AMA: Notion Former Head of Marketing, Camille Ricketts on Product Launches

The only way to figure out what channels reach and influence your audience is to ask and observe them. You have to do both - ask and observe. Asking is helpful. Most people can tell you where they hang out online, or how they heard about recent product purchases in their lives. But they often won't tell you the full story. People may say that they decided to sign up for a product because their friend tweeted about it. But really, they made the decision because they also saw your product remarket ...Read More

We haven't run into too many traffic jams yet with this. One thing that has proven very helpful is categorizing releases into three types: minor release, notable release, big launch. We have standard marketing activities associated with all three. For instance, a minor release gets a release note update on our What's New page and a tweet. A notable release requires an email be sent to all users and more social media support. A big launch has a custom array of marketing needs attached to it depen ...Read More

It's critical that you define success metrics ahead of launch because they should guide every facet of your plan. You never want to get to the end and think, "Okay, let's mine some data to see how we did." That's how you end up with a bunch of vanity metrics... or numbers that aren't necessarily indicative of what the launch actually could have accomplished. For instance, maybe total traffic driven by a launch is not actually as important as the number of people who actually purchased a particul ...Read More

The most helpful thing to do here is to have a single point person to talk to on each team involved in the launch. In our case, we have a "most knowledgeable person" on marketing, product, community, and sales (if it's relevant). These people are responsible for cross-team communication about the upcoming launch, so that you don't get several people on one team talking to several people on the other team and no one knows which information has been exchanged. That's how you run into confusion and ...Read More

We've benefitted significantly from having a user education specialist on the marketing team. Fantastic individual named David Tibbitts, who joined marketing from our community support team. Today, he owns social media (including Twitter support), user education (help center articles), and product marketing (messaging releases and creating content to educate users about all new products and features). He's also our conduit to the community support and customer success teams. He sits in their mee ...Read More

I think it depends on your audience, product, and goals. What do you want your audience to really understand about the product you're shipping? Do you want them to perceive that you are constantly shipping new things? Is part of your competitive advantage that you're building product faster than other companies in your space? Is this something your audience even wants, or would they prefer more considered/perfected big launches that meaningfully change their experience with it?  We like to stick ...Read More

First of all, sometimes product launches are about existing customers. Maybe you're launching something meant to dramatically improve their experience, or help them expand their engagement with the product. In those cases, they are your primary audience and all of your comms should be shaped to inform them and motivate them to take the action that you want them to take.  However, let's say that your launch is about attracting new users. You still want to engage your existing users as evangelists ...Read More

Whenever you start planning a larger than average launch, you should kick things off by understanding who the audience is for this launch. Is it all your users or a subset? And what do you want to motivate them to do? If you're successful, what is it that changes? Do you get more signups? Deeper engagement among current users? Etc.  Once you have the answers to those questions, think about the marketing levers that are most likely to reach and influence that subset of users. Are they general con ...Read More