Go-to-Market & Product Marketing Strategist (Freelance)
Our client is looking for a strategic, commercially-minded and highly autonomous Go-to-Market & Product Marketing Strategist to help the business validate its Ideal Customer Profile, refine its positioning and messaging, and identify the most effective ways to take the product to market. This is a hands-on, early-stage GTM role rather than a traditional marketing, sales or content position. The product is already built and receiving strong feedback from users; the immediate challenge is understanding who it resonates with most strongly, why it resonates, and how they can quickly validate the right customer, messaging and go-to-market approach. This person will sit at the intersection of: Customer discovery Product marketing Go-to-market strategy Market validation Positioning and messaging Commercial strategy Creative problem-solving Early-stage growth The role requires someone who is comfortable getting their hands dirty, speaking to potential customers, opening doors, testing ideas and learning quickly rather than simply developing a strategy from behind a desk.
About this position
Key Duties and Responsibilities:
ICP & Customer Discovery
- Work with the team to define, challenge and validate the Ideal Customer Profile
- Identify and prioritise the customer segments most likely to benefit from the client
- Conduct conversations with potential and existing customers
- Understand their current marketing challenges, pain points and workflows
- Identify how they currently solve these problems
- Understand what would make them willing to pay for a solution
- Identify objections and barriers to adoption
- Identify recurring patterns in customer feedback
- Translate customer conversations into clear, actionable insights
Current target segments include:
- Independent restaurants
- Restaurants with approximately 1–5 locations
- Airbnbs
- Guest houses
- Small hospitality businesses
- Independent hotels
Go-to-Market Strategy & Experimentation
- Identify multiple potential routes to market and prioritise those with the strongest potential.
- Develop small, fast and measurable GTM experiments.
- Test assumptions through direct conversations and real-world market interactions.
- Leverage existing networks and relationships to open doors to potential customers.
- Identify relevant communities, partnerships and industry networks.
- Explore grassroots, relationship-led and unconventional approaches to market entry.
- Test different customer segments, messaging and acquisition approaches.
- Identify what resonates and what doesn't.
- Document learnings and continuously refine the GTM approach.
- Recommend which channels and strategies the client should invest in further.
- Help establish a repeatable GTM formula that can subsequently be scaled by the wider marketing team.
Product Marketing & Positioning
- Help translate customer insights into clearer product positioning
- Refine the clients messaging and value proposition
- Develop and test different messaging angles
- Identify the strongest customer use cases
- Identify which product benefits resonate most strongly
- Help communicate the product in simple, commercially relevant language
- Challenge overly technical or product-led communication
- Feed customer insights into the wider brand and messaging work
- Help ensure the client communicates what customers actually care about
Pilot Customer Development & Validation
- Identify and approach potential pilot customers within the target ICP.
- Leverage existing relationships and networks to facilitate introductions.
- Introduce potential customers to the client and facilitate initial conversations or demonstrations.
- Gather structured feedback from pilot users.
- Understand whether the product is solving a genuine and meaningful problem.
- Identify objections, friction points and opportunities for product improvement.
- Capture testimonials, customer stories and use cases where appropriate.
- Use pilot learnings to validate the ICP, positioning and messaging.
- Help the clients team understand what needs to be true before scaling customer acquisition.
Content, Messaging & Market Feedback
While this is not a content creation role, the successful candidate should understand how insights can translate into marketing.
They may:
- Recommend content themes based on customer conversations
- Identify messaging that should be reflected across social, website and email
- Develop or contribute to value propositions and customer-facing messaging
- Identify compelling customer stories
- Feed insights into future social and content strategy
- Help the wider team understand which messages and use cases are worth amplifying
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Support and collaborate with the COO and the wider team
- Translate customer and market feedback into actionable recommendations
- Work closely with the technical team to communicate customer needs
- Challenge assumptions constructively
- Bring new ideas and opportunities to the table
- Help create alignment between product, customer and GTM thinking
Requirements & Qualifications:
- Experience in product marketing, go-to-market, growth, commercial strategy, customer insights or a related field
- Experience working in a startup, scale-up or entrepreneurial environment
- Strong understanding of ICP development and customer segmentation
- Experience conducting customer discovery or market research
- Existing network within hospitality, restaurants
- Strong communication and interviewing skills
- Ability to translate customer feedback into actionable business insights
- Strong strategic and creative thinking
- Commercial awareness
- Comfortable testing and iterating on messaging and positioning
- Comfortable engaging directly with customers and prospects
- Strong initiative and ability to work autonomously
- Ability to operate effectively in an ambiguous environment