2-min Product Marketing Insights: April 2024 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: April 11, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] (For Startups) Delight early customers quickly by building internal tools to intervene when they use your product and encounter issues.
Retool built 3 custom tools to 'spy' on its users and build customer confidence instantly - (i) a real-time notification when a large account was using their product, (ii) slack alerts when users faced an issue, and (iii) shared channels for developers to debug errors faster.
[2] Ensure your referral program 'outside product' is hyper-focused on experienced customers and part of their activation sequence.
Besides a dedicated spot in-product, you must regularly promote your referral program through campaigns (ex: email, push notifications, etc.) Deliveroo also leverages more experienced customers by making the referral program visible on the first screen anytime they open their app.
[3] (For Vertical SaaS) Compile a list of industry publishers and negotiate free partnership opportunities for high-quality content to generate qualified leads.
FleetPanda provides software to manage all "dispatch operations for fuel distributors in North America." Given the niche, the company generates qualified monthly leads on autopilot by securing agreements to publish free blogs and share press releases with select industry publishers.
[4] Split your onboarding questionnaire and similar user entry forms into multiple screens to improve conversion rates.
Houzz allows homeowners to get quotes from construction professionals by entering their project details and contact info. Instead of accumulating this info on one screen, the company lets the users input their information across multiple screens to reduce the cognitive load.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Growth Levers and How to Find Them” by Matt Lerner
[1] There are 4 steps to transform your team into an "instrument for discovery" - (i) Unpack the journey that leads customers to you, (ii) Build your growth model to discover the points of leverage, (iii) Quickly test ideas through growth sprints, and (iv) Move your team's mindset from optimization to discovery.
[2] Reasons why a growth model is essential - "A growth model is a flowchart that maps out how your business finds, acquires, and delights your customers." It tells you where to invest your limited resources mathematically to make the biggest impact. A growth model lets you align your team to a common goal, de-escalate resource decisions, spot bottlenecks, and nurture feedback loops.
[3] Find your North Star Metric (NSM) by asking these 2 questions - "If customers absolutely loved your product, how would they naturally behave? How many of them are behaving like this?" Examples - Slack: Daily Active Users, Amazon: Repeat Purchases.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] How To Start Google (an essay by Paul Graham)
[2] The Product Model at Amazon
[3] The Secret Value Of Big Tech: The real benefit of working at large tech companies
[4] Product Marketing to C-Suite: 30 examples from leaders in tech
[5] Distribute Ideas, Not Content
Part 2 Release Date: April 25, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Consider offering a 'founding customer' pricing option when you mature as a startup and start to increase prices across plans.
Patreon doubled its margins with a well-sequenced set of pricing increases. Additionally, the company permanently froze pricing packages for its initial set of customers who took a chance on the startup at an early stage. You can do the same or offer a price freeze for 12 months to acknowledge their impact before passing over the price hikes.
[2] Follow these 7 key principles for email marketing aimed at developers to keep them subscribed and grow loyalty.
Userlist believes dev tool companies often neglect email marketing and can fix it by sticking to these 7 principles - share edge cases upfront, be quirky, keep readers up to date, share deep content, stick to a 2-4 weeks cadence, remind them and offer context for your product, and lean on authentic influencers.
[3] Evaluate your target metrics around 4 categories - market, product, benchmarks, design - to determine product-market fit (PMF).
Revolut sells financial products in multiple countries. To ensure adoption and success, the product team studies country-specific PMF target metrics on categories like market (ex: acquisition costs), product (ex: MAP, DAP), cross-industry benchmarks (ex: NPS, LTV/CAC), and individual product design (ex: utilization rates).
[4] Limit the influence of industry benchmarks and performance metrics when they don't align with your core differentiation.
Etsy's brand prioritizes sellers as craftspeople and values the buyer-seller relationship. Unlike Amazon, a feature like two-day shipping is not a realistic choice for Etsy's differentiated marketplace. Similarly, overly relying on gross merchandise sales as a metric ignores the buyer-seller experience.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Traction is the "quantitative evidence of customer demand." It can be as simple as 2 to 3 early customers for an enterprise software's initial traction vs. 100s of 1000s of users for consumer software. You can address technical, market, and team risks easily with traction.
[2] You should prioritize traction and product development equally, and each should get half of your attention - "spend 50% of your time on product and 50% on traction." Sending a stream of new customers to your product by testing traction channels lets you determine if your product is getting less leaky over time and whether or not the product development strategy is sound.
[3] There are 2 types of unconventional PR - (i) Publicity Stunt: a spectacle (something outlandish) to get media coverage for an uninteresting product launch, and (ii) Unconventional PR: small gestures to turn customers into evangelists, i.e., increase customer goodwill for press coverage.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals
[2] How to make better decisions through research (and when you should go with your gut)
[3] How Stripe validates ideas for new products
[4] Picking the Winners in AI: How investors think about AI companies
[5] The Pre-PMF Guide to Product Management: How to Move Faster and Stop Throwing Away Your Roadmaps
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