2-min Product Marketing Insights: February 2024 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Feb 8, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Use the 95-5 rule to integrate lead gen and brand advertising to transform your go-to-market (GTM) strategy for long-term profits.
The CMO of symplr suggests you break your buyers into 'buying now' and 'looking to buy later' groups. Per the 95-5 rule, lead generation captures 5% of in-market buyers, while brand advertising creates demand among the 95% of out-market buyers - crucial for long-term profits.
[2] Create a demo wall for new features to reduce the noise from your free plans and identify your ideal users faster.
An early startup can attract a ton of free users through built-in growth loops without ever turning them into the right customers they want. Sendspark chose to add a demo wall to a new feature to identify users willing to pay. This manual step helped clean out their clogged self-service pipeline.
[3] Build a robust competitive intelligence (CI) culture by identifying role models, adding CI to onboarding, and making it easy to share intel.
McKinsey states that you need incentives, systems and skills, and role models to change how people do things. Using that idea, Prosci proposes you spotlight key folks within your company who contribute actively to CI, add CI to the new hire onboarding process, and turn intel sharing into an effortless process.
[4] Launch an external writers' program to scale 'how-to' content aimed at technical users like developers.
DigitalOcean built an in-house media agency complete with a head of content, an editorial team, SEO gurus, and a design and production team. Additionally, they launched a writers' program to meet their goal of creating tutorials targeting long-tail keywords.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Reimagined: Building Products with Generative AI” by Shyvee Shi, Caitlin Cai, Dr. Yiwen Rong
[1] You can use the cooking analogy to figure out what developing an AI model looks like. You need the "right ingredients (data), a recipe (model architecture and hyperparameters), culinary skills (organizational capabilities), state-of-the-art kitchen appliances (GPUs), and the final garnish (your AI 'killer app' - ex: chatbot, recommendation engine)."
[2] The VP of AI at Cisco (Barak Turovsky) identifies 3 factors to review to identify the problems best suited for Gen AI: "(i) Accuracy: How crucial is the accuracy of the information in your use case? (ii) Fluency: How important is it for the generated content to read naturally? (iii) Stakes: What are the risks if the AI-generated information is incorrect?"
[3] On deciding whether to use a pre-trained LLM through API or develop an in-house model: (i) Do you want to validate a hypothesis quickly? Aim for the plug-and-play benefit of GPT-4 or BERT. (ii) Is the market for your product proven? If yes, go for in-house to get complete control of the data. (iii) Are you concerned about speed to market or building a highly specialized product? (iv) Does your industry stipulate regulations on data storage and processing? (v) Do you have access to the necessary talent for maintaining an in-house model? (vi) Is the product a long-term play?
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] If AI Were Conscious, How Would We Know?
[2] Growth. What are you and where do you belong?
[3] Is LTV to CAC the Nickelback of SaaS Metrics?
[4] The Future of Prosumer: The Rise of “AI Native” Workflows
[5] Why AI Will Bring the “Tinder Moment” to VC
Part 2 Release Date: Feb 29, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Chop up your complex value proposition into unique, individual statements for better messages along the buyer journey.
Chili Piper breaks its value prop into small messages to offer each message through a select marketing asset to support every step of the buyer journey. Each message moves the buyer smoothly to acquisition without overwhelming them with an all-inclusive, end-to-end statement.
[2] Choose a non-TOFU north-star metric and test its usefulness by evaluating on a timely basis if it leads to sustainable revenue.
Quibi signed up nearly 1MM users within a few days despite only a paltry % of those users converting after trials. To avoid this, don't opt for a TOFU-centric metric; instead, pick a metric that captures the actions of 'whale' or 'high propensity' users.
[3] Consider an initial focus on SMBs (or small deal sizes) to prove scale and amass many customers for social proof before moving upmarket.
Shippo had difficulty pitching enterprises to try its unproven API for shipping operations. To save time trying other unsuccessful enterprise sales tactics, Shippo decided to focus on amassing small and mid-sized business customers to gradually and successfully pitch larger customers on being able to handle millions of packages per month.
[4] Institute blameless post-mortem as a best practice to better address product issues from user growth spikes.
Gamma grew its user base from 0 to 10MM in 9 months. Like Uber and Airbnb, Gamma relies on blameless post-mortems to better understand every product issue and ensure they don't occur again. Other benefits of this best practice include improving trust within any team and treating every error as a 'symptom of a systemic problem.'
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects” by Andrew Chen
[1] There's an ecological inspiration for the network effect. For example - "goldfish grow more rapidly and resist water toxicity when they're in groups." The Allee threshold captures this tipping point where the animals are safer and grow faster as a population.
[2] The solution to the Cold Start Problem - Focus on building a small and stable network from which you can build other networks. Figure out how to add a small group of people at the right time to use your product in the right way. On top of that, your networked product should launch in the simplest form with a clear value proposition.
[3] A network hits its ceiling when anti-network effects become so powerful they crowd off the product team's efforts. One way to stay resilient in this scenario is to allow users to group themselves. A network within a network. See Facebook Groups, Snap Stories.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] How Tech Outstayed Its Welcome
[2] Why We Can’t Have Nice Software
[3] The Snow Melts At The Periphery: How senior leaders can stay connected to the outside world
[4] The Return of the Pendulum: Consolidation is Here
[5] Designing a Great Early-User Program
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