit, I have no idea. Just my job, it's me. I'm a product marketer." But really a product marketer, they understand the product, they understand the audience and they understand the market in which you're operating. And from there they can figure out how to communicate with your audience about the right things at the right time. So they're kind of laying groundwork. And then they're also doing some work too. They're also doing a lot of the copywriting and the actual messaging and handling sort of launches and sometimes writing copy for things like emails and helping set the content strategy and things like that. And people think they need product marketers. ctual messaging and handling sort of launches and sometimes writing copy for things like emails and helping set the content strategy and things like that. And people think they need product marketers. One because it's like a fake people say, but two, because product marketers tend to shadow this line between fuel and engine. They're more on the fuel side, but particularly they've done a lot of launches in the past. They have a general understanding of channel strategy and what channels do at what time and that sort of end and stuff. But product marketers aren't really specialists in writing and producing content. They're not specialists in building out marketing ops or doing FDO. They're definitely more of the generalist function. And so sometimes that's a great answer. You need a product marketer, but sometimes you need someone that's scrappier in different areas. Another one of my frameworks is we start with doing these seal engine, what are the biggest problems? What are the biggest things that if you did, you would drive growth? And then we talk about the three typical subfunction that you would hire, which would be content, community type person, a growth demands and type person and a product marketer. And we kind of talk about what those three things mean. And kind of align based on what you're saying, based on the fuel engine thing, probably in this type of person. And then from there, what I tell people when you're hiring your first marketer and probably even your first several marketers, you're more want to hire generalist than specialists. This is probably true for anywhere at the early stage startup, but specialists are great to hire. It's great to hire contractors that are specialists. Like the FDO contractor, even the contractor who can write the marketing ops contractor. But you want someone who is pretty much a generalist. And the way I describe that within marketing, usually you you are like hire a T shape person that bites in one area and has working knowledge and try to crop all of them. But I use this thing that I made up which is you one up higher pie shaped marketers, not pie like dessert, but pie like 3.14 where the pie symbol has two vertical lines. So like a T but it has an extra line. And it's because you want the first marketer to be an expert in one of those three areas that I mentioned, product marketing, content marketing, growth marketing. And you want them to be proficient in another one, the second T. But you want them to be able to set strategy and know how to hire contractors across all of them. And so the promise land of hiring a first marketer, they are a pie shape marketer. And so then you could hire a content and product marketing pie shape marketer, product marketing growth pie shape marketer. But it's like what are those two spikes and what's the one that you're going to worry less about that they need to work knowledge of? The last thing I'll say on the pie piece is that it's really hard to find someone that's a content marketer that's also really good at growth. Like that pie shape marketer exists a lot less frequently.…

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