Illusional numbers in Product Marketing
It's a magic wave 🪄: The art is to convert numbers into how much impact product marketing brings to your product.
Hi 👋, Welcome to the 47th newsletter post.
Reaching that “Aha!” moment within the product is one of the best feelings for a product marketer with a balance of effectively communicating the product, leading others, understanding the technical aspect of the product, helping develop the product roadmap and meeting company goals.
But to feel accomplished there needs to be some success metrics to measure. For example, for this newsletter, I have a North Star - number of organic shares. Not on the number of views or subscribers.
Why?
When will someone share a piece of content they read online? Either they really like it or they resonate with it — they feel the problem themselves. A lot of my posts are around experiences and lessons from building a startup, product and marketing. My aim is to make content shareable, so I make sure it’s very relatable.
But that’s not all it measures, organic share also brings insights on:
Engagement
They ask for more insights or sometimes bring an opportunity
It automatically increases the open rate & click rate
It builds trust & authenticity
It also increases awareness.
I try to classify metrics in two ways: exciting numbers and numbers that bring impact. One pushes you to keep going and the other helps you reach your overall growth.
As much as numbers are great motivators and bring a sense of accomplishment and excitement, they won’t help measure the impact it has on your product and necessarily won’t be aligned with the overall company goals.
Example - you run a social media campaign for your product. It’s easy to get lost in irrelevant metrics such as number of follower gains, numbers of click on the campaign, number of likes and comment, number of product sign ups, etc. but these numbers won’t help you measure the impact that the campaign had on your product. Some might sign up but never actually use the product or some might just scroll around.
Let’s talk about numbers in product marketing that you shouldn’t overlook - knowing that also specify overall company goals. These metrics depend on various factors such as overall company goals, team goals, market trends, new direction or project.
Product launche
Product launches are once-a-year kind of thing bringing new functionality or new product into the market or even an MVP. To see if the message was distributed correctly and the hard work your team has put together is a success, you need to monitor the launch effects. Specifically - where you need to improve, what was a success, what was the social reaction, social sharing, trials, views, etc.
Start with a key goal that needs to be achieved, this goal can be laser-focused across different parameters even for different teams.
Did each one that signup the product got the value to stick around till the next upgrade?
Did you get enough feedback from customers that helped you create a product roadmap?
How much traction or churn did you see?
Website
The website plays an important role in communicating with customers - it’s the first place people learn about your product. As it’s so crucial, by monitoring the website will give you great insights on its performance - what is driving more signups, what page is leading more visitors, what call-to-action is working, and many more basic things, etc.
Website and content work as an awareness system which also includes non-target audiences. So, it’s better to view them from a zoom-out lens and start moving leads further down the funnel.
Product trials
I’m a huge believer in having first-hand experience prior to purchase. If your product strategy allows you to give free trials or demos, let the customers use your product. You can document the moves and get in-depth inputs on in-product experience.
In this, the customer lifecycle is a great indicator of how your product is doing and the value it’s giving to them. It also helps you better calculate and plan pricing strategy and acquisition cost.
Customer experience
A great way to measure customer experience is how much time they spend on your product and how often they talk about your product in public (let’s say social media shares), and leave reviews and testimonials (this builds trust and promotes validation).
If you make them advocate your product, how often are they able to bring signups and users upgrade?
More than the number of signups you target, it’s important to know how much your user is happy and willing to stick around. It won’t make sense if you keep getting signups but don’t have any idea on how to improve or expand.
Quick Campaigns
These are like some casual projects, they may include - resources, guides, free items, ads, webinars, or something that can be executed and launched in a few weeks. Their main aim is to expand their reach and awareness to different customer segments through small-size benefits.
Key success indicators:
How many customers are active?
The number of email signups.
You can also check how many potential customers your product has.
It’s always more than numbers…
I really like to think it this way - YouTube might have “number of views” as its North Star. It helps them measure how much ad revenue generates, how much people spend time on watching videos and, to the creators, how much interesting their content is. (This is just my assumption)
Metrics such as number of followers, like, sign up don’t significantly evaluate the success of your product. But seeing the bigger picture of how these numbers impact, in the end, is what you should measure - what you’re testing, what you expect to achieve, and the timeframe for achieving it.
So that, being said product marketer also requires to build behind-the-scenes relationships with internal teams to bring overall success.
Tell me, how do you measure your product success and how do you create goals?
Until next time,
Ritika
👋 PS: I’m Ritika founder, product marketer and advisor for early-stage startups, find more here or connect with her here. If you’re a first-time founder looking for curated resources, download here. You can also promote your product in this newsletter. Also, you can share your feedback or questions here.
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