🦅 2-min PMM: Supademo's Social Onboarding, Gong's LI Takeover, Sequoia's Archetypes, Cloudinary's Support
May 2024, Part 2 release
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Add social proof across every step of the product onboarding flow to increase willingness to complete onboarding.
Supademo tried a series of tactics - including reverse trials, push for team usage, action-triggered emails - to reduce friction and accelerate time to value for its users. One of the tactics generating results was adding social proof to specific product onboarding pages (ex: testimonials on the 'invite your team' page) and use case emails with actual case studies linked to them.
[2] Plan for employee-driven LinkedIn takeovers across company levels to increase brand awareness and dominate a nascent product category.
Gong focused exclusively on LinkedIn and adopted an 'edutainment' mentality to gain recognition and dominate the revenue intelligence category. The company also set a company-wide mandate to get every employee - from new hires to C-level executives - to post on LinkedIn in a pre-coordinated manner on topics most relevant to Gong's decision-makers in their professional peer group.
[3] For early-stage startups: Determine your product-market fit archetype to discover your product's place in the market and how you should operate.
Sequoia distills early-stage startups into 3 archetypes: hair on fire ('addresses an urgent problem'), hard fact ('solves an existing problem better'), and future vision ('products out of left field'). Each archetype has its "own customer mindset, competitive market status, challenges, opportunity/general product goals."
[4] Pair your technical primary persona in a PLG motion with a customer support team filled with folks sharing the same tech background.
Cloudinary's core audience is developers. Therefore, the company hired developers for their customer support team who knew the language of the target audience. Customer service now ranks as reason #2 for why Cloudinary wins word of mouth in the developer ecosystem.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Growth Hacking: Silicon Valley’s Best Kept Secret” by Raymond Fong and Chad Riddersen
[1] Seek advertising arbitrage, i.e., opportunities where advertising inventory supply outpaces advertiser demand. This usually "occurs when an advertising channel is growing really fast (a supply increase) or when an advertising channel is falling out of favor (demand decrease)."
[2] Try these directed questions to get solid testimonials from your clients - "(i) What were you looking for when you found [COMPANY]? (ii) What compelled you to choose [COMPANY] over others? (iii) What results did you get from working with [COMPANY]? (iv) When [COMPANY][COMPLETED SOLUTION], what did you like most about the experience? (v) Who else would you recommend [COMPANY] to?"
[3] 2 formulas to offer instant clarity through your headlines - "Formula 1: [What you do] + [What makes you unique] + [Geo Reach] - ex: Residential roofing since 1929 serving LA. Formula 2: [End result the customer wants] + [Specific period of time] + [Address the objections] - ex: Hot fresh pizza delivered to your door in 30 mins or it's free."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] My recent podcast appearance - “How CloudBees’ PMM built a competitive intelligence ecosystem from scratch”
[2] McKinsey: The growing importance of software product marketing managers
[3] Making a Good Bet: Building Products with Incomplete Information
[4] Why you need a “WTF Notebook”
[5] The Life and Death of Hollywood