2-min Product Marketing Insights: December 2023 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Dec 7, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Leverage micro-courses to onboard new users onto your platform and repurpose the same content into different assets later.
LangChain gets its new users to complete a sequence of email courses, which also serves as a tour of the must-know aspects of their product and a recommendation on ideal product workflow. You can repurpose this sort of drip content into a learning microsite, point documentation, live workshop, and more.
[2] Improve the 'value delivered per dollar' metric when you increase your price and want to soften the blow for customers.
Many companies have some element of usage metrics in their pricing plans. Shopify increased its prices this year but consciously expanded inventory limits across plans. For example, its professional plan increased from $79/month with 5 inventory locations (~$16 per location) to $105/month with 1000 inventory locations (~10 cents per location).
[3] Set a primary (North Star) goal for your Customer Advisory Board (CAB) every year, along with a way to measure success.
G2's in-person executive advisory board brings together multiple marketing thought leaders. For an effective CAB, start with a singular goal and include the following: (i) 10-15 vocal board members, (ii) from different segments and demographics, (iii) meet 2-4 times per year, (iv) lean on a structured agenda, and (v) send updates to members 2-3 times a quarter.
[4] Host digital events to let your customers mingle with late-stage prospects and get stuck deals moving.
You want always to let your prospects hear from their peers, i.e., your customers, as it carries more weight. Tackle hosts high-end virtual wine events for late-stage prospects, allowing customers to talk about their experiences using Tackle to solve challenges.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes” by Morgan Housel
[1] Focus on things that never change. Spend time understanding timeless behavior instead of trying to predict uncertain events.
[2] Don't assume something doesn't matter because it's hard to predict. Some of the intense forces in the world, like people's personalities and mindsets, fall into the group of impossible to measure.
[3] The customers' desire may signal the ideal or 'most convenient' size of a business. Growing by acquisitions often leads to disappointments, especially when management wants faster growth than the customers think the business deserves.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Tech is Going to Get Much Bigger. What happens when energy, intelligence, and labor get cheap?
[2] Beyond SaaS - Software Innovation and Business Models
[3] How to Build a Better Social Network (We just need to think of it like an economy)
[4] The Changing Role of Design. It’s time to put creativity back into design again.
[5] How to market to experts (Don’t - write for them instead)
Part 2 Release Date: Dec 21, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Track 'growth efficiency' over time to verify if your startup is succeeding on Product-Market Fit (PMF).
NGP Capital (VC firm) benchmarks its companies across 9 laddering categories covering product, business, and financial validation. The final category is growth efficiency - measured as a ratio of revenue growth to burn rate - which needs to improve over time if a company truly has PMF.
[2] Increase visibility into the progress of your referrals and free trials to improve new user sign-ups and paid users.
While waiting to claim the referral incentive, SoFi offers visibility to the referrer of the progress made by their referral through the sign-up steps, thereby driving up overall referrals by 20X. Similarly, the company wins over free trial users by sharing a timeline on what to expect as they kick off their trial and when they can expect to pay.
[3] Add a little personality and 'humanize' your brand to speak specifically to your target personas.
CB Insights' market intelligence platform targets VCs, governments, and influential companies as clients. Yet their content strategy across different formats - ex: newsletters, blogs, social - stays witty, light-hearted, and engaging, making them grab attention while adding value.
[4] Showcase your customers' New Year resolutions in messaging to get over the lull in spending post-December break.
There's plenty of up-to-date research on the most popular resolutions for Americans. Throughout January 2023, the cosmetic brand Origins linked its skin care products to health resolutions (ex: Wear. SPF. Every. Day.) across its email campaigns.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results” by Shane Parrish
[1] Understand these 4 instincts that shape our behaviors by default - (i) emotion default: we respond better to feelings vs. reasons, (ii) ego default: we react to anything that threatens our self-worth, (iii) social default: we conform to the social group norms, (iv) inertia default: we seek comfort and resist change.
[2] Adopt these 2 principles to gather accurate information - (i) High-Fidelity (HiFi): get info that's close to the source, and (ii) High-Expertise (HiEx): get info from folks with a lot of knowledge in a specific area and from folks with knowledge in many areas.
[3] Force yourself to explore at least 3 solutions to any problem to improve your problem-solving skills. It's another way to stop thinking in binary terms and get creative by digging deeper into the problem.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Soft Power in Tech - Stories move the world. Organizations that recognize this have the chance to exercise disproportionate influence.
[2] How to do a product critique
[3] 15 Assumption Testing Methods for Product & User Research Teams
[4] Tech predictions for 2024 and beyond
[5] Trying to Innovate? Put down your hammer.
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