SaaS product marketing has its own complexities and strategies. But, how can you measure if your approach is working? You cannot just rely on your instinct and general marketing KPIs are just too broad…
Product marketing is about generating demand, knowing exactly who your target persona is and let your product, its development, and its features sell for themselves. Some of these goals seem pretty hard to measure. However, there are certain indicators you can use to have a better understanding of how your product marketing strategy is performing.
“Before you take on new work, ask what metrics you’re driving.”
– Teresa Torres, Product Discovery Coach at Product Talk
Here are the top 10 Product Marketing KPIs to monitor your strategy:
1. Trial and Demo Signups.
This may seem simple, but it is one of the most important KPIs for your product marketing and sales team. Your product marketing strategy should be bringing in qualified leads. The number of demo or trial signups you have per month (for example) is important for knowing if what messaging, content, ads, and direct marketing is effective and speaking to the right audience. Are you addressing the right pain points and highlighting the true value of your product? Does your UI lead to sign ups or do adjustments need to be made? These are the areas that need to be addressed if this metric is falling behind for product marketers.
2. Conversion rates on inbound channels: Lead-to-customer rate.
Conversion rates on inbound channels takes a look at the health and success of your inbound marketing strategy which should be bringing you consistent leads to counteract churn and sustain growth. It’s the best way to determine if your long term product marketing efforts are paying off. To measure this, take a look at all the efforts such as your web traffic, conversion content pieces like eBook downloads, white papers, etc., as well as places on your site where you collect lead information from traffic and gauge what percentage of your inbound traffic and leads convert to customers. It’s good to try to narrow down the conversion rate for each inbound activity to determine which are more lucrative.
3. Product Usage.
Product usage overall is a metric that is really indicative of success for both your marketing/sales teams and development team. Your teams should determine which key features correlate with higher rates of retention, higher revenue, and more upsells for users. Tracking how these features are received and used can indicate the overall health of product usage and highlight points of tension. It’s the responsibility of both product teams and product marketers to take a look at which features are doing well and where customers are asking for improvement. Product marketers can use this metric to determine which features are best for marketing and sales purposes as well.
4. Customer Engagement Score.
A sign of a successful product is one that is heavily engaged with. The more customers are engaging, the less likely they are to churn out. As engagement drops, users are more likely to be leaving soon, cancelling recurring revenue.
Keeping Customer Engagement Score up is key for product marketers. Customer engagement is calculated through selected variables that are most important to your team such as frequency of usage, usage of certain features, certain actions taken, etc. You then assign weight to these factors and calculate a single number.
Customers stay engaged with products that meet their needs, address their concerns, and develop over time to keep up with the market. Product marketers need to communicate with customers and leads about the product and its development to keep customers engaged. They need to properly educate users on how to use the product and its features to increase engagement and help them be successful to see this metric rise and avoid churn.
5. Net Promoter Score.
Word of mouth marketing is of extreme value to your product marketing teams. What customers say about you is very powerful and can bring plenty of new, qualified leads to you exponentially. Your Net Promoter Score gauges how likely your customers are to recommend your product to others. It’s a great measure of overall satisfaction and loyalty to your product. Measured through surveys, your Net Promoter Score helps your product marketing team know where they are not doing a good enough job in serving the needs of customers and where they can do better as well as how they can use current customers to reach new customers.
6. Feature engagement and adoption.
As your product continues to develop, it’s important for product marketers to continue to do their job “selling” new updates and features to current and new customers. That ensures product success and engagement over time. Feature engagement is a metric to look at specifically each time your team releases a new feature. It gives your product marketing team a lot of insight as to how they are doing in both communicating with and engaging customers but also delivering to their needs.
New features and updates should be an opportunity to bring customers back in and re-engage as well as strong new selling points for new customers. If features do not get a lot of engagement, it’s vital that product marketers understand why. Learn more on how to increase new features adoption for SaaS here.
A great way to boost engagement and keep users in the loop on product updates is Beamer. Beamer is a changelog that opens directly within your app or site where you can post interactive updates on new features, bug fixes, upcoming news, etc. All users have to do is click an icon in your interface or a “What’s New” tab in your navigation to open up a native-looking sidebar of updates. You can add photos, videos, GIFs, and CTAs to engage users and get them interacting with your new features. You can also enable push notifications to bring users back to your product every time you send out an update. Companies using Beamer have seen 10x more engagement.
7. Usage of assets: content views, shares, downloads, etc.
This metric is more around the growth of your brand’s authority and influence which is important for product marketing teams. Being an authoritative figure in your space makes customers more trustworthy of your products. Content marketing is a large part of both growing that influence and growing organic traffic. Potential customers do a lot of research. If leads are using and engaging with the expert content you create, that means your brand is authoritative and trusted. If your marketing assets are overlooked and not engaged with, they make not be interesting enough or resonate with your target customers.
8. Win Rate and Win rates in target market.
Win rate is a basic, very straight forward sales metric that can determine how your product marketing team is doing compared to competitors, substitutes, and if your messaging is winning with customers. Your win rate is how many customers you win when given the opportunity. It can be in the form of an impression, demo, sales pitch, etc. You can also break down losses by “losses to competitors” and “losses to no decision”, etc. This can give you a good idea of how well your product and message do against competition and other options. You can also break down the win rate by target market to understand if your product and message perform better in specific target markets and how you can change to improve.
9. Reasons for winning.
In addition to “winning” with customers, it’s vital to know why they choose your product over another or why they choose to buy into your solution. Knowing the reasons why you win will help your product marketing team to understand what the key competitive selling points are for your product. Your product marketing team can use this to better shape the message for customers around what “wins” and your product team can use this to better understand what makes customers happy to keep on the same trajectory.
10. Upsell.
A big part of SaaS product revenue model is upselling customers in the form of premium features, extra services, or premium levels of products. Increasing MRR, monthly recurring revenue, for many SaaS companies is easiest achieved through increasing upsells, especially if new users come in for free for a low fee.
Knowing how many users go from free or low level customers to premium customers or purchase additional features can help your product team know what to expect in terms of lifetime value of customers and helps identify where you can improve upsells to increase MRR. Knowing what your customers are willing to pay extra for can help determine what is the core value of your product and what you should continue to deliver on in the future.
Product marketing is a specific type of marketing that intersects all parts of a SaaS company. All parts of the team are involved and everyone needs to work together to ensure these are successful KPIs. Your product needs to constantly evolve to what customers want and its growth and development should guide your marketing and sales strategy. For an easy way to boost product engagement by 10x, try Beamer today.
