Micro Product Marketing Insights: November 2021
Release Date: November 26, 2021
Good Morning,
Hope everyone’s doing well and staying safe.
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📈 8 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Offer a pay-as-you-go plan for a new customer to improve product familiarity and set the path for future growth.
Product-led growth (PLG) businesses can try hard to squeeze every dollar from existing customers anytime they notice retention rates fall to 50% or trend lower. Getting a customer to discover your product at their pace is one way to counter this.
[2] Gather feedback from "on-the-fence" users instead of satisfied or dissatisfied users to achieve better product/market fit.
Superhuman, a sleek email app, used the question - "how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?" - as its leading indicator for product/market fit. By focusing on "somewhat disappointed" respondents, Superhuman uncovered new insights and feature requests to convert a whole group of people to enthusiastic advocates.
[3] Connect customer membership data across your omnichannel experience to start new buying journeys.
Nike is actively figuring out everything about a customer's behavior irrespective of whether they bought a product through the app, online, in-store, or a wholesale retailer. This allows them to personalize product recommendations and push new content.
[4] Invest in a well-trusted editorial brand to attract new target groups beyond your initial niche.
Hubspot – who coined the idea of “inbound marketing” – plans to grow its software solutions beyond its core audience of marketers to also include entrepreneurs, investors, startup executives. The acquisition of ‘The Hustle’ by Hubspot offers exposure to their new target audience that actively consumes Hustle’s media products like blogs, newsletters, podcasts, etc.
[5] Choose an offbeat initial market to establish differentiated advantage and ramp up new users.
Depop is a popular Gen Z fashion resale app acquired by Etsy for $1.6B earlier this year. The evolution of Depop into a unicorn started with an initial focus on Italy (an uncommon spot for VC-backed businesses) and the steady flow of organic, less capital intense impressions.
[6] Use language/market fit to size your market, validate demand, demonstrate traction way before your minimum viable prototypes.
The "step zero" for startups or new products should be to find language/market fit as part of customer discovery. It's also a low-tech, low-risk way to figure out what to build for minimum viable prototypes or even decide whether to build it.
[7] Inspire customers to embrace sustainability measures by highlighting the transformation of materials into new products.
Eileen Fisher (clothier) was able to get its customers to recycle more by sharing messages on its efforts to donate old pieces or turn them into new designs. Getting customers to think about the transformation process to create something new led to the change in their behavior.
[8] Use a certain percentage of your yearly ad budget to explore new channels and counter ad saturation plus inflated costs.
DTC furniture rental company Fernish currently uses Facebook and Instagram for most of its digital advertising. With data privacy measures coming into play, the company is also diversifying its media mix by adding influencer marketing, audio advertising, direct mail, etc.
📚 2 BOOKS & THEIR TOP 3 INSIGHTS
Category design involves creating a great product (along with its experience), a great company, and a great category at the same time. In a well-honed category-driven strategy, the company designs the category, evangelizes the problem, offers its solution to the problem, and then the category makes the company its king.
3 questions to ask any entrepreneur on category design: (1) Can you explain to me like a five-year-old what problem you’re trying to solve? (2) If your company solves this problem perfectly, what category are you in? (3) If you win 85 percent of that category, what’s the size of your category potential?
To increase the odds of becoming a category king, smart companies don’t waste time and money on pointless vanilla, overly polite public relations. They go for PR that is opportunistic and edgy. And one good way for an upstart to leverage PR is to hijack some bigger company’s PR or news.
[2] “The Win Without Pitching Manifesto” by Blair Enns
We can measure the success of our positioning by gauging our ability to command 2 things simultaneously: (1) a sales advantage - when and where we choose to compete, we win more often than not. (2) a price premium - when we win, we do so not by cutting prices, but while charging more.
There are 4 phases in client engagements: (1) diagnose the problem/opportunity, (2) prescribe a therapy, (3) apply the therapy, (4) reapply the therapy as necessary.
Proper selling can be distilled into 3 steps, based on the client’s place in the buying cycle. These 3 steps replace the art of persuasion. To sell is to: (1) help the unaware, (2) inspire the interested, (3) reassure those who have formed intent.
🧠 10 CURATED BUSINESS THINK PIECES
[1] The Metaverse and (near-) infinite economic growth
[2] Why we crave software with style over “branding”
[3] Why individual talent is inevitably overrated and over-indexed – even in creative fields
[4] Investing in humans is the future of VC
[5] Why you should build a “career portfolio” (not a “career path”)
[6] New literary landscape: Is Amazon changing the novel?
[7] Our worst idea about “safety”
[8] How Twitter applied the “jobs to be done” approach to strategy
[9] The best inventions of 2021 – 100 innovations changing how we live
[10] How to make big, old companies act fast
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Keep Learning and Carry On!
Regards,
Bryan Elanko
“Apply new product marketing lessons from the fastest-growing companies”
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