2-minute Product Marketing Insights: September 2022 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: September 15, 2022 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Study different user journeys within your product and optimize the one with low time to value.
Time to value describes the time it takes for a user from signing up to get to their “aha moment” for becoming a regular user. Online bookies (ex: DraftKings, Fan Duel) offer free cash to get a potential user to place a bet quickly vs. having to go through a long process of creating an account, linking credit cards, picking an event, and so on.
[2] Source feature ideas from users, show progress, and notify users when you ship a new feature.
Loom allows users to submit product feature ideas directly via their public roadmap or email. They notify users via email whenever they ship a highly requested feature to illustrate their customer obsession.
[3] Accelerate community-led growth efforts by leaning on talent present within your community.
ServiceTitan's new VP of Customer Success was a former customer of their company. The first-hand experience of being a customer came in handy to instill product knowledge and empathy into the company’s community.
[4] Create a modular product demo using your key product use cases and overall value proposition.
You may have to provide a demo at different points in a user’s experience in a product-led growth model. Pitch suggests using a modular demo incorporating what you know about the prospect’s business, their product use so far, and challenges they want to tackle.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“The Qualified Sales Leader: Proven Lessons from a Five Time CRO” by John McMahon
[1] Any effective customer conversation is a loop of 4 actions: (i) ask open-ended questions, (ii) listen to understand, (iii) verify you understand, and (iv) feel the customer’s response.
[2] Offer your unique differentiators as a solution and create urgency by linking to the customer’s business pain. Use the 3 WHYs as a guide: Why do they have to buy? Why buy from us? Why buy now?
[3] “Time kills all deals without urgency. If you haven’t established urgency, then, as time moves on, the customer believes they can continue to operate without your solution.”
🧠 5 CURATED BUSINESS THINK PIECES
[1] The Decomposition of Marketing
[2] TikTok and The Fall of the Social-Media Giants
[3] Non-Coercive Marketing: A Primer
[4] The Design-First Approach: Building Products with People at the Center
[5] DevRel Explained for Product Managers: Do happy developers mean a successful product?
Part 2 Release Date: September 29, 2022 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Decide on which features you want to launch by linking each one of them to a specific company goal.
TrueLayer, like any company, deals with a broad set of feature ideas to support multiple company goals. They prioritize launching new features better by asking two questions - (i) Will it gain new customers or retain current ones? (ii) Does it help us stay relevant, grow in a saturated market, or meet a financial goal?
[2] Explain your product to a non-technical team to refine messaging that’s part of your go-to-market strategy.
The product marketing team at DigitalOcean deliberately avoids collaborating with the technical team on product messaging. Explaining the product to their non-technical team members helps them find new ways to communicate the final message better.
[3] Invest in learning content for your product to allow any user to expand their capabilities.
One of Figma’s goals from day 1 was to make the whole design experience collaborative and accessible. Investing in fun design courses for the users within their product helped Figma expand its user base beyond core developers, build community, and make the product more intuitive.
[4] Create a viral referral loop by offering something the referrer values and choosing the proper distribution.
The Hustle newsletter grew to 550K+ subscribers by rewarding each reader (example of personal gain) for a referral across a multi-tier system. Each tier of the referral program would give the reader access to a better reward - starting with unique content all the way to a flight to San Francisco.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Three questions to refine or validate your business: (i) Who do you believe your customer is or will be? (ii) What does your customer buy from you (not what you sell to them)? (iii) Why does your customer buy your product (or why do you think they will)?
[2] To understand what your customer buys from you, ask them these questions: What is the value you get from my product or service? How do you know? How do you measure it?
[3] Start a ‘learning backlog’ for your product team. Allocate 10% of the weekly sprint product hours to learning a critical aspect of your business.
🧠 5 CURATED BUSINESS THINK PIECES
[1] This is the B2B century, and marketers will be the ones to lead it
[2] The art of unshipping: deprioritize features, phase out projects, sunset products
[3] Overlooked user research methods that will make your product stand out
[4] Why you should focus on the bottom of the funnel first to drive signups
[5] What stops us from designing a sustainable future?
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