Conveying value proposition in the right way is crucial in product marketing: Hannah Sackett
Conveying value proposition in the right way is crucial in product marketing: Hannah Sackett
Highlights of the Talk
- Getting the positioning and messaging right for a product
- Branding journey of Electric.ai
- The Do’s and Don’ts in personalization
- Marketing metric that matters
Hannah's journey in marketing
“I wrote my first sales pitch at the age of 13.” I came across this line on your profile. Tell us about it.
Hannah: I went to a non-profit organization in my native. It was a space camp program. At that time, they were short of counsellors to run the program. So, I put together a presentation around a junior commander program and went to the head of the organization and pitched my idea. So, that was the first occasion when I conveyed my idea and the value from it. That’s why I call it my first sales pitch.
What attracted you to marketing?
Hannah: I had an interest in sales and marketing. Later, I quickly scaled up in my admin responsibilities. I was reaching out to project managers regarding research. Later when I moved into New York city, as I was looking for something similar to my previous positions, I started researching about getting into the mind of the consumer, how I could influence marketing decisions. Thereafter, my previous boss saw my skills and gave me an opportunity in product marketing. That’s how the journey started.
Branding- things to keep in mind
Your company Electric.ai recently raised Series D funding. Tell me about the branding journey of the company.
Hannah: To get the positioning and messaging has been the utmost important aspect of branding. IT as a whole is a complex space. The biggest challenge has been to clearly state what we do. How to convey the value and the service you provide. We had baseline materials that stated what we did.
I was the first product marketing, trying to build the team. From the branding perspective, my main responsibility was to translate the value proposition in non- technical simple form- why does Electric exist- to make IT simple, cost effective even for SMEs. Our work was mainly to convey this value point across the various platforms our customer interacted with us.
Conveying brand story through website
Websites are a crucial point of communication. There's an interesting video on the Hero of your company’s website. What has been your strategy while designing the website for Electric.ai?
Hannah: We went through rebranding in early 2019. We were trying to improve the Hero of our website when we came up with this idea of the video.
For the strategy, we were thinking from the customer’s perspective. I believe that the consumer is already interested in buying before you talk to them, they are doing their research. We recently did a test, reducing the time in the funnel and we are seeing a lot of wins there. So we discovered that it would be great if we could allow the customers to tell their story.
Everybody has case studies, but we didn't want the stories to get buried in the review section. So we created these video based testimonials. So that’s the overall strategy that went into website planning.
Personalization matters
How much importance you give to personalization on your website. What are your do’s and don’ts when it comes to personalization?
Hannah: You are always walking the fine line between working on that messaging to use it at scale and bringing in as many leads as possible. I think from a persona perspective, there is more than one persona for us, they fall into four different role buckets. We try to figure out what their position is with respect to IT before we start a conversation with us and what their role in the organization is. We also work on industry based content.
We put that straight and plainly by suggesting the relevant content for reading. So if they are looking at HR related content, we suggest they check our values for that industry. That’s how our website is structured today.
We had done a lot of research around the headers in the navigation bar. We will be revamping the content next year and be more specific about website content in terms of personalization.
Metric that runs the game
What is your favourite marketing metric?
Hannah: We have our weekly meetings where we speak about aligning our OKRs and discuss the metrics like CAC, Conversion rate and others. All of us have leading indicators to them. We are all mostly focused on revenue on a quarterly basis. From there, it’s how we are performing on various lines- paid or organic campaigns and of course the conversion rate.
On the product marketing side, I am focused on close rate which is important because the higher that rate, there’s lesser strain on the demand generation team.
Learning from campaigns
How has been your experience working on marketing campaigns? What was the most successful campaign?
Hannah: We are currently focusing on new product releases. We are launching a new product that reduces time by a great margin for our clients. So our new campaign is all about asking them what they will do with this time saved. So we are looking forward to the engagement on that campaign.
Apart from this, the campaign that I spearheaded as a product marketing manager was the live demos campaigns. It was about our prospects who were not ready to talk to our sales rep directly. I conducted a live demo about the values we provide. It was a win in my book as the conversion rate was high. However, I wish there was more attendance.
Challenges in marketing
The covid scenario has created a lot of disruption. How are you dealing with these new times?
Hannah: The fortunate part of the value of our service is that we are entirely remote. We observed that a lot of organizations were not able to send their employees home along with the company device, because they did not have the process in place. This caused a variety of insecure networks. Though this was an unfortunate situation, from the market perspective, it was our time and we could easily sell there.
We were doing really creative direct mail campaigns. So did many impactful virtual events and engaged the audience. We got creative in offering kits for things. We thought about what we could offer them. As the world gets back to hybrid work, we are planning more events.
As a leading marketer, what advice would you give to the budding/aspiring marketers?
Hannah: I would say stay curious, accomplish your goals and shout it from the rooftops. Be your own advocate. If you have the bandwidth and if you would like to move up in the ladder, reach out to seniors, they might be able to sit with you and train you.
