AMA: ActiveCampaign VP Product Marketing, Jackie Palmer on Market Research

This is a timely question as I recently did a presentation at the 2025 OMR conference in Germany on top use cases for AI and AI agents for marketers! I would say that most of them apply to product marketing but especially these: Content Creation - AI gives us a head start: first drafts, new ideas, and even finished assets—all customized for our audience, in a fraction of the time. Automation - Leverage AI to automate repetitive tasks so you can focus on higher-priority activities and be more pro ...Read More

I've measured product marketing in a number of ways but my preference is a monthly team dashboard, ideally broken down by product if there are multiple products. I ideally like to track the following metrics and stats though sometimes not all are so easy to get! Win/loss: I like to track competitor win rates monthly but then I have a quarterly deeper win/loss analysis including win rates, average ARR and number of deals by competitor, all broken down by incumbent displacements vs green field dea ...Read More

The easiest and cheapest way to start monitoring market and competitive insights is to just set up alerts like Google alerts etc and follow people and companies on the web and social especially LinkedIn for B2B. If you can't yet afford any monitoring tools you can start by looking at news and press alerts, social posts, and other mentions. Follow people like the Chief Product Officer and Chief Marketing Officer at your competitors, find out which industry analysts cover your space and follow the ...Read More

As I have been primarily in B2B software in my career I would have to say LinkedIn here. I use it to monitor what competitors, influencers, reporters, and industry analysts are saying. I follow a lot of companies and related people in my industry and in my company's space and I find it's worth scrolling through posts a few times a week at least But I would also say lately I've been going to my AI tools for research, whether that's something free like ChatGPT or even Google with Gemini, or now we ...Read More

Market research can take on multiple forms from customer feedback, to industry insights from analysts, to competitive insights from prospects. Good product marketing teams will have ways of looking at all three areas but the weight you put on one or the other may vary depending on your target market. For example, my current company focuses on smaller businesses so analysts like Gartner and Forrester who typically focus on enterprise size companies are less important for us right now. The key thi ...Read More

There are a lot of ways to gather customer feedback and a lot of types of customer feedback you should gather! Feedback can take the form of enhancement requests, product issues, customer satisfaction surveys, NPS and other sentiment, product reviews, company reviews, surveys, win/loss analysis, comments on marketing channels and about marketing messaging, feedback on interactions with company employees, and so much more! You can use a variety of tools but many of them come from the following ca ...Read More

To increase win rate, I would focus first on understanding where you are winning and where you are not. Do a deep dive into your competitive win/loss, segmenting it by whatever values you have available: region, segment, persona, use case, product/feature etc. Then read through all the text notes (though we all know salespeople are not the best at updating the CRM!!) and interview a variety of reps about the deals. If you can, I highly recommend also interviewing customers and prospects. Once yo ...Read More

As I mentioned in other responses in this AMA, the vast majority of tools these days have now implemented AI so you don't have to sort through insights or feedback manually. They will pull out key themes for you so you have starting points for deeper research. You can use a variety of tools but many of them come from the following categories: Competitive insight tools like Crayon, Klue, Kompete, and even tools like Semrush and Similarweb Roadmapping tools like Aha, Canny, Pendo, Productboard, et ...Read More

I've always found use cases extremely helpful for product marketing both for our own use and for us to use both internally during sales and customer team enablement but also externally for driving website content and other assets. Finding use cases is often more qualitative than quantitative as the quantitative data you likely have access to is for use cases that are already well known and might be offered as drop downs in your CRM for example. The best source of current use cases I've found com ...Read More