Micro Product Marketing Insights: March 2022
Release Date: March 31, 2022. Newsletter Word Count: 774 words (3 min read).
Good Morning,
Hope everyone had a great March!
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📈 8 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Make your product roadmap public to build community, win new, and retain old customers.
Vowel and LeanIX show companies how they can be transparent about roadmaps and flexible at the same time. Other benefits of a public product roadmap include improved team morale and customer feedback.
[2] Allow your users to discover the value of your product in its entirety and charge on product usage.
Algolia – a site search and discovery company – lets developers access key features of the product for easy adoption. The company then monetizes the high-value customers who gradually increase usage.
[3] Offer mid-term subscription plans to reduce monthly churn and long-term budgeting headaches.
CareGuide's option for a quarterly plan allows parents to sign up during summer to find childcare for their kids. FabFitFun's quarterly setup stops customers from exhausting curated, seasonal products in a short time.
[4] (For startups) Gain cachet with potential clients by closing at least 3 of your 10 target customers.
Relativity Space, a company that can 3D print entire rockets, won NASA as a customer. It updates the companies on its top 10 target list on the progress of their NASA project to gain credibility and remain top of mind.
[5] Rely on a powerful story initially to sell potential users what they secretly want to achieve.
Clay is a personal CRM to help you deepen relationships. To rally the first product users, Clay shared the story of David Rockefeller gathering 100K index cards in 50 years with over 200K notes to build thoughtful relationships.
[6] Study how customers interact with each other within your product for new engagement tools.
JIGGY creates puzzles worth framing using artwork from emerging female artists. The organic interaction between their customers and artists on social led to the creation of Puzzle Club – a membership program to encourage more of this behavior.
[7] Try a ‘recommendations’ quiz to engage potential customers plus generate new leads and sales.
Sephora has a dedicated quizzes page to allow buyers to get relevant product recommendations. On the B2B side, you can use a straightforward quiz as an appealing lead generation tool.
[8] Increase your average customer spend by recommending products with slight price increases.
For example, if an existing customer usually buys $100 shoes, suggest a pair at $110 or $115, i.e., 10-15% higher than their shopping average. Your current customers are 50% more likely to buy new products.
📚 2 BOOKS & THEIR TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] “Product-Led Growth: How to Build a Product That Sells Itself” by Wes Bush
Choose a product-led model if (1) you're in a blue ocean and can show your product's value quickly or (2) you're in a red ocean, and you need to increase your funnel, reduce acquisition costs, grow as fast as possible.
A value metric lets you measure the exchange of value in your product. Your business expands as your value metric does. Ex: The value metric for a shoe seller would be 'per pair of shoes'.
Jay Abraham's Multiplier Perspective – 3 levers you can pull for growth: (1) Churn, (2) Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), (3) Number of Customers.
[2] “Joy at Work: Organizing Your Professional Life” by Marie Kondo & Scott Sonenshein
3 things to keep at your workplace – (1) anything that sparks personal joy (ex: favorite pen), (2) anything functional for your work (ex: stapler), (3) anything that will lead to future joy (ex: papers for a crucial project).
It's hard to decide when you have more than 5 options. Try narrowing your choices to 5 anytime you have multiple options.
Choose brainwriting over brainstorming – Dedicate 15 minutes at the start of a meeting to allow the attendees to write their ideas on note cards. Collect them and find themes from there.
🧠 10 CURATED BUSINESS THINK PIECES
[1] Tech and War: What can one country do to another
[2] Participatory Capitalism: The ownership economy and the macro trend of micro-organizations
[3] The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth
[4] Understanding Web3 as the internet-native economy
[5] TV, merchant media and the unbundling of advertising
[6] Why everywhere in the US is starting to look the same
[7] The Economics of Data Businesses: How they start, and how they keep going, and growing.
[8] Ownership and the American Dream: Getting America its swagger back
[9] What’s the real cost of free shipping for direct-to-consumer brands?
[10] Building startups in a bear market
Feel free to reply to this email to share your feedback on the newsletter.
Keep Learning and Carry On!
Regards,
Bryan Elanko
“Apply new product marketing insights from fast-growing companies”
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