In this post, we will look at aligning key product and customer metrics alongside marketing metrics. This will help Product Managers know what the Product Marketing Manager is looking for and what they are invested in to better communicate with them.

Aligning Key Product and Customer Metrics with Marketing Metrics

There are five major metrics that the Product Marketing Manager is going to look at as they start to develop their marketing plan. They're going to look at the following:

The likelihood that a customer is to buy the product.
The likelihood that a customer is going to stay on the product.
The customer acquisition cost.
The customer retention cost.
The eight‑week retention curve.

A Product Marketing Manager is looking to answer some of the following questions when they are investigating the likelihood a customer is going to buy a product:

What makes a customer more apt to buy? Maybe they're currently buying a competitor's product, and this product has better features, or they're not buying any product, and this product is going to help them solve a problem.
What are the most important product features? What's important to remember for you as a Product Manager is that the feature that you think is the most important might not end up being the feature that the customer feels is the most important.
How does this align product, customer and marketing metrics? It's important to align with product marketing on this so that they can align with the customer.

Once a customer is onboard, the Product Marketing Manager is also going to look at what is the likelihood of retaining that customer:

What would make the customer continue to purchase? What are these key features? Is it the feature we discussed in the likelihood to buy section, or is there something else that makes it easy for them to stay, or is it more economical for them to stay?
Is it a consumable product? Is your product a one‑time purchase and they will never purchase again, or is it something they pay a monthly/yearly subscription for?
How does this align with the product, customer and marketing metrics? Once again, it would be best if you communicated all the reasons a customer might want to stay so that the product marketer can look at the key features that the customer requires.

Again, the features that you think are the most important are not always the features that the customer thinks are the most important, and that's the Product Marketing Manager's job to communicate the key features of this product to make the customers buy and stay.

Customer Acquisition Costs

The customer acquisition costs help calculate how much it costs to onboard a customer. Costs such as marketing, sales and promotions are considered when calculating this. You will need to figure out how much each aspect costs the company. Next, you will need to calculate the return on that investment. How does this align with the product, customer, and marketing metrics? The marketing person's job is to make sure the return on investment is very, very high, so they need to hit the nail on the head as they start to communicate the value proposition of your product.

Customer Retention Costs

When you have some customers onboarded, you will then need to calculate how much it will cost to keep a customer. So if it is a consumable product, something they must order every month or some sort of Software as a Service tool, how much does it cost to keep them? How long are you going to retain them? It's a very similar calculation to the ROI and the customer acquisition cost, as stated previously. Then you will have to calculate the ROI to keep the customer and how this aligns with your marketing and customer metrics. Once again, make sure that you're communicating the true value proposition to the customer.

Eight-week retention curve

About 5 to 35% of customers actually hit the eight‑week retention curve. For example, if you have a consumable product, something people have to order continually, eight weeks is the elite mark. Suppose your Product Marketing Manager is able to keep customers on for eight weeks. In that case, they're probably going to stay for the long term and understanding the likelihood to buy and the likelihood to stay, the customer acquisition and retention costs will really help you hit the mark on this eight‑week retention curve.

Marketing strategies

The Product Marketing Manager will develop various marketing strategies to help promote the product. They're going to look at various ways they can promote this product via:

Direct sales and marketing
Attending trade shows
Web and digital marketing
Press releases and blogs
Media and social media marketing

Understanding the target market and the best ways to reach them will help develop these marketing strategies to allocate the resources better and ensure they're reaching the target market.

Some questions that the Product Marketing Manager will have include the following:

What's the budget of this plan, and how much is it going to cost
What are the goals of this marketing plan?
How many people do you think will purchase this product initially based on the product forecasting?

Having these goals defined is important as it will help plan analysis to calculate how effective the marketing strategies were.

Understanding product marketing's role will ensure your customer will have the best possible experience and, of course, buy your product.

When do you bring in Product Marketing?

Usually, about four months from launch is the best time to bring product marketing in. You've probably been working on the product for months before this, maybe even years, but bringing them in with a four‑month lead time allows them to see the end cycle of this process. Make sure that they understand the key deliverables on your side and the engineering side, and maybe expose them to some of the engineering terminologies so that they can really work through the technical aspect on their end as well.