Hot tips for product marketers
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Mehdeeka covers B2B, SaaS, and startup/tech marketing. Check out the previous issue;Â an interview with product marketer, Jacob Hkeik. Help me grow Mehdeeka by sharing it with a friend or colleague!
Product marketing tips
A quick one from me this week, mainly as I’ve got a lot of links for you and I think they’re all good and I didn’t want this email to get too long.
First up, the most important part of product marketing is calling and speaking to customers and leads who chose not to buy your product.
Interview skills are part of being a product marketer, so if you’re not comfortable at this, it’s time to start getting comfortable. I’m grateful that I’ve spent a lot of my career running and writing up interviews, so I’m super comfortable talking to anyone about anything, but I know many marketers are not customer facing or don’t have media/interviewing backgrounds. Here are my top 3 tips for interviewing;
You, as the interviewer, should not do a lot of the talking. If you find yourself talking a lot, stop and let the interviewee speak. If you find yourself explaining or clarifying your questions, stop and think and clarify in your head before you speak (and then prep your questions better next time). You’re interviewing customers to get as much value out of them as possible, so give them the floor to speak (and respect their time by not wasting it).
Be ok with silence. Let your interviewee take time to think about their answer if they want to. After your interviewee has ‘answered’ your question, give them 10 seconds of space before you start speaking and ask the next question - the silence might prompt them to offer a longer or more in-depth answer.
Do not be afraid to circle back to previous topics, ask for more detail on an answer, or ask a question you hadn’t planned because the interviewee brought up something you didn’t expect. Likewise, don’t be afraid to bring them back to centre if they start going on tangents. There’s been many times in my career (across various projects, not just interviewing) where I later regretted not being more strict in directing the conversation when it was going off the rails or circling back to something because I thought the moment had already passed. Just do it!
And my second topic/tip is about copywriting. It can be suuuuper hard to write copy for product assests. What I’ve found helpful is to build a bank of stock standard copy that addresses your product, each of the features, the pain points of customers, and the value propositions.
Once you’ve got that, you can use it as a reference whenever you need to write copy and self-edit.
If you read over your draft and spot copy from your ‘features’ bank, you know you’re headed in the wrong direction. Similarly, it’ll allow you to make sure you haven’t missed any major pain points or value props!
This graph should make all of that make sense;
Having one big doc that holds all your standard phrases is so incredibly helpful, it is worth the time investment to make one!
P.S. I used Whimsical (free) to make this graph.
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Why am I putting this here? It’s part of my year of being selfish when it comes to my work. Read more about that here, and I encourage you to start being more selfish as well!
Linky dinks
Here’s an interesting Twitter thread on how Wish (the cheaper, dodgier Amazon) grew so big using data and dynamic Facebook ads:
Skip the first half of this and go straight down to ‘the collateral damage from shutting down Google Search’. I think what’s missing from the Google discourse is chat about what to do in case of something such as an entire search engine disappearing overnight. SmartCompany also discussed the top 4 industries likely to be impacted by Google leaving the market.
This week’s visual inspiration is nice and varied, we’ve got a Japanese typeface designed to express onomatopoeia, some starlings in flight photography, and a selection of 30 images from the International Landscape Photographer of the Year awards.
While we’re on the topic of visuals, this Youtube analysis of the ‘corporate art style’, AKA the flat illustrations all tech companies use, breaks down the history of the style as well as why it’s not very good. Personally, my view on it is that all tech brands are following a ‘safe’ path and copying each other - I would love to see the brand that sets the next trend with something completely different.
A heartwarming read about the late visual artist Jason Polan who started the Taco Bell Drawing Club (if you are interested in starting a similar club, consider me your first member!)
Deputy rebranded (yes it’s the flat tech style from above) and I can empathise with their design team on this - the Perkbox (my day job) brand also uses a lot of illustrations of employees ‘at work’ and capturing a diverse range of gender, abilities, and race in a ‘work environment’ (which is also incredibly varied when you service all industries) is really hard.
Here is a really important read on why the announcement for the Nike flyease shoes was poorly done and why disability representation in advertising matters. *I also want to say Nike still use child labour/sweatshops so don’t buy from or support them anyway*
This was a long one so thank you for sticking with me till the end! See you next week.