2-min Product Marketing Insights: July 2024 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: July 18, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Treat every influencer as your creative partner and confirm how your brand organically fits into their content.
Away customizes its relationship with every influencer. A few of Away's guiding questions when working with any influencer include: Do they showcase the diversity of the company's community? Does the content they create fit organically into Away's campaign?
[2] Lean on these 4 strategic pillars - website, community, developer content, and developer events - to market to a developer audience.
The VP of Marketing at Botpress has also used this playbook to scale dev communities at Postman, Rasa, and npm. Additional pointers - work to build an organic community, create content to help devs become power users, prioritize events for dev relationships, and expect 90% of your community members to be consumers.
[3] Offer a step-by-step employee advocacy activation playbook to increase your reach beyond the company's social presence.
Wiz provides tactical assistance to its employees, enabling them to create content that builds credibility for the company while reaching a receptive audience. Some of the highlights of this playbook include limited-time contests for employees to create LinkedIn content with Wiz swag, a club for super influencers (#Wizfluencers), internal LinkedIn workshops, spotlighting employee work, etc.
[4] Use the F.U.E.L. framework to kickstart growth efforts in your startup and categorically address growth problems plus bottlenecks.
F.U.E.L. is an acronym for Flywheels, Users, Experiments, and Learnings. Weights & Biases leverages this framework to discover and prioritize the right experiments due to their limited resources.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] There are 4 levels of differentiation (it's a hierarchy!) - Level 1: feature differentiation. Level 2: differentiating your benefits. Level 3: differentiation by customer segment, i.e., define the customer segment that will benefit from your product more vs. the competition. Level 4: problem differentiation - can you articulate a problem for which your startup has the only solution?
[2] The only metric a developer tools startup needs to care about initially is Net Developer Retention. Do the devs continue to use your tool? Are they inviting others to join them? Only think of other metrics once this metric passes over 100%.
[3] An early-stage developer tools startup should create a technical advisory board (TAB). The TAB members should comprise potential users and customers of your product. This will also help you understand your personas a lot better.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] 15 Life and Work Principles from NVIDIA CEO (the rockstar of the moment)
[2] AI’s $600B Question. The AI bubble is reaching a tipping point.
[3] Removing Asymmetry of Information - Unlock decision-making with information liquidity
[4] How to go from Seed to Series A to Series B
[5] This is Big Tech’s playbook for swallowing the AI industry
Part 2 Release Date: July 31, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Use the 'founder letter' on your landing page to present your product's narrative and stand out in a crowded market.
HEY's CEO (and Co-founder) leveraged the letter to introduce the problem around existing email services, tap into nostalgia (emotion), establish the enemy, and introduce the solution with the USP followed by a call to action. You can still find the letter on their current landing page!
[2] Let your open-source adoption and firmographic data uncover potential new accounts while tightening up your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Apollo GraphQL leans on 15 different signals, such as GitHub downloads, social media mentions, and job postings related to its open-source solution (GraphQL), to build an ICP-focused customer data platform for sales-led efforts.
[3] Create a 'perk hub' in your product to highlight all the benefits you've been generating for the user, especially when they're not easily visible.
Monzo is an online bank that lets its 'perks' sit front and center in the main navigation of its app. They use it to shed light on all the perks the user has accumulated over a lifetime (ex: interest earned).
[4] Adopt a 'most advanced, yet acceptable' (MAYA) mindset and particular 'idiosyncracies' to improve your chances of user adoption.
Ogilvy's Rory Sutherland argues that people prefer evolution to complete reinvention and that the right amount of 'weird' can garner interest. Veuve Clicquot's defining yellow label is an example of this concept in action.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Win Over Wizards: A Developer Marketing Handbook” by James Christopher
[1] Developer Marketing 101 - You can view developer marketing as a subset of product marketing. Developer marketing seeks to convince developers "to use, build, buy, and recommend your products plus get them to be active in your ecosystem." It combines "relationship building, knowledge sharing, and user experience."
[2] The common pain points developers face can be boiled down to time scarcity & resources, system complexity (dealing with technologies with their own set of protocols), legacy technologies, shifting requirements, and collaboration challenges.
[3] When you read anything or attend events to learn about developers, ask these questions: "What affects people now? What are they talking about? How can different events impact them in the future? How does a given topic relate to their work or working environment?"
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] My think piece for PMA - “How to create a growth playbook as a PLG product marketer”
[2] The software engineering industry in 2024: what changed in 2 years, why, and what is next
[3] Walking in a Systems Wonderland: Systems Thinking for Product People
[4] Levels of PMF: Product-Market Fit isn’t a black box - a new framework to help B2B founders find it, faster
[5] 5 GTM principles you should know as a PM
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.