2-min Product Marketing Insights: November 2023 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Nov 9, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Employ curiosity gap to craft notification emails that drive email opens and encourage continuous user engagement.
Loom relies on a simple and scannable email template to drive people back into the product. For example, you get a notification email with a curious subject line, header copy, and anonymous username every time someone views the video you share, motivating you to engage and record more videos.
[2] Look at these 3 areas to verify if your product has gained product-market fit (PMF) within a few months post-launch.
An advisor at Snapchat highlights how they were absolutely sure about their PMF by looking at the 'trifecta' - (i) non-trivial topline growth: Snapchat had 200K downloads within a few months after launch, (ii) retention: 50% of those downloads were active daily, (iii) meaningful usage: the active users were taking 10 pics daily on an average.
[3] Lean on your CS team more instead of Sales to convert prospects while dealing with specific users like developers.
Paperspace uses data to glide its Customer Success (CS) team into the self-serve journey of developers (their users). For example, the CS team non-intrusively answers questions, offers credits to promote product usage, and gradually offers discounts while following up with the same users later.
[4] Don't forget to include the problem (before your solution's existence) section on your homepage to qualify/disqualify visitors.
You must remind your visitors about their inconvenient status quo before introducing your solution. Additionally, if this section doesn't resonate with them, they can automatically disqualify themselves as prospects. To achieve this, Zenadmin uses a simple comparison of the pre-solution and post-solution situational descriptors.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] A well-functioning product operations team relies on 3 key pillars - data & insights, customer & market insights, and process & governance. Such a team can help your product management function scale well.
[2] Try the following technique if you're unable to trial your competitor's product. Ask your prospects or customers who want to switch to your competitor to screen share and walk you through the reasons while interacting with the competitor's product. Record these sessions for your research database.
[3] Set up a 'Community of Practice' for people in a specific role to get together and upskill. Think lunch and learns, quarterly events with experts, external events, targeted training, best practice playbooks and toolkits.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Banishing Burnout: It’s Time to Thrive at Your Workplace
[2] Rigorous thinking: How to build a culture of thoughtful debate
[3] Marketing-Led Growth with Outbound Fury
[4] How to measure what marketing activities are actually driving revenue
[5] Why Horror Films Are Hollywood’s Best Investment: A Statistical Analysis
Part 2 Release Date: Nov 24, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Recruit Product Advocates (PAs), i.e., Technical SDRs, if you're selling solutions with developers as the primary users.
Vercel uses PAs to assist and engage with developers (ex: help requests, in-product interactions) to guide developers to the aha moment before the handoff to sales. PAs are entry-level technical roles that can gradually mature into opportunities in CS, Engineering, and Product Marketing.
[2] For DTC: Stay authentic to your core brand and lean heavily into community marketing to incite deeper brand loyalty.
Yeti's recent campaign - 'Mapping the Gaps' - lets its 200 brand ambassadors showcase newer Yeti products in the wild while inspiring people to explore unmapped trails. The campaign serves an educational purpose - a fun way to introduce people to the outdoors. It allows Yeti to expand beyond its initial focus on fishing and hunting communities.
[3] Use these 6 checklist items to pick an engagement-based North Star metric predictive of revenue for your B2B PLG solution.
Snyk chose Weekly Fixing Orgs (WFO), i.e., the number of teams who use Snyk to fix vulnerabilities in their apps per week as its north star metric. The choice was driven by this 6-item checklist: (i) reflects the core value of the product, (ii) team-based, (iii) aligned with natural problem frequency, (iv) easy to understand, (v) easily cross-functionally influenced, and (vi) predictive of growth.
[4] Deploy the 'laddering' technique in your messaging to de-position your competitors in a crowded space without even mentioning them.
Laddering involves highlighting your product's strengths in a way that inherently shows off your competitor's issues. You find such strength by looking at what your competitor doesn't have, isn't known for sharing, and is something the customer cares about a lot. Writer separates itself from the many GenAI writing tools by repeating the AI data privacy message.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Opt for this 3-goal, simpler version of MEDDIC over any other sales qualification methodology - "(i) understand where your buyer is today (a problem), (ii) clarify the outcome that matters most to them (a payoff), (iii) build a bridge between the two (the buying process)."
[2] Create compelling problem statements by using these formulas for (i) Costs: "Every [frequency], at least [reach] are [pain], costing us [loss]" and (ii) Consequences = "That means [implication #1]. If it's not addressed by [timeline], then [implication #2]." Additional pointers: Loss = Reach (# people impacted) X Frequency (# times) X Severity (vs. ideal). Implications can be functional, strategic, or personal problems.
[3] Enterprise account mapping is about influence and communication, not hierarchy! To design the flow of internal communication, map "who needs to say what, to who, when, to keep a deal moving."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] The 100 best bits of advice from 10 years of First Round Review
[2] What I learned from getting acquired by Google
[3] Is Big Tech monopolizing the AI boom?
[4] The product manager role is a mistake
[5] Clarify your thinking by drawing concept maps
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