The next step in building your customer obsession is taking all you’ve learned through data and empathy and using it to innovate. Let’s follow Google’s lead on this one. A quote we use all the time is, “Know the user. Know the magic. Connect the two.” That came from Google Creative Lab, and it’s the philosophy that allows us to innovate and deliver on those unanticipated needs.
I'll give you a personal example. Last summer my family and I went on a huge trip. We traveled from here in Seattle to mainland Spain, then to Ibiza. The kids went to Paris, we went to the north of England, and then we all met up again in London before we flew back to Seattle.
I had no idea that Google had this magical way of extracting all of our bookings for every hotel, flight, and car hire. Without me taking any action, our full itinerary had been pulled into a new Google travel listing.
I didn't have to create a spreadsheet with all of our flight details and where benin telegram number we were going to be on what day – it was just there, on my phone. I couldn't believe it. To me, that's knowing the user, knowing the magic, and connecting the two.
Another example comes from my time working on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It's an example of not really knowing the insight, then testing, and innovating to get to a place that's very insightful and appealing.
We launched a product called AWS DeepLens, which we began marketing as “the world's first deep learning-enabled developer kit.” What the heck did that mean? Lots of people were excited about it but had no idea what they could actually use it for, so we innovated.
We listened to some customers and found an incredible use case that we thought would appeal to everybody in a humorous way and bring some magic. Let me hand it over to Ben Hamm, cat lover, to tell you a bit more about it.
Go ahead – watch the video. I’ll wait.
Ben and his murder cat, Metric, brought to life what had been a pretty bland campaign. We took something complex and made it interesting and relatable. It’s innovative product marketing at its finest.
Strategy three: Delight
As product marketers, we can drive customer retention by delivering long-term customer delight.
The first step in this process is making it delightfully easy to get started with a product. If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent many hours and months poring over onboarding content, trying to figure out how to improve the onboarding experience of your customers through tutorials, presentations, and webinars. It's our job as product marketers to support customers on those all-important first steps of their journey.
The next step is making your product delightfully easy to use. Now, I'm sure we all wish that all of our products were delightfully easy to use all of the time, but the truth is they're not. It's our job as custodians of the customer experience to provide the guidance needed in the documentation so that when customers hit a roadblock, they can quickly overcome it.