Spend time getting internal buy-in for your launch strategy. Ask for feedback and involve more people in the process as you refine your message. People who have weighed in will feel more invested in the product launch when it comes time to rally the team.
#productmarketing
Friction is the enemy of adoption.
Along with the broader marketing group, it’s on folks in product marketing and demand generation specifically to act as a path clearer for the customer. Removing unnecessary steps everywhere will eventually help fill the funnel with happy customers. It’s on leadership to have the patience to stick with it.
Yesterday was a rare day. Not that many meetings. But my calendar was still full of things that are important to me. If you don’t prioritize your personal priorities, are they even priorities?
Take a walk. Networking. Giving yourself permission to actually take a lunch. Proactively sharing your project status. These are the foundation for being able to do the work in the gaps there.
Time for some more jargon surgery. Acronyms and BizSpeak in meetings are the worst. But not for the reason you might think.
Most people aren’t going to stop to explain them for you. They’ll just keep going and assume you know what they’re talking about. But it’s not their fault. It’s yours.
If you hear an acronym or term you don’t know yet… ASK.
People don’t know what they don’t know and they will definitely assume you understand the words they use if you dont… ASK.
For the managers out there, take time to explain the terms you hear people using when addressing your team.
Whether it’s offering commentary in the zoom chat alongside the conversation, or directly asking the speaker to define the term for your team, it’s on you too.
I’ve personally witnessed a colleague stop to do help teach his team and it inspired this post.
So much of early stage marketing success relies on “hand to hand” stuff. The stuff that the “will it scale?” people can often derail. Don’t let them. Automation is easy for humans to subconsciously detect and gives the market permission to ignore it in favor of more “real” stuff.
This $200 IKEA whiteboard will instantly upgrade your work life, especially if you work from home.
It can serve multiple purposes: off the cuff sketches, pinning notes and papers, kid art; and even act as a “clutter in background hider” for zoom calls.
Sometimes Product Marketing is communicating simplicity, and setting expectations on how long setup will take.
I love this touch in the @Sonos app.
I imagine that it increases conversion to completing that action.
When writing copy, it’s always worth going back and performing some jargon surgery.
Acronyms, industry terms, and other biz speak must be removed carefully and simplified.
Leave the story better than you found it, but remove parts that will hurt it in the long run.
#marketing
Demand Generation is a myth.
Eugene Schwartz taught us that you can’t create demand out of thin air, but you can identify, understand, and harness existing demand. That’s the job of great marketers.
Harness. Existing. Demand.
Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Tell them what you told them. That’s the sandwich method for internal marketing and enablement. Here’s that in action with the TL;DR, ToC, ICYMI Framework.
Tell them what you are going to tell them with a TL;DR. Don’t bury the lede, but don’t tell all the details right away. Use intrigue, mystery to build anticipation for digging into the details. This is a great time to use the rule of three. What are the top three highlights to call attention to?
Tell them with a ToC (Table of Contents): In this section, you want to have a relevant headline, description, and representative image for each point you want to hit. Building it this way allows people to skip around to what interests them most with a scannable H2 structure.
Tell them what you told them with the ICYMI section: In case you missed it, let’s recap what we’ve learned. But this time, color in the lines on the three points from the TL;DR and give away the key details once more.
Structuring the story this way allows you to build anticipation, but also to keep people reading from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph.
Does this person have a problem? Do they know they have that problem? Do they want to fix the problem? Can I help them with the problem? Do they want my help?
These are all things that come before “BANT” and marketing can help.
Growth Hacking gone wrong.
“Get the GoToWebinar app to add it to your calendar”
I imagine putting the “add to calendar” behind the app reduces show rates for webinars and hurting their paying customers and the prospective attendees.
Lose-Lose
Resolutions don’t have to start on January 1st.
They can, but resolve means nothing without commitment.
A prison of our own making.
Why did we do this to ourselves?
When do we bust out?
Shoutout to all the other inmates of cell block “Elf on a Shelf”.
