Big Announcement: we decided our content team CAN’T create content for our ICP anymore. And from 2025- it won’t. As a marketer marketing to non-marketers - you *can* learn your target audience’s language - but you will always speak with an accent. And then depending on where your audience comes from (esp. if it’s a very specialist, technical niche) - you will be speaking a very strong accent. And whether you like it or not - people don’t trust folks with a thick accent as much as they trust “natives”. (Many sad stories from the life of an expat 🥲) You may disagree with this - but think of fine literature, or poetry. Would you enjoy it as much if it was written by an expat with a limited knowledge of the language, say - a B1 level - making basic grammar and spelling errors? I’ve been thinking about it recently and realised we’ve been doing that in our content for the past 5 years. Trying so, so hard to understand our audience’s first-hand experience (and write about it) - without really having the first-hand experience. The emotion. The empathy. The intuition. The tacit knowledge. This sucked. For both our writers, editors and the target audience. Have we partially succeeded at writing fairly simple how-to content? We have. But we’ve been talking about going beyond this. We’ve been talking about creating *inspiring*, ground-breaking, thought-leadership content - that our audience would rave about, and share. Remember when I posted about how our CEO called me out for not sharing our own content? Yep. We’re about to change that. So we know we can’t be the ones who create content about product/growth managers, designers and researchers’ lived experience. Who can? Only the said product/growth managers, researchers or designers… …and a lot of them already do! But hey, guess what - just as we aren’t product managers and can’t product-manage - product managers aren’t marketers…and a lot of them can’t (that is - doesn’t have the time or budget or resources) market…their brilliant content. So it sits there, somewhere, among thousands other blogs and Substacks, without getting as much credit as it deserves. So here’s the NEWS: we’re going to change that in 2025! The PITT is born - Product Innovation Think Tank - the first truly collaborative, product thought leadership magazine - created by outstanding product practioners, for product practitioners. Every month we will be syndicating 4-6 pieces of original, inspiring content from seasoned product & growth experts - curating a collection of intertwined ideas, that provide more value together than the sum of its parts - spanning the topics of AI, Product Innovation, Career in Product, Growth Case Studies, Data-Driven Product Management and User Engagement. And of course we are rewarding each creator $$$$ for syndicating their content. If that sounds like a fair initiative that you’d like to be part of - fill in the form below & join the PITT 😈
Super cool and kudos for going with unique direction and not „with the river flow” if you know what I mean. Too many companies have bland content strategy nowadays.
Seriously. Impressed.
Bold and fair decision, Emilia Korczynska! We did a similar thing at Infobip for our developer brand - launching our global developer magazine ShiftMag.dev with our dedicated developer content editorial team, but more importantly - hosting articles by our own engineers (they do really well on Reddit organically) and industry engineering experts :) I'm very curious about how you are planning to syndicate and promote content by authors - we've had good experiences with conferences as well as more journalistic reporting my team has 15+ years of experience with. https://shiftmag.dev/
Yeah we are shifting this way too. Let your customers and expert users tell the story. The marketing teams job is to facilitate and guide these stories. Takes longer, potentially more expensive, but worth it.’
We’re not going fully in that direction but next year will be doing a lot more collaboration content (already started now) where we’ll be amplifying the voices of marketers who’re doing a really good job of video at their company. I realise our ICP actually resonates with that format a lot… when they hear others in the trenches like them.
This is the way 🚀 I was thinking more companies would bet on the UGC & community in 2025, but this can be haaaaard to engineer. Your syndication idea for content from industry practicioners/content creators under UP's brand is brilliant.
Running newsletters taught me one thing: real experts writing beats marketers pretending to be experts. This is exactly what the industry needs right now.
This’s gonna be sooo cool 😍
Big kudos for bringing this splendid idea to life 👏
VP of Marketing @Userpilot. Author @ Product Rantz.
2dApply to join us here - we'll get in touch soon! https://forms.gle/9d2dTjeUkSS77i466