Redefining Product Communication: Beamer’s Insights from the Product Marketing Summit

The Product Marketing Summit is a beacon for product marketers, drawing professionals from across the industry to share insights, network, and explore the latest trends. We recently attended this two-day event, immersing ourselves in a sea of workshops, keynotes, and invaluable conversations. Now that the summit is over, we're not here to inundate you with the usual 'key learnings' and 'takeaways' blogs. Instead, we'll share our candid observations and distill the summit's insights into a concise summary. And while you're here, feel free to explore Beamer—your gateway to effective internal and external product communications (link conveniently located at the top right).

Is email still the best way to communicate with your users?

The overwhelming majority of PMMs still use emails to update their users on new features and product releases. This trend is alarming considering that click-through and open rates for product newsletters are at a historical low. And when metrics like user engagement, product adoption, and other product launch KPIs are more often than not owned by PMMs, especially in PLG environments, being able to own a channel that can actually drive results is even more pressing. That’s where in-app communications have begun to take center stage. Users want to engage with content inside your product so make it easy for them to engage and explore on their own terms. Our strategy is simple: if you want to reach more users and make sure they see—and get excited—about your new update, don’t send an email, update your users via in-app notifications and widgets that reach them where they are.

Internal product communications are a pain point that just gets bigger as you grow.

When it comes to product launches, it seemed like everyone in the room agreed that once an organization gets past 250 employees, but isn’t yet big enough to have their own intranet, they start to struggle with internal communications and keeping all stakeholders updated and on the same page. Most of us still use siloed tools like Google Docs, Asana boards, Jira, or internal emails, but I think we can all agree that our most prominent stakeholders rarely go into these boards or open "Internal announcements" emails. Out of ~200 PMMs we spoke with at the event, approximately 90% don't have the necessary tooling and enablement to support effective release communications internally. And if even your employees and teammates are struggling to understand what’s new with your product, how unaware are most of your customers? It’s clear that PMMs must take big steps to better own internal enablement and cultivate product champions from within.

How do you measure launch success for PMMs?

A lot of product marketers in both Enterprise and PLG companies are unclear on the KPIs they own. These two questions were flagged the most: “What exactly are my new KPIs?” and “Who should own them”? It is clear that both the Product teams’ and Product Marketing teams’ responsibilities and ownership are evolving. At Beamer, Product Marketing is responsible for impacting two key areas:

Product awareness.

Once the product is built, it’s up to PMMs to get the word out to customers. This can be tricky as PMMs aren’t traditionally channel owners, and at most companies that looks like sending emails or maybe writing a blog post. But as you already read before, these channels are no longer working. At Beamer, we’ve found the most effective route is to engage our customers in-app via a dedicated changelog. This makes it easy for both external customers AND internal employees to very quickly understand what’s new as well as receive segmented messaging just for them. Beamer customers have seen up to 10x increases in viewership of their release communications using Beamer compared to email!

Product Engagement & Adoption.

Awareness isn’t the end of it though, next PMMs need to get to the meat of it and drive engagement and adoption. This looks beyond views and goes into metrics like clicks, comments, reactions, and hopefully, customers actually using the new feature which can be tracked using in-product events—so make sure to get those events instrumented pre-launch! Understanding where in the funnel your users drop off is key to making improvements whether that’s with tighter segmented messaging, tweaks to the UX, or gathering useful feedback for V2. At Beamer, we look closely at changelog post engagement and also tie releases into our automated feedback loop where we communicate to our customers that the features and the suggestions that they’ve shared have not just been heard, but acted upon.

The summit was more than just an opportunity to learn; it was a chance to connect with fellow product marketers who share our passion for boosting product adoption and user engagement. We're here to help you navigate the evolving landscape of product marketing, and our commitment is unwavering.Ready to explore more about how Beamer can revolutionize your product communication strategy? Try Beamer for free and take the first step toward enhancing your product marketing efforts. Let's turn insights into action together!

Keep reading.

• How to Create a Product Launch Communications Plan
• How to write better release notes