AMA: Shopify Director of Product Marketing, Marisa Currie-Rose on Growth Product Marketing

When working on a product, the goal is that we are focusing on a problem that our merchants want us to solve. If we are doing that, there is already a natural interest in the product, which leads to acquisition. The audience that is organically interested in our product is likely to be the most highly qualified for the product or feature we’ve launched. Therefore, my priority is to ensure that we retain our existing customers and meet their expectations. If we are not doing this, then focusing on acquisition is not relevant. Once we have achieved product-market fit, it makes sense to move up the growth funnel. Overall, the following framework can help you think about Growth Marketing and how to invest in each area. There are four key focus areas: 1. Acquisition 2. Activation 3. Adoption 4. Retention Each of these focus areas has a desired outcome: perceived value, realized value, and ongoing value. To achieve these outcomes, there are primary tactics that can be used, such as paid media, SEM, email, direct mail, social media, and influencer marketing. Key metrics to focus on may include conversion rate, CPA, ROAS, new accounts, and revenue, with the ultimate goal of increasing Monthly Active Users. How much of the Growth work is focused on acquisition vs retention depends on the business needs. For example, if you have a hard time keeping users engaged and retained, you may want to focus more on retention tactics. By determining where the challenges lie, you can focus on the right areas of growth.

Some of the things I think about for boosting product adoption include: 1. In-product notifications and promotions, starting first with onboarding and milestone-related campaigns 2. Product and feature Cross-Sell and Upsell 3. Co-marketing and partnership opportunities 4. Email drip campaigns, including those that celebrate customer milestones 5. Push notifications 6. Organic social media outreach, namely featuring customer stories to ground in social proof 7. Influencer marketing promotions with expiration dates 8. Running A/B tests to determine the most effective marketing messaging and calls to action.

Product Marketing teams need Growth Product Marketing Managers. This close relationship is especially important when the initial product launch and go-to-market moment is done and the focus shifts to growing usage of and engagement with the product. Product Marketing Managers often refocus on the next feature/product launch, instead of having the time to prioritize growth work. The Product Marketing Manager is responsible for understanding product-market fit and building messaging and positioning, while the Growth Product Marketer takes that messaging and implements various tactics to drive growth through feature adoption, activation and retention.

Both Product Marketing and Growth Product Marketing should focus on quantitative impact. Both roles should focus on and track revenue, customer acquisition, and retention, including both lapsed customers (those who are still technically using the platform or service but haven't engaged in a certain period) and churn (customers who have left the platform or product). The key performance indicators (KPIs) used will vary based on business goals and objectives. To fully understand the effectiveness of growth and product marketing efforts, it is often necessary to use a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics. However, many qualitative metrics can be converted into quantitative metrics for easier analysis at scale, such as Net Promoter Score, social sentiment analysis, etc.

Growth Product Marketing focuses on driving feature adoption, activation and retention while Product Marketing is focused on the initial product launch and go-to-market moment. The primary goal of Growth Product Marketing is to help customers achieve the "realized value" of the product and maintain "ongoing value" to prevent customers from churning. This is accomplished through ongoing tactics such as implementing growth experiments, executing adoption campaigns through channels like SEO, SEM, email marketing and in-product adoption, creating viral loops (like a referral program) and using data and analytics to optimize their efforts. While a Product Marketing Manager is responsible for leading the development of the go-to-market strategy for a product, which includes establishing product-market fit, creating positioning and messaging, competitive analysis, content creation, sales enablement, pricing and packaging, and basic product adoption measurement.