I’m excited to share with you how we as product marketers can do more with less. This article is all about the five assets that I believe every product marketer should have and the 15 ways we can repurpose them.

In this article, I’ll be focusing on:

  • Top content creation challenges
  • Five key assets for your bill of materials

Top content creation challenges

From my experiences in product marketing, I've identified our top challenges in creating effective content that aligns with our goals, our target audience, and our channels.

Challenge #1: Budget

Our first content creation challenge, which I'm sure many readers are very familiar with, is budget.

In 2020, 47% of product marketing budgets were in the zero to $250,000 range, and only 6% of product marketing teams had a budget of over $1 million. If we fast forward a year to 2021, 67% of product marketing teams had a budget between zero and $250,000.

That budget, as we know, is not just reserved for content. We need to use that budget for software and internet tools, customer research, competitive research, and even conferences.

Challenge #2: Time

Our next challenge is our time. As I just mentioned, we're not just responsible for creating content all day; we’re also responsible for creating the go-to-market strategy for products, launching products, landing products, enabling sales - the list goes on.

With so many things to do, there just isn't enough time to dedicate to creating content.

Challenge #3: Stakeholder alignment

Our third challenge is stakeholder alignment. Even though product marketing conducts market research and represents the voice of the customer, sometimes our stakeholders think that they know more about what customers want.

I've had many conversations with sales teams and product managers, where they’ve told me that their customers really want a specific asset like a blog or a datasheet, but that’s just not in alignment with the research that I have. That can make it hard for us to create content that our stakeholders view as valuable.

Challenge #4: People’s attention spans

The next challenge is people's attention spans. A study recently conducted by Microsoft indicated that people now start to lose concentration after eight seconds. Attention spans have been falling for years, and they’re at an all-time low.

If we know that people are only paying attention for eight seconds, how do we create effective content that grabs their attention and inspires them to do what we want them to do?

Challenge #5: Noise

Challenge number five is noise. It’s estimated that Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook store at least 1200 petabytes between them. With so much information out there, how do we make our content sing out above the noise and reach our target audience?

Challenge #6: Promotion

The last challenge that we face with creating content is promotion. There are so many different channels available to product marketers.

We have social media, we have web pages, we have events, we have press articles, and sometimes we might not even be in charge of those channels.

At Google, for example, we have a dedicated social media team. If we don't own the channel, or if we're not aware of all the channels available to us, how can we make sure our content reaches our target audience?

Key assets for your bill of materials

What if I told you there was a way to build effective content within your budget that’s easy to promote and will excite your stakeholders and engage your target audience?

To help us with all of the content creation challenges that I mentioned, I believe that every product marketer should have these five key assets in their bill of materials:

  1. A customer-facing pitch deck
  2. A datasheet
  3. A customer reference
  4. A high-level product overview video
  5. A webpage

Let's dig into these five assets and the 15 different ways we can repurpose them.

I want to preface this with two things:

1) I'm going to be speaking from my background and my perspective of working in the B2B space.

2) These are not the only ways to repurpose your assets; you could create podcasts, white papers, and product demos, for example, but for the purposes of this article, I'm sticking with these 15 ways.

Key asset #1: The customer-facing pitch deck

Let's get started with the customer-facing pitch deck. The customer-facing pitch deck, as you’re probably aware, generally opens with the challenges that your target audience is facing, which leads nicely to your product and how it can solve that problem.

As you progress in your deck, you start to get into the specifics of your product – features, roadmap, pricing, customer references, upcoming events, you name it.

The goal of the customer-facing pitch deck is not only to tell a compelling story but to reflect our messaging and positioning and our key value props. To make this deck go further and save time and resources, we can repurpose it in three ways.

Repurposed asset: Analyst deck

Let’s start with the analyst deck. As I said, I work primarily in the business-to-business space.

We work with analysts – you can think of them as third-party consulting firms – to write papers, not only about our products but also about other products that play in that space, as a way to help businesses figure out which product is best for their business.

Because that customer-facing pitch deck is rich in information, it will be very easy for you as a PMM to take most of that content and put it into an analyst stack – you just have to make very slight tweaks.

Maybe this particular analyst cares about a specific feature, thought leadership theme, or moment in time. Because you have 80% of the content you need for an analyst deck in this customer-facing pitch deck, it should require very little effort and budget for you to flesh out the remaining 20%.

Repurposed asset: Event deck

You can take a similar approach for an event deck. Events can take many forms – your company might host first-party events, you might attend third-party or industry events, or you might even treat your product launches as events.

Whichever type of event you’re looking at, you can once again take all of that goodness in your customer-facing pitch deck and tailor it to the event’s theme.

For example, since I work in the online fraud space, I have a customer-facing pitch deck about how my products protect against online fraud and abuse.

However, I might be attending an event that is focused on protecting against fraud retailers during the holiday season. I can take the existing material in that deck and reword it to position our solution to that particular theme.