Does your marketing team put out bangers? (Dave’s Newsletter)

The Best Marketing Teams Don’t Wait for a Product Launch

Marketing is the momentum department at your company.

I really believe that.

This is about having something to say. Having news. Having a reason for your ideal customers to pay attention to you right now.

Good marketing works like a magnet. You put something out into the world that’s genuinely useful or interesting, and it pulls the right people toward you. That’s what momentum is. It’s the compound effect of consistently giving your market a reason to care.

Now, of course: product launches are usually the best fuel for that. Give me something big, juicy, exciting that we know our customers want. A new feature that solves a real problem; a key integration.

But the reality is you’re not always going to have a packed product roadmap with features that customers are begging for (if you work on the marketing team at Anthropic or OpenAI right now this does not apply, but for everyone else, you feel me…)

Sometimes there’s nothing to launch until next quarter. Sometimes that big release gets pushed. Again. And you never want to be in a position where the whole job is about waiting for the product team.

One pattern I’ve noticed with the great marketing teams, the ones that “get it” — they don’t wait! They play offense and create their own.

I was talking to Erin May about this; as CMO at User Interviews she scaled their marketing from a one-person operation to a team of 16 and helped grow the company from $0 to over $20M in ARR over eight years and a recent acquisition by UserTesting.

This thing I talked about in the intro here about momentum? She came up with the perfect name for these “marketing-created moments” that I loved and wanted to share with you:

Bangers.

She calls them bangers.

I had Erin on the podcast recently and she walked me through how bangers became the operating system for her entire marketing team (and here’s the full conversation if you want to tune in).

Here are three things worth knowing:

1. A banger is something big that’s 100% in marketing’s control.

Erin breaks her launches into two categories: bottom-of-funnel bangers (product launches, which depend on the product team) and top-of-funnel bangers, which are completely in marketing’s control. It’s the top-of-funnel ones I want to talk about because those are the ones you can go do tomorrow.

Think: original research, a video series, a takeover at an industry event, a piece of content so good that the whole company wants to share it. You’re acting like a publishing company inside the business.

Example: their first real banger was a UX Research Tools Map. Think of those massive martech landscape graphics with hundreds of logos, but for UX research tools. It was visually interesting, it was useful to their audience, and nobody else had done it. They’ve now turned it into an annual thing. They also do a State of User Research report using their own product to survey researchers, pulling out insights that are actually interesting and packaging it as a proper launch.

The key: these aren’t blog posts. They’re events. Erin plans 2-3 bangers per quarter, and each one gets the full treatment. Landing page, social campaign, email push, the works. If you can’t describe the banger in one sentence and get someone excited about it, it’s not a banger yet.

2. Lock the whole company in around the banger, not just marketing.

At Drift, we did something similar. We called them marketable moments (OK fine hat tip for Erin for bangers; much cooler). The first Tuesday of every month we shipped a marketable moment. No matter what. Some months we had a huge feature to announce from product or key partnerships. Some months we had to get creative. I like to say we opened the fridge and we had two pieces of bread, two eggs, an onion and we had to find a way to make dinner.

But the rhythm was the thing. Having that date on the calendar forced the whole company to orient around it; and it was a forcing function for the marketing team to create something, to have something to say.

Example: one month we decided to declare an end to the war between sales and marketing and created some catch materials around it, made videos, had a webinar with industry experts, and really turned it into a whole thing that tied back to the company mission and story — despite having no product news to share.

Erin does a company-wide push around every banger. The entire org is encouraged to share the content on social. There’s a paid, incentivized contest for whoever drives the most engagement from LinkedIn. Cash prizes. Then a week or two later, sales follows up with everyone who engaged with the content and tries to book meetings. They get incentivized for that too. That’s a banger turning into a full-funnel motion. Not just a content drop that dies in the feed.

I have always liked this idea of an operating cadence for startups where you snap the product and marketing calendars together so the whole company is moving in lockstep. One launch event per quarter that gives the org something to rally around, with real deadlines and real stakes. Bangers are that for marketing. When you plan them on a quarterly rhythm and the whole company knows they’re coming, it changes the energy. Marketing isn’t reacting. Marketing is setting the pace.

3. Myth: You need a huge “media” team and budget to do these.

Here’s the part that should make you feel good. Erin didn’t have a massive team when this started. She was the first marketer. She learned GarageBand to launch a podcast. She hopped into Webflow on day two to build a blog because they needed to announce a product integration.

The bangers that worked weren’t expensive. The UX Research Tools Map was original thinking and good design, not a six-figure production. The podcast started on Anchor with zero budget. What made them work was that they were genuinely useful to the audience and nobody else was doing them.

And this is where I think AI changes the math even more. Every company now has the ability to go deeper with content instead of wider. Instead of publishing 20 mediocre blog posts a month, take that energy and put it into one banger that your whole company can rally around. Original research. A definitive guide. Something with a real point of view. AI gives you the leverage to produce that caliber of work with a smaller team than ever before. Use it.

The product roadmap is one source of momentum. But it’s not the only one.

The best marketing teams figure out how to create their own. Map out your next quarter. Pick two or three moments that are 100% in your control. Give them a name, a deadline, and a plan. Then go make something worth sharing.

Bonus: now of course, if you have budget, there’s certainly more plays you can run. Billboards for your bangers, CTV, all the LinkedIn ads, events and all that. I just wanted to give you more of a content-first idea here based on the conversation with Erin.

What do you think?

— Dave

P.S. Reply back and let me know if you do something like this…

Also just reply, we read them all. Me, Erin, and Dan are always jumping to see who can reply first. It’s fun to know real people are on the other end here.

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