From Marketing to Product and vice versa

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https://unsplash.com/photos/orange-mega-blocks-toy-on-white-surface-qXakibuQiPU

Topic

MarketingProduct Management

Type

Deep dive

Recently, there's been quite a buzz about Brian Chesky's latest interview in Lenny’s newsletter. They covered a myriad of topics, but one, in particular, resonated with me the most. Chesky's approach to integrating product management with marketing at Airbnb focuses on blending the creative and strategic aspects of both domains. He believes that understanding a product and marketing it are intrinsically linked—a product manager must be adept not only at creating the product but also in communicating its value to the market.

This integrated approach ensures that the product is not only well-designed but also effectively positioned and marketed, aligning with Airbnb's mission of creating unique and reliable customer experiences. Chesky's strategy represents a shift from traditional siloed roles, emphasizing a more holistic and collaborative approach to product development and marketing.

This resonated with me because, before switching to Product Management, I was a Marketeer. I can intimately feel the connection between these two worlds.

Although there is debate about this approach, I agree with it. That's why I decided to write this post, highlighting what a competent Performance Marketeer can bring to the Product Management table.

Before going deeper, let's consider this enlightening graph from Seth Godin’s blog about the circles of Marketing. Can you guess which circle lies at the very core?

USER INTENT

The main and most important skill valuable for both PMs and Marketeers is deeply understanding the intent of the user. User intent refers to the goal or purpose a user has in mind when typing a query into a search engine or when interacting with a product or service.

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Marketing strategy 101: The right message, on the right users, on the right time.

Understanding user intent is crucial for the following reasons:

User intent defines the type of communication

Different intents require varied communication channels and concepts. As a PM, you might work with product personas based on product usage (e.g., a power user of feature X) and customer segmentation (e.g., a churned user). However, as a Marketeer, utilizing marketing channels to match customer intents is key.

For instance, your power user might be active on TikTok or LinkedIn—platforms that demand completely different communication approaches. Developing holistic personas enables efficient and resonant communication, which is invaluable for any company.

User intent defines the search query

Consider the difference between searching for “souvlakia halandri” and “souvlakia halandri efood.” The intent behind these queries differs significantly. The first query suggests a general interest in souvlaki in Halandri, while the second implies a preference for ordering souvlaki via efood.

This distinction impacts several aspects:

User Perspective: The intent varies between general exploration and a specific service. On the first search user might be unaware of our service, while on the second one, most probably the user is an already active customer.
Ads Cost and Performance: The cost and performance of ads differ significantly between these queries. On the non-brand query the cost might be 10x more than the brand-query, while the performance of non-brand is 10x worse than the brand-query performance.
Organic Search Results: The nature of organic results changes as well, since the non-brand query includes various results while the brand-query includes only brand-relevant results.

“Souvlakia halandri” results:

“Souvlakia halandri efood” results:

User intent defines the landing page

The reason behind having multiple landing pages in a website is that each landing page, was developed to match a user intent. Landing pages that match effectively the intent of the users, rank higher in Google search and generate incremental visits to the Product.

This is not a simple skill to develop.

It’s called SEO and there are multiple tools and professionals that are working solely on this. The whole industry of SEO was build around this concept, an industry that has 45 billion USD market size. Since we talked about SEO, there is a whole section in SEO called on-page SEO that is considered as “technical” since it includes technical configurations in the product page.

Here is a nice article by Skroutz that talks about SEO and user intent. Skroutz has one of the most interesting SEO strategies in Greece.

Also, regarding intent and landing pages, here is an interesting article from Jeff Chang that talks about the intent/ease framework for conversion optimization. In this article, Jeff talks about the high and low intent of a user to convert and correlates it with the type of landing page.

User intent defines the UX

The overall experience of a product should be driven by user intent. Every user that lands on your product wants to do something. If you manage to understand and provide it, then the probability to convert increases dramatically. This is a double-edged sword, though, because if you don’t serve the intent correctly, the conversion will not happen.

Here starts the tricky part.

What if the intents that your product serves are multiple?

Take JIRA, for example. JIRA is being used by multiple professionals across industries and roles. PMs, agile coaches, delivery leads, engineering managers, engineers, QAs, Product & Tech directors are some of the professions that are using it, all of them having different intents.

Examples:

PMs use it to write specifications,
Agile coaches to measure the velocity & effectiveness of the teams,
QAs to find the acceptance criteria of the feature that is about to be launched,
Delivery leads to monitor roadmap milestones, etc.

How do you handle when multiple intents should be served within one page?

A good example is efood. There are customers ordering souvlaki, pizza, groceries, flowers, drinks, etc., while their intent is one of the following:

Order because they are hungry,
Order because they need caffeine,
Social-eat due to an event (birthday, football match),
Order with a specific amount of money in mind,
Order something that will arrive quickly,
Order what others are ordering because they are not sure,
Order from their favorite restaurants,
Order groceries for tomorrow,

In order to handle multiple intents, a common practice is to group them around specific concepts. For example, in a marketplace, the two biggest user intents are: i) convenience, and ii) discovery.

Convenience is about ordering your favorite food from your favorite restaurant in the easiest and most convenient way. The purpose here is to allow customers to order as fast as possible using shortcuts, such as the reorder swimlane or the vertical swimlane, or even search (that can be used either for convenience or discovery).

When it comes to discovery, customers want to explore additional options besides the regular ones (that can be found in the reorder swimlane), and here comes the discovery page, where customers can see vendors around different concepts, such as:

Affordability and how to find discounts (Pinata),
Personalized suggestions based on your behavior (picked for you),
Groceries and items that you can find in efoodMarket (Weekly deals),
Social proof and restaurants that are popular in general (Lovable brands),
Curated vendors (Red Selection),
New vendors to try (New restaurants),
Social proof and popular local shops (Popular vendors),
Top rated specific cuisine (Top rated burgers),
Last but not least, you see some XL banners that communicate multiple initiatives as well, from a CSR initiative to an offer bundle of a specific vendor that you should not miss.

efood app home above the fold

efood app home swimlanes

A good PM should always strive to satisfy the user's intent while also meeting business objectives and considering partner satisfaction, combining all these aspects into a balanced and smooth experience. Try different products, and you’ll be able to understand which ones handle user intents well and which ones are struggling.

CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION (CRO)

Another skill that a competent performance marketeer is skillful at is CRO, or conversion rate optimization. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is a process of enhancing your website and content to boost conversions, which can include making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or any other action you want your visitors to take. It involves understanding what drives, stops, and persuades your users. CRO actually lies between Product and Marketing, and it was one of my core skills as well.

To be good at CRO, you need proficiency in the following skills and concepts:

Product performance has high correlation with Marketing performance

Yes. Product performance correlates heavily with Marketing performance. In efood, paid traffic, which means sessions and users that are coming from marketing campaigns, has a significant % (double-digit) of our traffic overall.

Now imagine that the marketing team has the wrong targeting on their campaigns. The result will be the generation of low-quality sessions that will lower the conversion rate of your product.

On the other hand, even the slightest increase in the conversion rate of your product (due to a product feature or user flow optimization) will definitely save marketing budget and increase the performance of the respective marketing campaigns.

Targeting	Product flow	Performance
Targeting wrong people	Bad user flow	Bad
Targeting the right people	Bad user flow	Mediocre
Targeting the wrong people	Optimized user flow	Mediocre
Targeting the right people	Optimized user flow	Best

Google analytics

GA and other relevant tools that measure user behavior are a must for CRO. There is no CRO without qualitative and quantitative data. Many people consider Google Analytics a marketing tool. Although I disagree with that, I understand its significance within a performance marketing team. Also, I don't know any competent performance marketer who is not proficient in Google Analytics, while there are senior PMs out there who are not even aware of how analytics tools work.

Segment or die

A very popular concept in performance marketing is segmentation. There are many user segmentation concepts, such as RFM, but being able to identify the right user segments and connect them to product solutions and challenges can be an unfair advantage, especially in consumer products with millions of active users.

Performance marketers are able to handle datasets on their own, making all the necessary segmentations because there is no other way to understand if a campaign is underperforming or if a specific campaign is lacking in a particular user segment (e.g., mobile users) that needs tweaking in the campaign settings to work.

ROI & incrementality

Similar to incrementality, measuring ROI is a core skill for a performance marketer. During the years, we spend millions of euros on performance marketing, so as a team, we needed to know the pragmatic return on investment. There were other metrics more ad-friendly, like ROAS (return on advertising spend), but ROI provides a holistic view, an approach that is essential for every multi-channel marketing strategy.

The holy grail of marketing is measuring incremental performance. Incrementality includes all the orders that came additionally from the orders that would have come organically either way. Incrementality is important for product management as well, since it helps identify not only the adoption of a feature but also the incremental value it adds to the product.

Here is an interesting article about incrementality and marketing channels by Avinash Kaushik.

Prioritization

I truly believe that the next best profession for prioritization, besides Product Management, is Marketing. The reason is simple: in most modern businesses, the most important and/or scarce resources are the marketing budget and the technical resources.

A Performance Marketeer transitioning to Product Management will be very familiar with the prioritization process, including assessing the opportunity cost, which is crucial for an effective prioritization process.

After all, everyone has a Marketing idea and a Product idea. I’ve never seen someone had a Finance idea, or a legal idea 😎.

A/B testing

A/B testing is part of the core skill set of a Performance Marketeer. Even though many campaigns have become automated and a black box by the big advertising players, A/B testing is embedded as a mindset.

There is a Marketing book that was written back in 1923 (!) called "Scientific Advertising" by Claude C. Hopkins (a must-read for every Marketeer) that talks about the importance of experimentation.

Copies, creatives, budget, targeting, goals, everything is a good candidate for experimentation in Marketing. Here is an interesting test that we did 6 years ago, which might be resolved currently, but the mindset behind it should remain.

Last but not least, I wrote a book about Marketing on 2020 that includes tips for Agile Marketing and how to operate and scale a Marketing team plus a detailed guide on a growth framework we used back in time, inspired by Growth Engine by Brian Balfour. Here is a brief overview:

Read:

This is the first and most important step in the process. “Read” means that you have to check your data. In order to become user-centric, we worked hard and managed to build a foundation of user metrics and user feedback so that we could avoid our own personal and professional biases and focus solely on our user's needs. This was a decision that we made firstly as a business and secondly as a department and took months before it started working efficiently. We have a couple of sophisticated systems in place enabling us to have a comprehensive view of the impact of our efforts. Please note, considering yourself as “data-driven” does not necessarily mean that you evaluate everything with data

Learn:

This is the second step and it can be translated as “understanding the problem/opportunity.” This step needs creativity, observation, and anticipation. Once we have “read” the insights, we need to understand what happened and plan our next steps accordingly. We know how users came to our product (thanks to analytics), where they landed, and what pages they navigated along with their exit pages, but we are missing something. We are missing the why.

Test:

The third step is to test the solutions that you have come up with. This can be an A/B test, a split campaign test, a user testing session, etc. Testing is a science by itself. We feel that sometimes testing and experimentation are a little overrated at least in our industry (after more than 100 tests we are not even close to analyze how an A/B test in an ad copy can produce tons of additional orders), but we find value in it and use a couple of testing approaches to cover all our needs.

Validate:

This step is dedicated to the validation of proposed solutions. For validation, we mostly use data performance, wherever applied, or our experience in the business. We use a wide range of validation techniques, from statistical significance indicators to plain positive performance results or user testing insights.

Repeat:

The final step is to replicate every success you had and digest the lessons you learned from the previous steps. In the book, I briefly describe how we utilized this framework for our YouTube channel, plus there are plenty tips and examples for each step.

I would like to close this article by sharing an old guide of ConversionXL about CRO. For all those that are interested in CRO, feel free to check it.

Having all the above into consideration, I feel that Product Management could emerge as a very interesting path for a competent performance Marketeer. Of course, there are pitfalls as well (e.g., lack of technical competency), but having the above skills in place can act as a great kickstart to start as a PM and work to develop the missing skills too.

To my friends that work as Performance Marketeers:

Join, the dark side. It’s fun.

A relevant video from a meetup we did with George discussing Product & Marketing topics.