2-minute Product Marketing Insights: March 2023 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: March 10, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Add a ceiling to your usage-based pricing to avoid hurting adoption among your most valuable customers.
Snowflake won a lot of customers from its competition by highlighting cost savings via its usage-based pricing model. But when there are no cost savings for the customer after a certain point as usage scales up, unlike Snowflake, you benefit from switching to value-add pricing.
[2] (For B2C) Increase new user referrals by making them crucial to winning freebies via in-app games.
Temu - a shopping app launched in September - wins over new users through low prices and referral campaigns involving mobile games. Other platforms like Taobao, Shein, Meituan have also followed suit with a gamified shopping experience.
[3] Focus more on activation content if you're a PLG startup where your product is the primary acquisition driver.
Your content plan should directly match your business model. In the case of Dock, a revenue enablement platform, the company prioritizes mid-funnel, product-related content - ex: guides, templates.
[4] Cultivate an employee ambassador program to improve brand awareness, visibility, and sales reach.
According to Elwyn's Marketing Director, a team of employee ambassadors representing different departments can effectively improve brand perception and share information given our distributed workplaces. It is vital to establish guidelines, offer an assessment process, and the right incentives for participation.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] 5 principles of AI weirdness - (i) The danger of AI is that it's not smart enough, (ii) AI has the brainpower of a worm, (iii) AI doesn't understand the problem you want it to solve, (iv) But: AI will do what you tell it to or at least try its best, (v) AI will take the path of least resistance.
[2] Training data is more crucial than how the AI was designed. Therefore, if you don't create your own proprietary dataset, hackers can still design adversarial attacks that fool your AI.
[3] The best way to use AI - understand (i) how to choose the right problems for it to solve, (ii) how to anticipate its misunderstandings, and (iii) how to prevent it from copying the worst of what it finds in 'human' data.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] A joyful writing process for your Product Vision
[2] 6 Demand Gen Channel Options for Startups: Which is Best for You?
[3] How to Write a Case Study (That Actually Closes Deals)
[4] The 10 principles of product discovery
[5] ChatGPT use cases for Product Managers
Part 2 Release Date: March 24, 2023 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Use the L.O.V.E. email copywriting framework to organize your ideas and convert more prospects into buyers.
L.O.V.E. framework from SizzleForce Marketing works as follows: (L) Leverage an existing authority - ex: statistics, thought leader - to build trust, (O) Offer your product's unique benefits and testimonials on its impact, (V) Validate your product's promise through different means - ex: free trials, certifications, satisfaction guarantee, (E) Ease your prospect into taking action through a non-demanding CTA.
[2] (For a new startup) Construct a simple pricing model by matching your competitors or setting prices ~20% higher and revisit later.
According to Slab, a 20% price difference vs. your competition is easy for prospects to accept when you're a new startup. Every negotiation from then on should get you on the path to experiment and iterate on your prices for the rest of your company's life.
[3] Create an internal product tracker to update the entire organization on every roadmap-related concern at scale.
Airtable maintains a single source of truth type tracker to update their team and partners on what's coming next. This product tracker is split into 7 levels: projects, OKRs, docs, updates, releases, feedback, and team.
[4] Collect feedback via polls and surveys within your product to both boost feature adoption and build your roadmap.
Pendo states that up to 80% of product features never get used! Usage analytics, on top of qualitative feedback from customers, can help you plan the right product experiences.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) let you (i) set inspiring and measurable goals, (ii) ensure progress toward that end state, and (iii) provide cadence for the team to remember what's at stake while holding everyone accountable.
[2] How to write a good objective - An objective should be a single sentence that's (i) qualitative and inspirational, (ii) time-bound, and (iii) actionable by the team independently.
[3] On KRs - Key results answer the question - "How would we know if we met our Objective?" Aim for 3 key results for an objective and not more. Ideally, you want to have one usage metric, one revenue metric, and one satisfaction metric for your key results.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Why Churn is a SaaS Killer
[2] Do You Have Lightning In a Bottle? How to Benchmark Your Social App
[3] What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About Business: From Viral Marketing to Market Sizing to Product Roadmaps
[4] When Content Creation Goes to Zero: AI is making a world where it costs nothing to produce anything. What happens next?
[5] How I’m protecting my job against AI
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