Product marketing is a dynamic and creative field that requires constant innovation to stay ahead of the competition and deliver value to customers. In this article, you will learn about some of the latest trends and innovations in product marketing that can help you boost your skills and performance.
One of the key innovations in product marketing is customer-led growth, which means leveraging your existing customers to drive new leads, referrals, and retention. Customer-led growth involves creating a positive feedback loop between your product, your marketing, and your customers, so that they become your advocates and promoters. To achieve customer-led growth, you need to understand your customer segments, their needs, their journeys, and their motivations, and then tailor your product messaging, positioning, and features accordingly. You also need to provide them with incentives, rewards, and social proof to encourage them to share your product with others and stay loyal.
In many ways this is king. I’d even argue that product led growth is an offshoot of customer led growth. A product experience that has customer growth levers built into it (eg invitations via an event platform, referrals, gifting) means nothing without features that are beloved to your customer, which can be achieved by building the features that are going to be highest leverage in solving their pain points. PMMs are uniquely situated to solve this as they are closest to the customer and can provide product teams an understanding of why a customer may hire or fire a product. Doing so ensures the downstream feature development and go to market is impactful enough for customers such that they have reason to utilize customer growth levers.
Whenever a customer reaches out to you, there is an opportunity to build a rapport which can lead to either selling or growing the revenue. I used to help customers who were trying out our service for free. We noticed that many of them didn't end up buying it. So, we decided to do more. We started helping them set things up and learn how to use our service. This made a big difference. More people started paying for our service, and we made 40% more money.
I just recently came to the realization that we have been too focused on growth marketing (numbers-focused, tools, AI and the latest shiny object) without the prioritization of building evolutionary relationships with our prospects and customers. Data-driven decision-making and tech is necessary but we need to do more! I am now leading an initiative to bring more focus on building deeper, emotional connections with our audiences.
One thing that’s core to focus on is the voice of the customer. What is s/he saying about your product or service? What disconnects in the brand are you finding through social listening via your brand channels or online chat? And what ideas do your brand superfans have in terms of innovation? Superfans or superusers can be a wealth of knowledge to drive innovation.
The biggest problem in customer-led growth is the loss of Customer Empathy through straight-jacket messaging and practices. The co-founder of Loom shared that after 9 months of heading in a direction that everyone agreed on internally, the company hit a growth roadblock. It was only by listening to what people actually said that they realized how to make Loom truly relevant.
Content marketing is not a new concept, but it is still a powerful and innovative way to attract, engage, and convert your target audience. Content marketing is the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires your prospects and customers. Content marketing can help you establish your authority, credibility, and trustworthiness in your niche, as well as generate organic traffic, leads, and sales. Content marketing can take many forms, such as blogs, videos, podcasts, ebooks, webinars, infographics, case studies, and more. The key is to create content that matches your buyer personas, their pain points, their goals, and their stage in the buyer journey, and then optimize it for search engines and social media.
One piece of advice to build great content marketing programs... ?? Focus on the problem your product solves. 80%+ of the content you create and share should be covering insights around the problem and the use case your prospect is trying to carry out. ? Too often I see content marketing that is solution focused. And yes, you do eventually need to introduce your product. ?? But only after you've earned the trust and credibility that you UNDERSTAND YOUR PROSPECT'S PROBLEM.
Content is the ideal way to put your product marketing strategies into the market, get feedback and optimize where needed. For instance, when I'm working on a positioning project, my goal is to quickly put together a draft of the positioning statement, get alignment and use that positioning to put together some kind of content that will help us test our assumptions. That might be a sales deck, a homepage or even a blog post.
What else is there? Content is king. Buyers drive 100% of the sales process now so you better give them everything they need to make an informed decision. And you have to keep it fresh, punchy, interesting, and educational. And I’m sorry, using AI to generate marketing copy is still not gonna work unless you hold a high bar for editing and optimizing it for real people. No one wants to read LLM drivel.
Don’t forget use cases! Consider the WWWWW but do not forget the how. How does the product help? How is the product modern? How will the product create impact and change behaviors for the better? For the long haul? And my favorite - how does the product inspire?
(!) To build a robust content marketing program, prioritize understanding your audience's core needs through regular surveys or feedback loops. This ensures you produce content that resonates. Additionally, always measure and analyze content performance, making necessary adjustments to maximize engagement and ROI.
Another innovation in product marketing is product-led growth, which means using your product as the main driver of your growth strategy. Product-led growth involves designing your product in a way that makes it easy, intuitive, and enjoyable for users to sign up, use, and upgrade, without relying on sales or marketing interventions. Product-led growth can help you reduce your customer acquisition costs, increase your customer lifetime value, and improve your retention and referral rates. To achieve product-led growth, you need to focus on creating a frictionless user experience, a clear value proposition, a compelling onboarding process, a viral feature, and a scalable pricing model.
Three practical tips that helped me acquire 130K+ users through PLG: ?? Growth Loops At Uxcel, we have a Skill Assessments Loop: User completes an assessment > gets benchmarked against 250K+ users > shares the result on LinkedIn > Other users see the result and assess themselves. This loop brings us thousands of website visits per month, with 13.46% conversion rate. Turn your feature into an acquisition channel. ?? Incentivized onboarding Offer extended free trial days for every action a user completes within your onboarding checklist. Serve them a unique offer valid only if they convert before the trial ends ?? Ungated Product Demo Use tools like Arcade to give your users an option to test the product before they even sign up.
(!) For product-led growth, initiate with a robust 'freemium' model where users experience core benefits without paying. A practical tip: during onboarding, use guided tutorials or interactive walkthroughs to highlight key features. Also, incentivize actions that promote virality, like sharing or collaborating within the tool, possibly with feature unlocks or usage credits.
Launching a PLG product this year taught me three key lessons: Takeaway 1: MVP experiments are not polished, and that's okay. Building a Minimal Unviable Product (MUP) suffices to prove demand and collect feedback. As a product marketer, co-own alphas/betas/pilots to use this feedback for messaging/campaigns/launch. Takeaway 2: Activation is the real challenge. New users must grasp how to use the product and experience its value independently. As a product marketer, advocate for in-app experience and communications, ensuring user independence. Takeaway 3: Prioritize highlighting user value. Showcase vital metrics, utilize notifications and emails effectively for user conversion and retention, like Loom's successful model.
In B2B tech companies with very complex product portfolio, creating a product-led company culture is a bit more challenging. I've worked my whole career in the geospatial, mapping, location tech industry, where "offline" data needs to be downloaded, or delivered via APIs and SDKs, many times with no UI end-user applications. In these cases, it's very important to create: 1. An amazing developer experience with great documentation, self-service account creation and usage. 2. After the self-service experience, the possibility to go bigger with an open channel to more "enterprise" B2B capabilities. 3. Create a great customer relationship that goes beyond selling where it feels more like "developing together" partnership.
LinkedIn GTM | Ex Google, Indeed, Handshake Sr Director of Product Marketing | MBA
The key is tying innovation back to a clear objective and deep understanding of your users, customers, and prospects. The goal isn't innovation for its own sake, but moving the needle on business impact. For example, at Indeed we brought part of the recruiter experience out from behind the paywall, showcasing the vast volume of job seeker searches for any given query. This addressed a common concern of recruiters regarding candidate volume, and proved very effective at converting free users to paid. Innovation stems from addressing core customer needs and friction points, not novelty alone. By deeply understanding your audience and tying new features and campaigns back to tangible objectives, you can drive meaningful results
Video marketing is another trend and innovation in product marketing that can help you stand out from the crowd and connect with your audience. Video marketing is the use of video content to showcase your product, brand, or story, and to educate, entertain, or persuade your viewers. Video marketing can help you increase your brand awareness, engagement, conversion, and loyalty, as well as boost your SEO and social media presence. Video marketing can take many forms, such as explainer videos, demo videos, testimonial videos, live videos, animated videos, and more. The key is to create video content that is relevant, authentic, and captivating, and that showcases your product's benefits, features, and personality.
Videos are currently the best format to capture attention and works across every touch point on the AIDA framework ( awareness, intent, decision, action). Creating videos is now easy with several AI tools available as well as agency experts, but the key is to give the correct requirement or brief that communicates the what, why, for whom and so what of the video. The PMM needs to understand the relevance of the video in the overall marketing strategy, where it fits best, what else is needed to support its messaging and how it's going to support the overall campaign objective.
There is one golden rule that many companies, especially in B2B, don't follow ?? ? DON'T BE BORING ? Research shows the average adult's attention span is just 8 seconds ? Make them Count ?
Video information is processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text! You are more likely to remember an episode of 'The Crown' detailing an incident than simply reading about it. That's the power of video—it sticks with you.
One thing I have found extremely useful in video marketing is building a video marketing funnel. It consist of 3 parts: 1. Video ads you can run on FB/IG/YouTube 2. Main promo/explainer video 60-120 sec long 3. Demo video tour that is available after visitor will share their email info. By letting prospects self-educate through these videos, you'll see a significant decrease in lead warm-up time, giving your sales reps more time to close. If you need more info, I offer free consultation on how to implement this into your company. I will also share best examples of how other companies have done that. #videomarketing #saasgrowth
Video marketing is currently a very powerful tool for reinforcement selling. The boom of YouTube shorts, Instagram reels is a testimony of how popular this format of marketing is. Brands look at quality of content and married with right influencer can do wonders.
Agile marketing is a methodology and mindset that applies the principles of agile software development to the marketing process. Agile marketing involves working in short, iterative cycles, called sprints, where you plan, execute, measure, and improve your marketing activities based on data and feedback. Agile marketing can help you increase your speed, flexibility, collaboration, and innovation in product marketing, as well as deliver more value to your customers and stakeholders. To adopt agile marketing, you need to embrace a culture of experimentation, learning, and adaptation, as well as use tools and frameworks that support agile workflows, such as Scrum, Kanban, or Lean.
On a personal level, I am very (positively) biased towards Agile Marketing. I have seen this framework work immensely in marketing and would always prefer a test-and-learn mindset. Instead of setting up plans that extend to months and months, go with smaller sprints, focus on mini targets with bigger impacts, test and experiment frameworks that work for your product/ brand and repeat (IF IT WORKS). There's no better (and quicker) way to jump to trends, be more relevant and put your brands out there. (instead of just following bleh strategies)
(!) To truly harness the power of agile marketing, it's crucial to maintain a "test-and-learn" mindset. Instead of committing to large campaigns, break them into smaller initiatives, test their effectiveness in real-time, and then quickly adjust based on the data. This way, not only will your marketing efforts be more adaptive, but you'll also gain actionable insights faster than traditional methods.
Agile Marketing is the natural evolution of product marketing in consumer tech/app based businesses. Every GTM / growth hack / messaging test is crafted with an empirical approach that is set out to validate or disprove a hypothesis. A hypothesis led test and learn approach forces the marketers to think within frameworks and have clear metrics or signals of success ahead of launching a campaign. This way forward is critical for product marketing to become a function that owns growth or business outcomes. When implemented correctly, the method enables the marketer to assess impact, clearly identify growth levers that move the needle and scale strategies based on repeatably effective campaigns and tactics.
Zur kontinuierlichen Verbesserung der Marketingaktivit?ten, sollten die Feedbackschleifen interdisziplin?r ausgelegt sein. Im B2B Produktmarketing sind kurzfristige Anpassungen von Aktivit?ten vor allem dann erfolgreich wenn sie Markt- und Nutzererkenntnisse mit einbauen. Das gelingt überdurschnittlich gut wenn sowohl der Verkaufs- als auch der Entwicklungsprozess darauf ausgelegt sind die maximale Nutzendarstellung eines Produkts herauszuarbeiten und am Markt zu platzieren. Das gelingt durch Einbindung von agilen Methoden, die idealerweise direkte Erkenntnisse von zukünftigen Kundenpersonas mit berücksichtigen, und stets in monderne Managementmethoden wie z.B. OKR aufgehen.
Foster cross-functional collaboration by encouraging regular communication between marketing, development, and other teams. Embrace data-driven decision-making and quickly adapt strategies based on performance metrics. Implement agile methodologies to respond promptly to market changes.
Creativity and innovation is much more about combining existing things in new ways that it is about creating something truly novel.
It’s important to remember that innovation doesn’t always mean recreating the wheel. When we were creating our website messaging framework, we took inspiration from other experts and their methods. Not only did this result in a better tool in the end — But we were able to easily share and teach it to startups founders and other product marketers.
We've combined product and customer marketing into a single team. We have expertise across those two disciplines, but we also bring a massive amount of experience across marketing more generally, which gives us the confidence to step up and master more than what product and customer teams would normally take on. We invest a lot in social proof, because no one tells your story better than your customers. We drive messaging, email campaigns, pricing, and packaging. We have a robust customer survey program, we started a customer advisory board and a partner program. There's almost nothing we can't do. When someone asks you to define product marketing...you can tell them that product marketing can truly do almost anything to benefit the org.
Olhar a quest?o de um ponto de vista mais amplo pode ajudar o processo de inova??o: quais servi?os complementares melhoram ainda mais a experiência? Quais parcerias isso pode fomentar? Usar o ecosistema a seu favor refor?a o sucesso de uma marca
Innovation can be a mindset of continual improvements. Instead of seeing each marketing activity like a project that gets finished, see every channel as an evolving entity that gets honed and improved over time.