Prioritize Goals, Solve One Problem at a Time — a Mantra for Product Marketing
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It has to be one problem at a time. Sometimes, it doesn't matter if you're in product marketing and growth marketing or content, there's always a tsunami of problems coming your way. You just have to be able to figure out what the one problem is that's the most important one to that specific moment and trickle it down as you go to the rest. Unfortunately, we haven't discovered, as humans, how to solve multiple problems at once. We only have two hands, one brain, two eyes etc so solving many problems all at once, kind of becomes complex. Even if you have a team, you still want to be able to kind of say “this is a priority”. Also, we need to see the whole picture and say, this is what we have to focus on today or in the next few hours or the next week depending on what you're trying to achieve.
It really depends, first of all, on the strategies that your company is taking on, which can depend a bit on the stage your company is at. If you're in a stage where you're trying to grow as a startup and start generating leads. You might be doing paid acquisition and you want to have these kind of like one or two lead magnet assets that allow you to capture good quality leads and then you want to have kind of like some kind of nurturing flow. You want to spread the net as far as possible. As your nurturing goes on, you're kind of like funneling people and staying with the ones that are more relevant for your sales team to approach.
If you're having a product-led kind of part of a growth strategy, then that might change a bit because you're not trying to funnel people into sales and trying to convert them for your website, get them to try your product and so forth. For us, we are a bit of a more mature company. We right now go to market in an ABM focused manner. It makes it a bit different. You go for quality instead of quantity of leads.
I think that the strategy that you should follow really depends on the stage you're at and the way that you go to market. If it's direct sales or partner sales or if it's kind of a product-led growth approach, it will vary a bit. We've seen our success in the ABM centric approach but it might not be right for every company. It depends on where you are.
It really depends at what stage you are as a company. If you're an early stage company, and your website doesn't have domain authority, it's going to be very difficult to rank high for SEO keywords. So you might want to try to acquire some traffic views for paid, for partnerships with other brands or with blog writers.
If you're a more mature company and you already have traction on Google, then you can probably put efforts into SEO. If you're trying to go to market and ABM way, then you're probably also trying to, once again, buy the right traffic to get to your audience. It would always be a balance at the end of the day. It's important to strike a balance between organic traffic, paid traffic, referral traffic, and so forth because I don't believe you can win with only one eye.
The key is to avoid misalignment between the landing page and whatever your audience clicked on to get through your website. You have to assume that the audience has to reach you by either clicking on some link, anywhere that could be- social or a paid ad. It could be another website or via search and under that assumption would you always want to optimize that matching between the person's click and the landing page, where the person is arriving at. There's too many occasions where that doesn't happen, even for a very mature brand. That's the first thing that eats out to your conversion rate. A person that lands on the page and says, “Wait, this is not what I was expecting” would just bounce.
Secondly, you're trying to create a snowball effect where the person says, “I'm at the right place. I read the first line. It's interesting. I want to go to the second line. I want to understand, okay, here's the offer now I want to convert.” I prefer to give the visitor a bit of more content and more value before I try to entice them to confirm.
A lot of marketers try to jump way too forward instead of covering their basics. There's this fine balance you want to maintain between being very personalized and having a message that's coherent to most of your audience. I think that where marketers kind of fail is when they go all the way into that, one-to-one personalization without covering the basics of what's the story we're trying to tell, and you get lost in a specific scenario.
Firstly, I want to make sure that the segmentation is right, that you kind of understand who are the audiences that are coming in. You want to make sure that your conversions are working. So you want to be able to keep an eye on the conversion rates of the landing pages, where people are landing and kind of have a benchmark for yourself and try to optimize the benchmark as you go. You have to be aware of retaining that, converting them at the first point, but then being able to keep them engaged as they move forward.
As you nurture and grow your audience, you make them feel comfortable to buy your product. A lot of the inbound is always focused on — let me get them into my website, let me convert them once they're on my website.
And people forget that third element which is the retention of those people or nurturing of those people. You want to be sure that if you've already spent all this energy and even money bringing them in and converting them, you don't want them to just kind of disappear forever.
I think that in the present you can scale personalization with a strong AI. You just have to have the right partner that gives you that AI capability. If you're trying to get to one-to-one personalization on your website, then you're also gonna have to find that partner that would allow you to create these personalized experiences at scale because doing it manually just becomes impossible.
Today there are so many tools that can help you understand what keywords are valuable for you. It helps you understand how we should frame our content or how to bring more value based on this type of discussion. So, there’s a whole discovery that goes into writing a content. If you want to write content for SEO, go back to that prioritization issue from the beginning, you may have to start with maybe a few keywords. And then you can kind of start scaling into more and more keywords or more specific ones. You probably don't want to start with the biggest, largest and the most competitive keyword out there.
If you're doing B2C marketing read the Optimove blog, because there's very good content there. For B2B marketing, HubSpot for our automation or inbound MoZ , for SEO, there is Dave Gerhardt school. You want to have a bit of a combination of sources to tap into some community where you can ask questions where you can kind of find peers who can answer your questions and so forth.
The tools that can help you identify the visitor, anything that can help you as quickly as possible to know the person that is arriving to you as relevant to you is a good tool. Also any tool that can help you to understand how users are behaving on your website are also important.
As you grow as a company and as a manager, you have kind of larger teams. The main challenge becomes finding the time for each individual and the person on your team. Very easily, you can get stuck into a full day of meetings and even some late night work, but you want to try to find those 10, 15, 30 minutes to sit down with every person on your team.
I'm a big people's person. I believe that that's what makes us run at the end of the day. That's what gives us energy and we want to invest in one another.
You have to look at different aspects and prioritize what would bring you the most value in the next x number of days. Sit with your team and just go through your whole list of target accounts, prioritizing between them and making sure that they're the right ones for your market. Thereafter, focus on the action plan.
Without proper planning, by the end of the day, the quality of output will be low. So, in my opinion, it's just getting everybody focused, understanding what are the priorities and making sure that you hit those priorities.