During the awareness stage, potential customers discover your product and learn about its benefits. To measure the success of your product marketing campaigns, you should track metrics such as reach, impressions, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per mille (CPM). These metrics will help you evaluate the reach and cost-effectiveness of your campaigns, and determine which channels and messages are resonating with your target audience.
Depending on the complexity of your product, PMM can play a vital role in understanding the customer’s buying process. What is the problem they are trying to solve? What is deficient with current solutions to this problem? Where do they go to become educated on alternative solutions: your web site? Industry conferences? Their peers? Providing insights that marketing can leverage in determining the appropriate marketing mix to reach your targeted buyers is a great opportunity to leverage PMM skills that traverse marketing and product
The key is to align metrics with objectives and evaluate performance. Not every track metric has an impact on your business. Set SMART objectives, and align them with relevant key Metrics, Monitor, Evaluate and deduce insights for strategic decisions.
I agree with this sentiment to a point, the challenge lies in tying product feature launches into broader marketing campaigns so you can amplify the impact of both across your communication channels. In my opinion, CTR is generally a good barometer of engagement for awareness campaigns however you can compliment that with attributed opportunities influenced by the product campaign too - to show activity metrics and pipeline metrics.
The consideration stage is when potential customers evaluate your product and compare it with other alternatives. To assess the effectiveness and efficiency of your product landing page, you can measure key product marketing metrics and KPIs such as landing page views, bounce rate, conversion rate, cost per action (CPA), and lead quality. These metrics and KPIs can help you optimize the design, content, and offer of your product landing page to increase conversions and generate high-quality leads.
Except for small B2C and other SMB focused products, consideration can often entail gaining support and buy-in from key influencers within the prospect’s selection team. Understanding those stakeholders and how they buy (eg RFPs, proof of concepts, reference calls, etc) is critical to understand at this early stage of the journey to avoid surprises later. PMM can play a key role in mapping those who ‘can’t say yes, but can say no’ in tuning messaging and marketing programs specifically targeting them
It has to be tied to conversion rates IMO as the north star metric. What I mean by that is, where are opportunities stuck or where is the deal stage drop off? That understanding will enable us to put more energy into improving sales resources, landing page content, competitive differentiation and any number of variables that are stage appropriate.
The decision stage is when potential customers decide to purchase your product or not. To measure the profitability and sustainability of your product marketing and sales efforts, you should focus on key metrics and KPIs such as the sales cycle, win rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), average order value (AOV), and customer lifetime value (CLTV). These metrics can help you identify the best strategies and tactics to close more deals and increase customer value. The sales cycle indicates the average length of time it takes for a lead to become a customer, from the first contact to the final purchase. The win rate is the percentage of leads who become customers out of the total leads generated. CAC is the average amount you spend to acquire a new customer, including all product marketing and sales expenses. AOV is the average amount of revenue generated by each customer purchase, while CLTV is the average amount of revenue generated by a customer over their entire relationship with your product.
In my experience, you can diagnose an organizations health by the CAC and AOV. These are critical KPI's that often get lost in the noise of celebrating the deal and it is Product Marketing's job to assess whether the business heart beat is strong.
In my experience, win rate is number 1 but I also like to compare average opportunity value (AOV) vs. average won value (AWV) because this gives you a better gauge on what value we're placing on deals vs. what value they're actually closing at. In doing so, we can look at actions to mitigate the deal shrinkage during the sales process and simultaneously improve win rates to double the effect of our efforts. We can then examine why there is a decrease and the variances across different industries, personas etc to improve both
The retention stage is when existing customers continue to use your product and renew their subscription or contract. To evaluate the quality and loyalty of your customer base, as well as improve your product, service, and support to reduce churn and increase referrals, you should measure key product marketing metrics and KPIs such as the retention rate (the percentage of customers who remain active and loyal over a given period of time), the churn rate (the percentage of customers who stop using your product or cancel their subscription or contract over a given period of time), the net promoter score (the measure of how likely your customers are to recommend your product to others), the customer satisfaction score (the measure of how satisfied your customers are with your product), and the customer effort score (the measure of how easy your customers find it to use your product).
In my experience this is the most crucial stage of the customer journey — this is where the business should be working towards the customer reaching the value realization stage. I measure/closely monitor adoption (increase or decrease of licenses or use of functions and features). Hosting Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) tends to keep a pulse of your top selected strategic customers. Measuring avg deal size pre/post CAB has worked as a KPI.
Also, this is a great point to understand sales & customer success sentiment. What roadblocks are they running into? What barriers exist that are stopping them from showcasing the product/solution’s full value? PMM can do voice of field (VoF) activities such as field advisory boards, surveys, and focus groups to find these answers & determine which types of enablement (playbooks, one-pagers, FAQs, etc.) are needed to further assist them in showcasing value to customers.
This may be one of the most important stages that marketing departments spend least amount of time addressing. High growth organizations in particular are so focused on acquiring clients they forget about nurturing the opportunity for the long term and leave it as a problem for customer success.
The retention stage is a huge opportunity to turn your customers into advocates. NPS is a great measure for this. Do your customers love your product so much that they can't stop talking about it? A more direct measurement to track word of mouth growth is referrals from existing customers. If it's a great product, they will want to do this, and you can always provide an incentive to kickstart this process.
I think making the customer the central part of your product is the most important factor in retention. By setting up customer advisory boards or community slack channels, you can get to the heart of what they care about, how they use your product and what you need to build to please the widest demographic. If they feel heard, there's a better chance they'll tolerate a few negatives now and again!
The advocacy stage is when satisfied customers promote your product to others and become your brand ambassadors. To measure the success of this stage, you should track and analyze the referral rate, referral revenue, social media engagement, online reviews, and user-generated content (UGC). These metrics and KPIs help you leverage the power and influence of your customers to spread the word about your product and attract new prospects. Monitoring these key product marketing metrics can also help you optimize your product marketing strategy, align it with your business goals, and demonstrate your value and impact.
Advocacy is a currency that is gold to marketers. Capturing and then amplifying Voice of Customer provides more authenticity to your sales efforts then the best positioning statement a product marketer can make.
For us, advocacy forms one of our highest converting channels because someone going out of their way to advocate you as a vendor is the gold standard of credibility. Making customer happy, feeling listened to, influential in the product roadmap and part of the journey goes a long way to building trust. Think about your day to day, you may see an advert for a show and think "nah not interesting" but if your friend is passionate about how good it is and how you really should check it out.. well, maybe you will give it a go then!
The advocacy stage, as delineated, is a pivotal yet often overlooked phase in the customer journey. Many companies lose steam post-sale, missing a golden opportunity to harness customer satisfaction. It's a crucial juncture where a happy customer's enthusiasm is at its zenith—ripe for referrals, testimonials, and endorsements. A post-purchase cadence strategy can ensure the momentum doesn’t wane. Monitoring referral rates, social engagement, and UGC isn’t merely about measuring success; it’s about engaging with satisfied customers to amplify positive WOM. This proactive engagement not only fortifies brand loyalty but propels a virtuous cycle of advocacy, ushering in new prospects and fostering a community of brand ambassadors.
I want to offer the lesser-discussed, but critically important aspect of product management - managing the supply! Yes, connecting all the dots with the customers sells the products, but if the forecast is off or Supply Chain is not adequately in the loop, things go wrong. There's nothing worse than a brilliant marketing campaign that delights customers and cannot put the product in their hands. As a product manager, I partnered on my launch plans, commercialization dashboards, and service levels. I reviewed the daily inventory reports and adjusted forecasts monthly and quarterly.
In my experience, this whole article comes down to product marketers needing to actually be data-driven and engage in learning other marketing disciplines to align with revenue (churn, new biz, upsell, cross sell, etc.) and not double down on the strategy/softer skills side of product marketing. Proving that you can track metrics from awareness through decision/retention stages will help product marketing be seen as an ally to the broader GTM team and give the role more influence on strategic business initiatives like product vision, pricing, packaging, brand, and so one.
If for whatever reason you're product or service misses the mark (poor value prop, bad targeting, wrong price, etc.), the old adage "fail fast and fail cheap" rings true. I've found often times that it is better to presell the solution before you have it and then backfill (with lead-time) if demand is there or adjust if demand proves elusive, then find out what is missing. Potentially saves a lot of resources and effort.
Most of the proposed KPIs are relevant to digital. In case ATL is used, results can only be measured through customer research. The best way is to use one of the AIDA models.