AMA: Vanta Head of PLG Product Marketing, Madison Leonard on Self Serve Product Marketing

I'm a big fan of in-app guides and tours. And from my personal experience, it usually outperforms email. Everything should be crafted with the best user experience in-mind. After you come up with a wireframe for the flow, ask yourself these questions: How does the user discover this in-app tour? (is it hidden behind a trigger, such as navigating to a certain page?) Does this guide/tour compete with or compliment other tours? Is the tour broken up into bite-size pieces? (I recommend less than 6 g ...Read More

PLG product marketing is focused on the individual user, whereas sales-led product marketing is focused more on the buyer.  However, I will say that most PLG companies mature into utilizing both product led growth and sales led growth together.  For PLG, the messaging is more focused on solving the individual user's pain point, ultimately helping them to do their job better/faster. These users are going to be using your product often and are looking for a specific solution.  However, sales-led p ...Read More

Oooo this really depends on so many factors! Is your organization focused more on product-led or sales-led growth? Do you have a Growth Product division? etc.. IMO, yes. Product, Growth, and Product Marketing teams should all co-own adoption KPIs, especially for large tier 1 features. Here's why: if you have no say over how a feature is implemented, why are you then solely responsible for adoption? I see that as a recipe for disaster where Product teams create whatever they want and aren't respo ...Read More

Great question - this is very common in today's PMM landscape. There are 3 main product marketing differences: Target audience Messaging  Value prop For self-serve products, the target is usually focused on the individual user. Therefore, the messaging and value prop is focused on simplicity and solving their immediate problem, which in return helps them do their job better or faster.  However, when selling to enterprises, the target audience is usually the buyer. Keep in mind - the buyer often ...Read More

Think of onboarding as a path towards value. Product marketing, growth, and product should all work together to make the time to value as short as possible. The end goal is always to get the user "activated" (also known as the aha moment). So the first question your product team should be able to answer is --> how do we define activation in the platform? Once that north star is identified (and validated), all work you do on onboarding will be guiding that user towards activation. If we use Ai ...Read More

Land and expand is music to my ears!  Growth for PLG companies focuses on word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer sharing, both organic and strategic.  Example of organic word-of-mouth sharing = mentioning slack in a product marketing discord group.  Example of strategic peer-to-peer sharing = slack prompting me to invite users during onboarding, and I do.  However, this can be utilized internally as well for a bottoms-up adoption movement!  I call these folks "champions" - they are deep lovers of the pl ...Read More

Great question. To clarify, self-serve product marketing still needs to enable sales teams. Just not as frequently as sales-led organizations.  Typically, self-serve products have a tiered pricing structure that includes free/trial, premium, and enterprise with limits around seats, usage, storage, and/or specific features.  For those who sign up for free or with a trial, there's a ton of self-serve value and education that rests on the product marketing team. For this base tier, success comes in ...Read More

The product roadmap is ever-changing! It's never too late to voice customer feedback. Most importantly, make sure to document your findings are provide visbility. If these conversations are just happening between the PM and you, expand the visibility to include others!  I like to talk with at least 5 customers per quarter minimum. In addition, I record these sessions and share it with the product and marketing teams with a recap of the highlights.  Lastly, whenever you have wins, include how cus ...Read More

This should be decided before a launch plan or GTM strategy is crafted. Always have a north star! Whenever possible, I recommend following this guide: Identify the target audience and the pain point they encounter (Product owned) Develop a solution to the individual's problem (Product owned) Hypothesize the outcome of the new product (Product and Product Marketing owned) Tie it back into business goals (Product and Product Marketing owned) Develop a plan for launch that ties back into your north ...Read More

Utilize product data for quantitative insight. For example, how many people clicked through the in-app product tour?  Utilize surveys and interviews for quantitative insight. Extracting qualitative insight from interviews is a special skill to hone - you've got to think critically and analyze patterns in real time to make the most of it. Surveys are great for snapshots, but they do have a low response rate so come prepared with a reward!  Big fan of Pendo for self-serve analytics. I've used Goog ...Read More

I love using NPS! I'm also a big fan of getting product feedback in the form of star rating, thumbs up/down, etc.  Users have little patience for long surveys, so it's our job to be really strategic with WHEN we ask and HOW we ask (p.s. keep it simple!).  IMO, NPS should be owned by whoever is responsible for retention optimization. Usually this falls into growth or product. Otherwise, you'll have division between NPS collection ownership and execution.  Then, you can utilize data from NPS respo ...Read More

Leveraging your existing user base can be done in a number of ways, but if I could highlight only one thing it would be this: have someone dedicated to it full-time.  You can moderate communities on Slack, Discord, LinkedIn, etc. But it's a lot of work to not only deliver value on a daily basis, but also foster a culture where the majority of folks are willing to contribute. There's nothing worse than having a "community" with thousands of people but no active chatter. Much better to have a comm ...Read More

With SMB, your buyers are also your individual users. You need to sell them on both the solution of your product and impact on business results, as well as sell them on the experience of the product.  However, ENT buyers are rarely your users so you can focus more high-level on impact to the business and an ideal future state.  I recommend investing in messaging testing software to create personalized landing pages based on the persona. But if you're not at that stage yet, you do really need to ...Read More

This is such a hard one! I think it would be getting leadership buy-in. There are so many conflicting priorities in the workday, especially in a startup environment. Each team is contributing to the overall success of the company in major ways. When you have new initiatives you want to implement or a pivot in strategy, it can sometimes be hard to convince other teams or figure out a way to add it to their workstreams. And often I find that even if I do get individual teams to buy-in, leadership ...Read More

Personally, I hate mini projects for strategic roles and think they should be abolished altogether. The only exception to this rule is internal transferring, esp if you have no prior experience in that type of role. I prefer that prospective candidates put together a presentation on a previous strategy they've built. Presentations are a must-have skill for any product marketer, so this is a great test to see how well they tell the story and if the messaging sticks. Presenting previous experience ...Read More

Ooof this is a tough one and honestly it depends on how things were structured at your organization from the beginning.  IMO, product marketing should influence/contribute to webinars, but not own webinar execution. For thought-leadership webinars, I've seen product marketing, content, and comms all own this in the past.  If you're lucky to have a large marketing team, I usually divide responsibilities for webinars like this:  Product marketing owns outline and enablement material  Content owns ...Read More

TDLR: self-serve product marketing focuses on the individual user persona and their use cases vs traditional product marketing in a sales-led company focuses on the buyer persona and business results.  However, the catch is that most PLG organizations have both product-led growth and product-led sales happening simultaneously so you'll need both to have a successful acquisition strategy amongst SMB, Mid Market, and Enterprise alike!  If you want more detail, check out this talk I did on the diff ...Read More