2-minute Product Marketing Insights: February 2023 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: February 9, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Close deals faster and avoid price discounts by offering custom implementation services for free.
Zenefits closed deals mostly in Nov or Dec, as companies usually would renew their annual benefits around Jan 1. To close deals during the rest of the year, Zenefits created an implementation fee and waived it for companies that didn't wait to sign up till Q4 every year.
[2] Personalize a prospect's experience in the free version of your product using a short onboarding survey.
Similarweb's ungated free tools serve different users in distinct ways. Their onboarding survey, therefore, asks a series of questions about company size, industry, role type.
[3] Improve your lead quality and develop rapport with your customers by building a community to support your product.
The social investing app - Public - lets you invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Its investing community allows you to discuss with other investors, ask questions, build knowledge, explore new companies.
[4] Offer influencers a clear stake in your product to improve messaging and word-of-mouth marketing results.
Healthy Extracts, Inc. - manages products in the nutraceuticals space - partnered with a fitness influencer on her own product label. This helped the company align incentives while generating authentic responses from the influencer's audience.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“The Pocket Guide to Product Launches: Get Confident, Go to Market, and Win” by Mary Sheehan
[1] Spend 10% of your time communicating about your launch. It needs to be a hit internally (within your company) before it gets any traction externally.
[2] Err on the side of over-segmentation. After you finalize if your product is for new or existing customers, look for characteristics that let you segment them further.
[3] Get an executive sponsor for your launch - any director or VP invested in the launch - to help remove blockers and provide air cover.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Roadmap: Software powering the PLG era
[2] Customer Interviews: How to Recruit, What to Ask, and How to Synthesize What You Learn
[3] 5 takeaways from a week with some of the world’s best product coaches
[4] WTF is Strategy? What it takes to build a great company and product strategy.
[5] How Technology Giants Die
Part 2 Release Date: February 24, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Improve the adoption of every new product or feature by uniquely communicating to 4 sub-groups of your customer base.
A successful release relies on the customer understanding what they're getting and taking advantage of it. Spiffy's CPO suggests communicating differently to each sub-group of your customer base - engaged customers, existing customers, interested prospects, and new prospects.
[2] As a PMM, use MRD, user interviews, and design sprints to work closely with your PM to shape the product roadmap.
Two tactics came in handy for Spendesk while designing a roadmap for a new product for a new type of user. User interviews were used to determine (i) MVP and capabilities for PM and (ii) GTM and positioning for PMM. Several design sprints were run, including the PMM, PMM, product designer, and engineer, to focus on specific parts of the product to develop an ideal solution and user experience.
[3] Limit increases to purchase price from upselling to 25% unless you're sure about the customer benefit.
Avoid selling unrelated products or expansive packages unrelated to the customer's existing business needs and footprint. For a very tactical example - Vistaprint upsells by suggesting business cards with higher-quality images or gloss finish when you order custom business cards.
[4] Simplify your UX writing and make interactions clear by asking these 3 questions.
They are - "(i) Is the screen doing what it needs to? (ii) Are users clear about that? (iii) Do we even need this part of the onboarding?" Asking these questions can give your CTAs more context, help you add relevant labels, and set more explicit expectations with the user.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] The new wave of AI is bringing down the cost of prediction - this increases the value of complements (ex: data, judgment, action) while decreasing the value of substitutes (ex: human prediction).
[2] Data plays 3 roles in AI - (i) input data fed into the algorithm to generate a prediction, (ii) training data to generate the algorithm initially, and (iii) feedback data to improve the algorithm's performance.
[3] How will jobs change? One lens: A job is a collection of tasks. You can break down any workflow into a series of tasks. Look at the tasks that AI can perform. And regroup the leftover tasks into a 'new type of job.'
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Generative AI: The Next Consumer Platform
[2] Have Research Insights Collecting Dust? Here’s How to Activate Them
[3] How Spotify builds a listener personality profile
[4] Alternative Product Business Models: The rise of the micro subscription and more as alternatives to ad-funded models
[5] The maze is in the mouse: What ails Google. And how it can turn things around.
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