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)

• Exit Five

• PMA Product Marketing Life

• Metrics and Chill

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)

💡 To climb up the ladder of success make sure you tie every activity of yours to the business revenue.

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