Seeking upstream revenue growth from Enterprises? Not trying to capture the D2C segment? May be you are thinking what is need of UGC led product content? Revenue is being generated by marketing activities which lead to more face to face conversations with the top brass.
That’s where all the marketing budget should be flowing in. UGC led product approach is required, if we would have wanted to capture the SMB segment.
You are 100% true from the revenue perspective. Marketing dollar should definitely be routed that way. That is what is bringing in the $$$$ in the short term.
Over in this article I’m talking about LTV. Increasing it over a period of time. At scale. With Lifecycle Marketing.
(Pardon me for my lack of using terms which are not exactly matching definition of business schools. I have not had the good fortune to attend B-school. I have done business for 10 years, which I consider as the longest internship a business school has provided me. That internship showed me how to scale a business from 0 to 1CR+ in annual revenue. The business school taught me how to set up and manage a small team of 8 people. How to do partnerships for channel sales. But in this course of a 10 year old internship, after having read multiple business books, I started making a few definitions myself. Like over in this article I am talking about lifecycle marketing from a product perspective. What I am going to describe below, may have a completely different name according to business books. Please pardon me on those nuances. I write based on my observations. For me lifecycle means, the total time a client is in business. Not associated with us as clients. But as a timeframe, that business is in business. Even if I am not doing a revenue transaction at the present moment in time, they are still my audience in the broader ‘lifecycle’. Below account is basis on this thought process.)
If you are building a product, the decison maker can be a enterprise CEO, but the question you have to ask yourself. Is my user of the product also the CEO? If not, then hear me out.
100% of CEO’s are smart. Very very smart. That’s why they are there acting as the top boss in a company steering it forward. But the rest of the people, especially lower down the ranks, who are performing tactical work, their mind is not used to being smart. They are in fact taught and expected to do 1 job everyday. Relentlessly.
The deal is done within 2 CEOs. The user of the product is a marketing manager, editor, analyst. They utilize the product to complete a particular job. They aren’t incentivised to utilize the product to its utmost potential to get the full benefit of it. If that doesn’t happen, the promise made by CEO may fall short. Ultimately leading to a possible churn.
On the other hand if the user of the product has already seen the product being used in various use cases. Multiple content showing how it can make the life of the marketing manager easier if these hacks are followed, suddenly, the product user is interested in using the tool. Not because they start loving their product. No certainly not. But you just released a video showing how to explain to the CEO if your numbers are in RED.
Product marketing is not a function to show how to use the tool. It is a function to show why you should use the tool. Everyone has a different why. As a department you can’t possibly list out all the why’s the total of 10000+ user of your product may have.
Then? What is the solution? There must be many users who are asking similar questions. How can we address them at scale?
The answer. UGC. Users of the product, sharing content on how to use it better for gaining efficiency. For making life easier. If the usage of your product is to be done by people who are anyone beyond the C-Suite, UGC is the only way for true scalability for growth of the company, purely from the product perspective.
Do not think of users as people from outside the organization. Include users from people within the company. They are one of the foremost users of the product. The deep insights they have with them, which if shared across your enterprise client base, can help many a product user from the client side.
Heck, may be have a club for the most innovative product users. Give them a special gift. Have meet ups. This club can contain your advocates from the client side, who produce UGC content, showing how your tool can be utilised better. May be he/she created the content as internal training purposes. The response he got was tremendous. That is value being shown by your product user. Celebrate that.
I want to end with a short philosophical note. UGC is a very hard nut to crack. Especially when you want to protect brand guidelines yet giving users the signal of creating content. It has a lot of negative points going against it. It has just 1 unique selling point. Perspective.
They say, perspective is crucial when it comes to content being surfaced in a post AI world. Content that has context, perspective, expertise. What better type of content than UGC.
Product companies with a marketing department, are you looking at UGC as a viable growth channel? I would love to hear your thoughts.