This template is designed to help consumer Product Marketers communicate their launch strategy to internal stakeholders. My former manager would always say: “this document should be a waterfall - each section should logically flow into the next.” For example, after defining the user pain points and key insight, the messaging framework should seem like it’s addressing those specific pain points. Having this logical progression makes it easier for teammates to follow along and understand the plan.

For larger launches, a separate Creative Brief is created based on this document but stripped of excess details not useful for the Creative team. Having just one combined document could work as well for faster or simpler executions.

Template starts below:

Job to be done

Get (establish your target user)
Who (describe a major pain point of theirs)
To (action you want them to take)
By (explain why they would take action)

This is a quick TLDR of the GTM so that readers can quickly get context for the document. Sometimes I write this part after completing the rest of the plan so that it all ties together. Read more about this framework in the Product Marketing Messaging Framework [link] post.

Business Overview

Introduce your audience and the challenges that they’re facing, how this product will solve those needs, and most importantly, translate this into how it’ll affect the business. The goal is for the reader to conclude: “Wow, this is a huge problem! If we’re successful in solving it, we’re going to grow this business tremendously.”

What to include:

• Acuteness / urgency of the pain point
• How the existing product is addressing these needs (before this new product is launched)
• Market or national trends
• Size total addressable market, estimates of existing users who would be interested
• Revenue or profit opportunity

Objectives and Metrics

What is this campaign looking to accomplish? I like to break this down into smaller components: Shared organization / company goal —> product goal —> product marketing goal.

• Shared organization / company goal - The top-level objective of the company or broader org. Often it’s revenue / profitability or growth related. What objective is the entire organization rallying toward that this product will help drive?
• Product goal - Product and Product Marketing work together to ensure the product is being used with high user satisfaction. The product goal usually sets an adoption target, retention improvement, or NPS rating improvement.
• Product marketing goal - The specific goal that PMM is responsible for. If you look at the customer acquisition funnel with awareness at the top and conversion at the bottom, try to find a goal that’s as far down funnel as possible while still being mostly influenced by marketing activities. For example, ‘impressions’ might be too high in the funnel because it’s hard to tell if the impressions are coming from your target audience. Conversely, ‘conversions’ is likely too low in the funnel because other factors such as purchase flow or pricing may influence the metric but is outside of marketing’s control. Find a goal and metric that marketing can drive without too much external influence.

Product Overview

Given the business overview and goals listed in the previous section, go into detail about how you plan on solving them with the product. Walk through the user journey and the details of what has been built to address the pain point.

What to include:

• Screenshots of the product flow
• Features or benefits that differentiate your product from competitors
• Show why this is an improvement on the status quo
• Link to Product Requirements Doc (written by the PM)

Audience Insights

Target Audience

Identify the target customer for this product and paint a picture of who this person is. Look at their behavioral and demographic tendencies, how they currently use your product, and any other factors that make them unique.

Pain Points

What are the pain points for the target audience? There should be one or two very acute problems that they’re facing, causing them such pain that they’d jump at the opportunity to try a potential solution.

Competitive Analysis

Conduct a thorough market analysis to understand the alternative solutions, their strengths and weakness, and industry trends. Why do the current solutions not solve the problem?

Key Insight

Succinctly summarize the audience insights above into ONE sentence. This key insight drives the entire messaging framework so it needs to get to the heart of what users are feeling and need at the moment.

Messaging Framework

Go in-depth with the Product Marketing Messaging Framework here

The messaging framework needs to make clear the ONE message that you’d like to convey to the customer (Product Value Proposition). Everything else in the framework should build on that value prop / message and all creative assets for the campaign should be generated from the framework. Use internal-facing language here — the creative team is responsible for turning that into exciting external copy.

Approach

Describe how you plan to execute the launch of the product. This needs to encompass everything from the product rollout timing (soft launch, live date) to marketing phases to PR timing to channel strategy.

It’s very important to organize this section in a way that’s easily digestible for the reader. Oftentimes certain phases can span days or weeks whereas other events are a single point in time. Channel strategy can also become a matrixed mess if different channels are used for different phases. While it may all make sense to you, the plan gets confusing quickly for everyone else. I find that a chart or timeline works best here.

For channel strategy, focus on which channels will be the most efficient use of resources. Picking every possible channel is not a good strategy for several reasons:

1. After a certain point, each additional channel requires incremental work but results in diminishing incremental impact.
2. Overuse of a channel at a company level slowly begins to degrade reachability and increase marketing fatigue, decreasing effectiveness of future marketing for the whole company.
3. Not every channel will be effective for accomplishing the campaign goals — it’s the PMM’s job to decide which is best.

Audience Targeting

Describe how you will find the target audience. Using the internal / external data available, build the audience that will receive this campaign. For example, if you’re marketing to your most engaged users, how are you defining ‘most engaged’? Are there users that should be filtered out? I include this at the end of the GTM template because it’s pretty tactical and not relevant to all readers.

Risks and Mitigations

Think through all the risks that may prevent the campaign from being a success. Product, product market fit, competition, reputation, press, regulations — every campaign will be different. By being clear and upfront about the risks, you can align with the team on the solutions in the planning phase.

Final Thoughts

Although it can take me anywhere from days to weeks to write, share, revise, and get approval on the GTM Plan, I believe it’s the most important and rewarding part of launching a new product. This document is the foundation of the ‘outbound’ side of Product Marketing work and the place where a PMM can put their stamp on the product / company / industry.