🌓 2-min PMM: Deliveroo's Referrals, Retool on Customer Confidence, FleetPanda's Partnerships, Houzz's Onboarding.
April 2024, Part 1 release
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] (For Startups) Delight early customers quickly by building internal tools to intervene when they use your product and encounter issues.
Retool built 3 custom tools to 'spy' on its users and build customer confidence instantly - (i) a real-time notification when a large account was using their product, (ii) slack alerts when users faced an issue, and (iii) shared channels for developers to debug errors faster.
[2] Ensure your referral program 'outside product' is hyper-focused on experienced customers and part of their activation sequence.
Besides a dedicated spot in-product, you must regularly promote your referral program through campaigns (ex: email, push notifications, etc.) Deliveroo also leverages more experienced customers by making the referral program visible on the first screen anytime they open their app.
[3] (For Vertical SaaS) Compile a list of industry publishers and negotiate free partnership opportunities for high-quality content to generate qualified leads.
FleetPanda provides software to manage all "dispatch operations for fuel distributors in North America." Given the niche, the company generates qualified monthly leads on autopilot by securing agreements to publish free blogs and share press releases with select industry publishers.
[4] Split your onboarding questionnaire and similar user entry forms into multiple screens to improve conversion rates.
Houzz allows homeowners to get quotes from construction professionals by entering their project details and contact info. Instead of accumulating this info on one screen, the company lets the users input their information across multiple screens to reduce the cognitive load.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Growth Levers and How to Find Them” by Matt Lerner
[1] There are 4 steps to transform your team into an "instrument for discovery" - (i) Unpack the journey that leads customers to you, (ii) Build your growth model to discover the points of leverage, (iii) Quickly test ideas through growth sprints, and (iv) Move your team's mindset from optimization to discovery.
[2] Reasons why a growth model is essential - "A growth model is a flowchart that maps out how your business finds, acquires, and delights your customers." It tells you where to invest your limited resources mathematically to make the biggest impact. A growth model lets you align your team to a common goal, de-escalate resource decisions, spot bottlenecks, and nurture feedback loops.
[3] Find your North Star Metric (NSM) by asking these 2 questions - "If customers absolutely loved your product, how would they naturally behave? How many of them are behaving like this?" Examples - Slack: Daily Active Users, Amazon: Repeat Purchases.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] How To Start Google (an essay by Paul Graham)
[2] The Product Model at Amazon
[3] The Secret Value Of Big Tech: The real benefit of working at large tech companies
[4] Product Marketing to C-Suite: 30 examples from leaders in tech
[5] Distribute Ideas, Not Content