Julia Szatar

Usually, your existing customers are the most impacted by pricing and packaging changes – so you may need to focus on communicating any updates clearly to your users. If all the changes are positive (e.g. they get more for the same) your job is much easier. If there are negative impacts, you need to diligently segment all your cohorts and identify how each group will be impacted, and then create a comms strategy from there. A blog explaining the changes and customized emails to each group is how we have approached this before. 

One question to start with is – is the goal to target existing customers or attract new ones (or both)? Then figure out where that audience is and how you can most effectively reach them. Another is resourcing and scope - what can you pull off in the timeframe you have, and prioritize from there. Another would be, do you want to experiment with new channels (and do you have the resources/risk appetite/budget)? For example, we have an upcoming launch and we're looking into new social channels: Instagram and TikTok. But we've made it a P1-2 priority. We're focused on the channels we know are effective for us and will make a game-time decision on TikTok if we have the bandwidth. 

There are three things to focus on: process, qualitative, and quantitative. A launch is very cross-functional – so you can ask yourself, how did the process go? Are there improvements to be made for next time? Especially when you are at a startup and the team and processes are still evolving and maturing. On the qualitative side, it's harder to measure but – you can ask, did the message resonate? We launched our loomSDK back in June 2021, and we called it the "Record Button for the Internet" (thank you, brand team!). People were referencing this on social over and over, so we could "tell" that the message had resonated. At the end of the day, the quantitative metrics are most important and you need to determine these upfront. It really depends on the launch and target audience. It can be as basic as email open and click-through rates for existing users to sign-ups. It also depends on how sophisticated your data is, we are still working on attribution and it isn't always easy to show that a launch drove sign-ups, for example. 

Start by defining the personas and the top-level narrative of the product. * Who is it for? * What is the problem statement? * What is the value prop? * What are the key benefits? You could start with the buyer and then modify it for the different end-users (or the other way around). There will be at least some overlap with nuanced differences, and some very different messages. In terms of choosing the marketing materials, this is also all about understanding your audience. How does they buyer make decisions, what materials do they consume, is there a standard procurement process for the buyer and materials they are used to seeing? E.g. white papers, landing pages, webinars? Same thing for the end-users. What are they reading? What press, newsletters, and blogs do they read? Are you targeting existing customers or trying to get new customers? Based on those answers you can explore the different materials and channels - 1 pagers, decks, emails, blog posts, videos (loom videos!), press releases, press outreach, webinars, events etc. The other factor is time and resourcing. For example, events are expensive and need more lead time.

It depends on your resources and the skills of your team. A larger company might be able to tap into more channels successfully or might already have more users and so the launch will inherently be more amplified. You can still do a successful launch as a small company with some creativity and good storytelling! Try to think about the channels that will have the most impact given your constraints and work with a good designer to make compelling assets, and use Loom to create fun demos...(shameless plug!). 

See answer about Launch Frameworks! Product announcements are a growth lever, and everything the product team ships is a marketing opportunity. But, not all opportunities should be treated equally, especially if your product team is shipping at a high velocity (like we do at Loom). We use a tiering system from 1-4, 1 being the most important type of launch. To determine what tier a product or feature launch is in, we ask ourselves two questions. 1. Will this retain customers or attract customers? 2. Is this a new invention or is it a table-stakes feature? It's best to visualize it, there is a good blog post on this by Matt Hodges: https://www.intercom.com/blog/prioritizing-product-announcements-saas-world/. We used this approach when determining the scale of our loomSDK launch back in June this year. So we asked ourselves the above questions. The answer was yes, the loomSDK will attract a new audience for us – Partners & Developers. And, yes, it's a new invention - the ability to integrate async video into your application. Yes + Yes = Tier 1 launch! (See the 2 by 2 in via the link for clarity). Tier 1 launch meant that we used all channels available to us at the time: Press, Social, Email, Product Hunt, Paid Advertising, etc.

One example is not identifying a potential risk and failing to address it proactively, then having it flare up during the launch. We've had this happen before when we had a lot of pressure to move fast. We kind of knew about the risk in the back of our minds but forgot to address it / flag it early. Since then I've added a "risks" section in our product launch template and we take the time to call them out early and proactively address them with the product team and exec team where relevant.

The general timing is mostly driven by the product team and then the specifics around it are driven by the PMM team to try to optimize. We want to launch as close to the product being shipped to get value to our users as soon as we can. However we also want to ensure there is a story that resonates, and this might mean bundling features. We definitely try to avoid holidays and major events if we know they are happening. Having a buffer between shipping and launching also helps to create effective assets (screenshots, videos, demos etc) and fix bugs. This could simply be an internal release first before rolling out to users. It's helpful if your product team can share a general/directional product roadmap a quarter in advance so you have time to plan and get the messaging crisp.

Since you will have a lot of different messages with potentially different audiences building some sort of matrix can help you make sure everything is cohesive. I personally love using tables for this kind of thing (a spreadsheet works, or building out tables in a doc, you can even make the page landscape to digest it more easily). You would start with what is the overall narrative for the platform? * Who is it for? * What is the problem statement? * What is the value prop? * What are the key benefits? Then below that break it out into the various products and ask the same questions: * Who is it for? * What is the problem statement? * What is the value prop? * What are the key benefits? You can find templates online, but I usually end up making a custom matrix because each launch is so different, especially if it's a platform.

This is mostly just practice, start writing, and keep writing. However, some specific things you could do include: * Actively consume other marketing content. For example subscribe to your favorite brand's emails, competitor emais. Read the content and think about why it is effective/not effective. * Before you start writing anything work with product to really understand why you are building a product or feature. Understand the audience and the problem you are trying to solve. * Get involved in user research. This is the most powerful shortcut to good messaging. Sometimes it feels like cheating, but your customers often use words in user interviews, that you can take and put into your messaging. * Build strong relationships with frontline teams: support, sales, CSMs. They speak with your users the most and often have the best insights.