2-minute Product Marketing Insights: June 2023 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: June 8, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Allow customer success (CS) to run the same engagement programs for free customers as the paying ones to get better feedback on the customer journey.
Amplitude doesn't separate the paying customer base from the free one, as it believes they share the same pain points, use cases, etc. Doing so allows the company to apply the best practices and playbooks evenly across all customers and avoid siloed approaches.
[2] Create a 'user insights knowledge base' to group all insights of user personas to improve user-centered decision-making.
Digitec uses the knowledge base to avoid losing user insights and uniformly spread knowledge about users across the company. Besides the decision-making benefit, this practice lets you break research into understandable chunks, connect product features to the 'why?' faster, and gets developers closer to the customer mindset.
[3] Ask these 3 questions before borrowing a popular feature from a different product onto yours to ensure success.
Duolingo's earlier attempts at gamification failed since they didn't account for the context of their product vs. the type of games to promote. The company gradually fixed this issue by asking these questions for adopting new features from other products - "(i) Why is this feature working in that product? (ii) Why might this feature succeed or fail in our context? (iii) What adaptations are necessary to make this feature succeed in our context?"
[4] Recruit a list of 'challenge people' to help you design and build for future (desired) users per your product strategy.
Adobe's Photoshop team was split, trying to figure out whether they wanted to satisfy existing users or the users who would fit better with the future version of the product. To tackle this issue, choose actual people ('challenge people') - ex: folks with extreme versions of product needs, early adopters, specific challenges, and future-leaning - to help design the product in line with your long-term goals.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Don't rely on product or demographic data to get into your customer's head. Instead, create a documentary of your best customer's journey - "from the struggle, to the search for solutions, to finding your product, to trying it, to buying it and being so happy that someone would now have to pry it from their hands."
[2] You can find the customer's motivations in response to these questions - "What was the most important to you in a new solution? Why did you decide to choose us over the other options? Can you recall if anything, in particular, stood out to you? What deal breakers would have prevented you from choosing us? Once you started using our product, what happened that made you feel certain it was right for you?"
[3] Break down the customer experience mapping effort into 3 main phases - (i) The Struggle Phase - "your customer realizes they have a problem and begins seeking and exploring possible solutions," (ii) The Evaluation Phase - "your customer commits to try your product and decides it's the solution they were looking for," (iii) The Growth Phase - "your customer successfully embeds your product into their daily life and even may use it in new ways beyond the scope of the original problem."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] AI Is Life: Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life!
[2] 6 Keys to Human-Centric Software Development
[3] Guide: Implement a sales-assist function in 7 weeks
[4] Short Form Content is Broken. Can We Fix It?
[5] Différance: How To Think Critically In The Age of Content
Part 2 Release Date: June 22, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Improve sales forecasts from partners by treating each partner as a new AE and going through the same qualification process.
Partners work with multiple tech vendors, and your solution may not always be a priority, further adding to the challenges in forecasting partner-led deals in your pipeline. PartnerHacker suggests a couple of improvements - ex: stick to the same onboarding process for a new account executive in your sales org with the partner, set a cadence for updates, squeeze the partner into your sales methodology (ex: MEDDIC).
[2] Capture, at a minimum, both customer satisfaction and feature or outcome validation directly in your product.
Usersnap and similar feedback software let you plan and run periodic NPS surveys directly within your product. You can extend this software to also survey and determine if your users are getting to the right outcome with a newly launched feature - ex: users who've tried to use the new feature vs. users who use the new feature frequently vs. ones who used the new feature and don't do so anymore.
[3] Study these 3 issues after you map out your user journey to increase your product's conversion rates.
Analyzing the user journey in a popular app like Spotify can help you parallelly discover limits within your own product. When you see users drop across their journey, it's likely due to one or more of these 3 reasons - "(i) lack of clarity on the value proposition, (ii) confusing UX, and (iii) complex onboarding processes."
[4] Make your price point compelling by showing what your product replaces and how it enhances what users already do.
Apple justifies the high cost of Vision Pro by showing how it replaces your TV and high-end cameras. It also plants the new product right at the center of the things we love to do - ex: take photos, use FaceTime, watch sports with a virtual monitor.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be” by Marcus Collins
[1] Our decisions are by-products of the cultural characteristics of the tribe we belong to. You can use this framework to unpack that - "I am a member of [name of the tribe]; we believe [shared belief of the tribe]; therefore, I [behavioral norm]."
[2] A better way to build a community for your company would be to first identify folks who already believe what you believe, i.e., mirror your belief system. And simply facilitate the network that connects them.
[3] A quicker way to truly learn about a community beyond just observing and listening is to ask these 3 questions - "Why do they behave in a certain manner? What are they feeling? How do they view the world around them?"
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Why AI Will Save the World (by Marc Andreessen)
[2] Are You Tracking the Right Metrics?
[3] How to Hire Your Next Community Lead
[4] S.P.A.C.E. Framework - The Ultimate Framework For Measuring Your Tech Team Productivity
[5] The First 90 Days in DevRel - A menu of milestones for the first devrel in a startup
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