Metrics a product marketer should focus on, and more with Santhoshi Natarajan, Product Marketer at Dataflo
Your journey from being a Content Strategist to becoming a Product Marketer is interesting. Please tell us more about it.
I graduated as a Communications Specialist, and I knew that I had a passion for the English language and writing. It showed in every step of my career—all of my roles involved some kind of content writing.
I then joined Hippo Video as a Content Strategist—and it all came together! Since then, I have been producing different forms of content: ebooks, video scripts, blogs and case studies—and now web pages too.
I realised I loved producing meaningful content, especially for B2B businesses, and that's when it hit me: I want to be a Product Marketer!
My goal is to help companies get their message heard by the right people—and that's why I'm so happy with where I am today.
Resources you recommend to learn more about product marketing?
- One book - Product-led-growth by Wes Bush
- One blog - Read up on anything that is available on the PMA website.
- One podcast - (Santoshi couldn't stop herself from sharing several here)
In your view, is product marketing a generalist or specialist role?
It starts out as a generalist role, especially when you are in a startup and then slowly gets very specific.
What are the three most essential skills an aspiring product marketer should develop?
- Ability to be a team player and collaborate.
- Good communication skills
- Being curious ALWAYS and getting to the ‘why’. And a thirst to keep learning.
What are some tools a product marketer should be familiar with?
- Email marketing tools - pretty much any tool should be sufficient
- Google Analytics
- Any CMS
- CRM (any CRM should work - Hubspot would be an added advantage)
What best practices do you recommend product marketers adopt?
- Understand the product’s ins and outs.
- Be clear on who the product is for and talk to both your product team and your customers.
- Always train yourself to write a copy.
- To climb up the ladder of success make sure you tie every activity of yours to the business revenue.
What are some metrics a product marketer should focus on?
Depending on which area of the business you are handling, it is fourfold - Acquisition, Activation, Retention and Expansion.
Each function comes with a different set of metrics. I recommend every product marketer understand the following:
- web traffic for pages
- total sign-ups
- product usage
- revenue
- sales cycle length & velocity and
- user retention as a blanket metric
Which part of your work keeps you awake at night?
Getting traffic to our website and getting prospects to sign-up. And 'conversion' post that.
Other product marketers, you follow?
- Dave Gerhardt
- April Dunford
- Jeff Gadway