2-min Product Marketing Insights: Sep 2024 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Sep 13, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Pick a North Star metric for your product that captures engagement and connects to the commercial drivers of your business.
Babbel - a language learning app - chose ‘Total Learning Minutes’ as its north star metric since it captures the company’s impact on learning and ties back to revenue. All the subsequent choices on the product dealt with creating an engagement ladder to ramp up that metric.
[2] Include ‘message validation’ as one of the mandatory steps after you confirm your product solves valuable pain points for customers.
Don’t stop at verifying your solution (ex: user flows, design choices, etc.) solves customer pain points; go a step further to validate the language and value propositions behind your solution. One option: use Wynter to get feedback on your marketing copy/website messaging.
[3] Answer these 6 questions on your homepage to better turn your casual visitors into loyal customers.
These questions are: What is the product? Who is it for? What does it do? Why should they care? When would customers need it? How does it work? An example: Using the 6 questions, a reworked homepage for Bunce - a customer lifecycle management platform - would go into detail about its niche category and use simpler language to educate a prospect who may not be familiar with their type of software.
[4] Move away from ‘streak’ metrics and instead adopt metrics that embody these 3 principles to drive user behavior.
These principles are to make success feel achievable, failure non-fatal, and to create a learning loop. Noom uses ‘emergency reserves’ to allow users to pause a streak or “receive forgiveness for missing a day.”
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] DIFFERENCES IN GOALS - Developer Marketing: Attract developers to your platform, focus on what's good for the company, create a channel with developers to guide them to take action, lean on great messages, great APIs, interactive documentation, and comprehensive sample code. Developer Relations: Educate developers on what they can do and help them build products, focus on what's good for developers, create and grow a relationship with developers, rely on community first, followed by code and content.
[2] 4 metrics can give you a 360-degree view of the performance of your developer relations program: (i) adoption rate, (ii) engagement rate, (iii) satisfaction score, and (iv) reasons for developers adopting or rejecting your product.
[3] You want to start a developer marketing program if any of these criteria apply to you: your product is aimed at (i) marketplace-based developers (ex: Apple App Store) or (ii) API consumption (ex: companies in the infrastructure space), or (iii) your product is a developer tool (ex: GitLab), or (iii) you need developers to use the product (ex: Twillio).
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Founder Mode (vs. Manager Mode) - The latest essay from Paul Graham
[2] print (“Hello AI World" ): Evolution of the developer economy in the age of AI
[3] Designing Tools for Software Developers: What We’ve Learnt
[4] The hidden metric that’s getting more important
[5] If you want to test the fundamentals of your design, take off your glasses
Part 2 Release Date: Sep 26, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Answer these 4 questions to simplify and build your positioning strategy for your product.
They are: (i) What is it? (ii) Who is it for? (iii) What does it replace? (iv) Why is it better? A combination of answering the first 2 questions leads to a 'use case' driven positioning strategy for Tango, which reads, "Create software training walkthroughs in minutes."
[2] Gauge the readiness of each of your AEs for discovery calls with prospects by reviewing their answers to these 4 questions.
These test questions are: (i) For fit with prospect's org - What does the company you're talking to do? (ii) For individual motives - Who are you talking to (Title, LinkedIn)? (iii) To uncover future conversations - What are the relevant roles on their job boards? (iv) For multi-threading - Who else should you be talking to?
[3] Evaluate and create strategies for daily engagement, habit-forming notifications, and the off-product ecosystem to improve retention.
Fortnite faced the challenge of keeping its players highly engaged in a competitive gaming environment. They used a multi-prong approach of creating regular challenges (for daily engagement), notifying players when friends were online (habit formation), and building a YouTube-powered (off-product) ecosystem to increase their 30-day retention rates.
[4] Tailor your post-initial contact email to include these 5 sections irrespective of the prospect source (ex: event, cold call, etc.)
The email should contain 5 sections: (i) Email Opener, (ii) Recap/Observation, (iii) Value Proposition, (iv) CTA/Next Steps, (v) P.S. (aka. Soft CTA). These sections also translate well for your sales deck or your SaaS homepage.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] You can never buy differentiation. You can only build it. Build customer-facing software and buy backend software, i.e., things that don’t differentiate you from the customer PoV.
[2] TWO things to do before implementing any idea: (a) Vet the idea - “What assumptions about customers, the problem, or the market are we making? How will our experiments prove or disprove those assumptions?” (b) “If we’re wildly successful, will it be a big outcome?”
[3] You can only pick any 3 out of the 4 following attributes in software development: features, deadlines, quality, and certainty (level of confidence). Another reason why engineering teams find it challenging to commit to hard deadlines.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] State of Product Marketing Leadership, 2024 Report - I make a brief appearance ;)
[2] The Art of Finishing - break the cycle of endless beginnings & unsatisfying middles
[3] Unlocking Momentum with Product Strategy - a fresh approach to get unstuck
[4] The Post-IPO Trough of Sorrow
[5] Are You Solving the Right Problems?
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