2-min Product Marketing Insights: Aug 2024 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Aug 16, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Explore using your homepage as an ungated freemium version of your product to increase conversions.
Rows is an alternative to Excel and Google Sheets. The company's homepage is the freemium version of the product, which allows every curious user to check out all the features indefinitely without signing up. The product only requests signup when the user tries to use the sharing functionalities.
[2] Choose from these 4 styles of stories - detail, founder, how it works, and values - to sell without sounding "salesy".
Patagonia's birth story revolves around the founder's inability to find suitable climbing clothes in the marketplace. Schlitz beer was floundering in the early 1900s till it embraced the formula of going into great detail about its ingredients and the brewing process in its ads.
[3] For developer tools: Partner with other dev tool companies for sponsored posts where influencers use multiple technologies for whatever they create.
Sponsored YouTube videos where developer influencers talk about their passion projects using different dev tools are becoming a popular paid strategy for driving signups. The interim CMO of Vercel suggests teaming up with complementary dev tool companies to showcase your technology and reduce the cost of sponsorships.
[4] The new 4Ps: Align all your stakeholders for building product strategy by first defining persona, problem, promise, and product together.
First Round Capital's 4Ps work as follows - persona: who benefits from your solution most -> problem: what are their most urgent problems you can solve -> promise: highlight your unique value proposition -> product: details about your product on delivering the promise.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Metrics force you to focus on the middle of a market. You devise boring ideas by focusing on an average set of users. Instead, pay attention to the weird consumers (for example) who exist in the extremes - they drive more innovation than normal ones.
[2] Two counterintuitive lessons on decision-making - (i) It doesn't pay to be logical when everyone's being logical in a situation. This tendency helps when choosing things in scarce supply. (ii) Since there's no real unitary measure of what's important in many situations, what you pay attention to and how you frame it affects your decisions more.
[3] Our attitudes don't drive behavior; the behaviors we adopt drive our attitudes. "Behavior comes first; attitude changes to keep up."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Copying is the way design works
[2] Boom time vs Gloom time startups: Why founders benefit from starting new companies during a recession
[3] Guide: How to find your first ICP
[4] Identifying your organization’s digital products
[5] Retailers Locked Up Their Products - and Broke Shopping in America
Part 2 Release Date: Aug 30, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Minimize cognitive load for every feature by consistently improving value to the business, the user, and the likelihood of success.
Mural, a digital environment for visual collaboration, saw new signups show a low 1-week retention rate. They chalked this up to a noisy homepage and drastically improved retention by introducing a simple 5-item checklist to reduce the cognitive burden.
[2] For Crowded Markets: Reevaluate your narrative across these 5 areas: PoV, Clarity, Strategic Alignment, Memorability, and Distinctness.
Navan operates in the mature category of expense management solutions. It does a decent job of looking “meaningfully different” from the status quo by highlighting travel and expense integration and offering a value proposition beyond making expense reports more “efficient.”
[3] For Niche Markets: Accelerate account-based marketing by pre-mapping the entire universe of contacts who influence or buy in target companies.
Cedar Health invests heavily in in-person experiences while targeting a select group of high-value people who fit their “prospect” profile. The pre-mapping allows the sales team to spend less time qualifying and more time crafting deeper connections - ex: understanding pain points, mapping relationships within the market, etc.
[4] Align UX better to business metrics using tools/techniques like design sprints, persona & customer journey maps, and human-centered design.
Delta Air Lines mapped out its customer journey from booking to boarding to streamline the process and in-flight services, improving loyalty and customer satisfaction. Kaiser Permanente designs patient-centered services around its personas.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Use a friction log to record your experience sequentially working through your software. The gulf between expectation and reality across all the steps is your opportunity to improve the docs and software.
[2] Create a user council to access a dedicated list of people who can offer feedback on any new feature or document. They can be current and potential users who you see as early adopters and expect to invest in your product.
[3] Triage user feedback with some inspiration from healthcare. Ask these questions to evaluate every feedback issue: “(A) Is the issue valid? (B) Can it be fixed? (C) How important is the issue?”
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] The Lost Sense OR: The Marginalization of Touch in a Digital World
[2] When to write strategy, and how much?
[3] Why Dying Industries Can Make Great Investments
[4] The Feature War: Turning product managers and engineers from frustrating foes into advocating allies
[5] Songhurst Matrix - categorizing business opportunities based on their level of boredom and complexity.
Sign up for 2-minute Product Marketing Insights. Every 2 weeks, you get 📈 4 micro case studies 📚 1 book & top 3 insights 🧠 5 curated marketing think pieces.