Product Marketing Alliance - The Future of Digital Experiences
Vijay Sekar
TPM at Freshworks | Enabling Engineering & Business Excellence Through Execution
The End-User Era is a revolution in internet space. People will be interested in trying before they go ahead to buy a product. The companies must ensure to include the PLG (product led growth) factor that helps to show the value than telling it in the form of collaterals and help documents.
The alliance of product and marketing will act as a strategic function sitting at the intersection of product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams. The alliance is not limited to the process of bringing a product or feature to the market, but also strengthens the relationship with customers before and after the launch.
The alliance will accelerate adoption and retention by translating the voice of the customer (VoC), product positioning and sales enablement. It primarily focuses on product improvement leading to greater customer experience rather than brand awareness, highlighting strategies and tactics targeting customer acquisition only.
Feature Factory shifting to Product Outcomes
The companies work on shipping of a change to the product (includes feature requests and bug fixes). This shipment, if it solves a customer problem, will result in the change that is measurable in how the customers behave, which delivers the impact to the business. The only way to escape the feature factory is with outcome-oriented product roadmaps.
Wait, what is a Feature Factory? - easy, a company which prioritizes the quantity of features added to a product, rather than the quality.
The feature factory is tagged to a company when the sync between Product Managers and other stakeholders is lesser than expected. The cost of misalignment with stakeholders results in waste, slow delivery, or demoralization too. To mitigate this problem, the sync should be as often as possible.
What makes a roadmap, outcome-driven? - If the focus is on net result and learning instead of time and scope, then it is. But it doesn't stop there. Such roadmaps should have a "right" set of underlying assumptions, related outcomes, and success metric to measure.
Remember, a product roadmap should always be dynamic, focused on setting direction and intent and more importantly, the communication document between a company and its customers. Also, it should NOT be a list of features, list of solutions, timeline, or Gantt chart.
The product roadmap that is driving the vision depends on the opportunity available in the market and how customers can use it to solve their pain points. The hierarchy looks like this.
Data Driven (Demand Marketing) vs Gut Driven (Brand Marketing)
Albert Einstein once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Likewise, data doesn’t lie, but it can’t tell the whole story.
Demand marketing can offer a company with basic and straightforward information – the who/what/when. While knowing that information is extremely helpful, the insights are limited without the additional context of how and why.
Data is real, no denial in that, but it can't take risks. On the other hand, the gut (with experience) will know how to approach these numbers and do further testing. At the outset, this helps to get qualitative feedback with the customers in the form of web and email surveys.
ROMI (not ROI)
Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) can be attributed to marketing (net of marketing spend) divided by net of marketing invested. This is different from ROI, why? - ROI is tied up in collaterals (long-term) while ROMI expensed in the current period and the marketing funds are risked. The improvement in ROMI is fundamental to optimizing product marketing alliance and its initiatives. Let's have a quick comparison.
There are two forms of ROMI to track - short-term that indexes the measurement of revenue to the marketing spend. On the other hand, long-term will include the other less tangible aspects of marketing effectiveness. The first focuses on profit and the latter focuses on marketing activities (incremental brand awareness). Here's how ROMI can be calculated with different considerations.
Profit :-
Gross Profit - Marketing Investment
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Marketing Investment
Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV or CLV) :-
CLV - Marketing Investment
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Marketing Investment
Incremental Expenses :-
Profit - Investment - Incremental Expenses
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Investment
No matter which considerations the companies take, solid ROMI calculations will enable them to focus on product marketing initiatives that deliver the greatest value.
Marketing (Maximize Ad Spend => Customer Conversion)
When the company launches a campaign, they are ready to measure the essential metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) or cost per conversion (CPC). But is it enough? - the answer is NO. The company should pinpoint its monetary success, and that is where the return on ad spend (ROAS) comes into the picture. ROAS is the amount of revenue generated by every dollar spent on the revenue return from a specific ad or marketing campaign. Let's look at the key areas the experiences are created.
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The target will vary according to the company and the product being sold, but three to five times ROAS are good numbers to aim for. A brand’s ideal ROAS will vary depending on what stage the business is in. In this case, if the conversion ratio optimization (CRO) is implemented, then the ROAS will significantly change over time and can be used to measure per campaign as well.
Website Content
Content is KING. Sounds familiar? Yes, as Bill Gates quoted this. But the content is all about VALUE as well. If the inbound marketing strategy is not delivering the expected value, then the company will have to rethink what they're trying to solve with their offering. A product that has effective content as part of the company's strategy will witness improvements in sales, cost savings and customer retention. Any element on the website should have two key purposes - brand awareness and conversion. So, a call-to-action (CTA) button, an e-book or a form must lead to effective nurturing.
Product (Customer Retention)
HubSpot's product marketing can be broken down into three parts - i) bring product to your market, ii) promote your product, and iii) sell your product to customers. Product marketing is a mixture of marketing, sales, product, and customer success which highlights its cross-functional nature, making it crucial to SaaS success. A happy customer yields dividends to a company in three forms - renewals, referrals and build brand reputation. The intention is to delight your customers by opening a loyalty loop from marketing via sales to post-purchase.
Complex Browser App
Google Chrome is winning the browser war, and this is due to the set of tools, plugins, and extensions that extend far beyond basic search. The browser space is an area to round out the company's calendar in publishing the competitive content with potential topics that keeps the social platforms to have a better following. This is a good chance to add a plugin that can be tracked in the CRM that can help in collecting data about prospects and existing customers for retention.
Mobile App
Apps can provide a better shopping experience. The company can't focus exclusively on the desktop or the app. Most of the product users are on mobile as well. The first installation on the users' device will help the company to stay on top of their mind. The company will need to have an impact on the numbers before there is any justification for investment in growth. The users should experience the product more than thinking about the purchase made. The basic operations should be operative, and every new update should allow the users to download without hiccups.
Project Thinking vs Product Thinking
Project Thinking is not new to us, because project management has been around for an exceedingly long time. And we as humans tend to think in terms of projects: things we need to get done. The focus is only on delivery. The project thinking is measured by how well we can estimate the timeline beforehand and deliver the specific output on that schedule. Success is defined by setting up a schedule and then hitting those dates along the way.
Product Thinking is a significant shift from the mindset of project thinking. The focus is only on goals. Rather than focusing on the output, product thinking is focused on the outcome. Comparatively, the difficulty in setting time constraints around the delivery is high because the accomplishment of the overall goal isn't structured, at least up front. This kind of thinking can be quite the shift, but the benefits are high. Some of these include.
Focused Strategy
The product has a greater chance of success when it is built with customers in mind. To have a focused strategy, the customer and their business must be given preferences beyond the attributes of the product.
Inclusive Growth Mindset with Design Thinking
The other driver which helps to understand what customers think is by connecting collaborative teams. This occurs via interaction with customers / prospects through social media, panel interviews, surveys and focus groups. This is where Design Thinking influences innovation like how actors get insider a character's head.
Siloed Goals -> Common Framework
The PMA Framework
Four parts to compile the goals into one common framework from Wise.
Insights displaying
Messaging displaying
Launches displaying
Adoption displaying
To conclude, CONSISTENCY IS KEY and can be achieved with the Product Marketing Alliance. This collaboration would redefine the future of digital experiences.
Thanks for reading!
Disclaimer?- Any views or opinions represented in this article are personal and belong solely to the article owner and do not represent those of people, institutions, or organizations that the owner may or may not be associated with in professional or personal capacity, unless explicitly stated. The views or opinions are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, or individual.