2-min Product Marketing Insights: January 2024 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Jan 11, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Narrow down your initial Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) through value, pay, and 'easy to close' checks.
Stage 2 Capital suggests refining your ICP by evaluating your potential customers on who derives the most value, is more likely to pay, and will buy from you soon. You should further prioritize your opportunities by their fit with this ICP and build outbound targeting plans accordingly.
[2] Consider these 2 questions to choose the right trial experience for your product.
Ask yourself - (i) What's the friction the customer needs to accept? Ex: enter their credit card before the trial, and (ii) How long does the trial need to be? Skillshare ran a generous 90-day free trial that helped convert many users. Conversely, a long trial slows the payback you see on paid ads, limits your product development cycles, and becomes a tangible expense.
[3] Evaluate your effort, risk, and cost factors to decide when to introduce sales into your PLG motion.
The VP of Revenue at Hex recommends looking at 3 factors: (i) The time and resources it takes a user to get started on your product. A quick start implies a low human touch. (ii) The level of risk your product introduces to a company. Exposure to sensitive systems (for ex) would need some human intervention. (iii) The cost to start. Can one person sign up and see value quickly?
[4] PLG will work for your startup only if you rank favorably on at least 2 out of the following 3 dimensions: user type, acquisition, and virality.
Dropbox and Box solve the same problem, but unlike the latter, Dropbox is set up for a single user to sign up and start using the product. Also, for PLG to work, you want to be able to acquire your users through organic channels (Ex: Grammarly) and have built-in viral features to acquire new users (Ex: Calendly's website embeds).
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Decide on the type of community you want to create. You can pick from 3 options depending on your purpose - (i) 'communities of practice' to help folks develop skills, (ii) 'communities of product' to generate evangelists for your brand, and (iii) 'communities of play' to create experiences.
[2] Determine your ideal community member better through the 3 Fs - (i) What do they fund? Ex: tools, products, and services. (ii) Who do they follow? Ex: industry influencers. (iii) Where do they frequent?
[3] Zero in on the 'core action' for your community and turn it into a ritual. Don't confuse your members with multiple ways to engage. Ex: The core action for CrossFit is the Workout of the Day (WOD).
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] The art of the professional pivot
[2] Discovery is the original sin of the modern age
[3] Product Strategy, Roadmap, and Prioritization - The GL(c) Model
[4] Product Predictions 2024 (from Marty Cagan)
[5] 2024 Predictions (from Prof. Scott Galloway)
Part 2 Release Date: Jan 25, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Gauge the success of your community growth efforts by looking at user-generated content, web traffic, and the number of customer service inquiries.
One of the many community efforts from Apollo is a Slack group of 2000+ AEs who want to be better at sales. Apollo engages advocates across different digital spaces, including LinkedIn, and closely monitors the above 3 KPIs to determine its success.
[2] For greenfield markets: Target one vertical and don't change focus till you saturate it, especially when 'no decision' is your primary competitor.
The VC firm - Blossom Street Ventures - advises its portfolio SaaS companies in greenfield markets to ensure their product is as relevant as possible to one vertical initially. Additionally, to further cement this effort by dominating every conference in this vertical, getting industry publications for the sales reps, and signing an industry leader at a minimum ('buffalo') to use as a case study to win the rest of the vertical.
[3] Explore the dual strategy of a strong open-source base and the role of a 'trusted advisor' to create your structural advantage.
Grafana's robust open-source base helps them prioritize community and adoption while attracting inbound sales - monetization is secondary, in other words. The company also doesn't advocate a 'rip and replace' mentality to increase chances of plugging in quicker into every prospect's existing IT infrastructure.
[4] Create a library promoting top insights from your niche market segment to strengthen brand awareness.
Productivity.so is a mini-website curated by Amie.so (a productivity app) to offer a variety of productivity tricks and tools. The mini-website doesn't promote the product in any way but contains valuable content that indirectly showcases Amie.so as a productivity thought leader.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Ask these questions when you come across a combination of trends (adjacent or opposing) occurring at the same time - What's the pattern behind the trends? What's the potential tension? What's the tectonic shift that they're creating in our society? How can you leverage this shift for your product?
[2] Use the acronym INSIGHT to understand the characteristics of a true insight - I: inspires action, N: not obvious (reframes problem uniquely), S: simple to explain (clear & concise), I: includes key data, observations, or trends, G: gives your brand a clear advantage, H: human truth, T: taps into cultural tension.
[3] Keep asking 'why' to get to the root of motivation. Asking 'what if' will get you to the root of imagination. Insights are all about imagination - connecting the dots uniquely to see an exciting possibility no one else can.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Pace Yourself. Kicking the Year Off with Pace Layering.
[2] Finding the Next Wave of Growth: S-Curves and Product Sequencing
[3] An incomplete manifesto for growth
[4] Who is responsible for the impact of innovative products?
[5] How to avoid joining a doomed startup
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