11 Metrics to Measure the Success of Product Marketing

Reputation & Awareness:

• Share of voice is the mind share you capture for a particular category or topic compared to competitors. It's a signal of effective positioning and messaging. Your positioning should define the category where you play, and set the rules to give you an unfair advantage. Your messaging should guide thought leadership on topics your buyers care about. Share of voice is a difficult metric to actually measure. I'll be honest – for most of my career, I've deferred this one to an external PR agency or tools used by social media teams, but some of the best ways I've seen this tracked are to look at percentage of press coverage and social media mentions your company earns relative to competitors in your category (or a topic for which you're trying to establish thought leadership). Bonus points if your MarTech stack can do sentiment analysis on that data.
  
  
• Market perception, or brand sentiment, is the hardest metric to measure, but can be deduced by listening to prospects, hearing what analysts have to say, and reading press coverage and analyst reports. A former boss of mine once told me the job of product marketing is "to change people's minds", so your messaging frameworks should always have a set of From > To's to describe the perceptions you want to create, shift or reinforce. I like to ask prospects and customers how they categorize my product, or what they think of my company. I track positioning in analysts vendor comparison benchmark reports, and how they describe our company and our space. I look at how the media identifies my company and our category in media coverage.
  
  
• Web traffic is the most tried-and-true way to measure top-of-funnel awareness. I've found it most useful for trend analysis. For example, how does traffic to your site (or to key pages) change as a result of a product launch or a campaign. Long-term, how do changes in your positioning and messaging influence SEO and traffic to your site?

Demand Generation:

• Sales pipeline is more useful to me than MQLs (marketing-qualified leads), because it's a more reliable indicator of forecasted revenue than counting leads. Another metric I look at is pipeline coverage ratio, which is a measure of your total pipeline divided by your bookings target. Most SaaS companies I've been at target 2.5X-3X pipe coverage, depending on how efficient they are at winning open opportunities. If you're operating in an emerging market or aren't a leader in your category, you'll likely need a higher pipe coverage ratio to hit your bookings target. If you're a leader in an established category, you may be able to get away with a lower ratio.

Sales Enablement:

• Revenue is the ultimate success metric, and as a PMM, you should bird-dog this closely, tracking sales opportunities, asking how you can help, making yourself available to tag in and join sales calls and meetings with prospects to help your sales team close deals. Good PMMs are a sales team's secret weapon, and you should be getting tapped to join customer meetings and help your sales team get deals over the goal line.
  
  
• Win rate is the percentage of opportunities that turn into closed won deals, or the percentage of sales pipeline that turns into bookings. It's one of the most reliable measures of sales efficiency – how effective is your sales team at winning new business vs. alternatives such as competitors or "do-nothings".
  
  
• Sales certification - While it doesn't correlate as closely to your top-line revenue, I've often partnered with sales enablement teams to ensure sales reps are certified on pitch decks and sales messaging, in addition to certifying sales engineers on demo scripts. If you've got your sales messaging right, it's going to influence purchase intent and help your sales reps close deals faster and more easily.
  
  
• Sales enablement asset usage - I look at usage of core enablement assets like sales playbooks, pitch decks, persona guides, discovery guides, demo scripts and economic value calculators. If you're producing effective sales enablement content, your sales reps are going to want to use them because they know it will help them close more deals. There are sales enablement tools out there that can help you monitor content usage. I've used Showpad before, and Highspot is another that comes to mind.

Customer Adoption:

• Product usage - PMMs have a big role to play pre-sale, but as experts in how customers use and get value from your product, part of your role should focus on driving successful adoption. If your company relies on product-led growth vs. a sales-led GTM, you're going to spend more of your time as a PMM driving and measuring product adoption. You can do this with best practices content, tutorials, videos, as well as in-app messaging and onboarding email communications. I like to zero in on three metrics to analyze product usage:
  • Signups are an important customer acquisition metric, but don't get caught in a trap here. Lots of SaaS products are littered with ghost users -- people who signed up, kicked the tires, but never adopted or got value from a product. Tracking signups is necessary, but not sufficient.
  • Active users can be measured on a monthly or weekly basis and are a good signal of the stickiness of your product.
  • Feature engagement tracking is really useful to understand how customers are interacting with specific features of your product, so you can uncover popular use cases. If you're lucky, your product team has built telemetry into your products so you can measure how customers are using them. Otherwise, you can implement a product analytics tool like Amplitude, which I've used at previous companies.
    
    
• Renewal rates are paramount if your company operates with a recurring subscription model, as is common for B2B SaaS companies. Here, you want to measure renewal rates in addition to whether customers are expanding their spend year-over-year through upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Even if your business operates with a perpetual license model, you can measure maintenance contract renewals and customer churn to see if customers are sticking with your product.
  
  
• Net promoter score (NPS) surveys may be run by your customer marketing or customer success teams, depending on the size and structure of your organization. They are a simple measure of how likely a customer is to recommend your product. They're usually measured by asking customers a simple question: "How likely are you to recommend us?" on a 10-point scale:
  • Customers who give you a 9 or 10 rating are considered loyal customers.
  • Customers who rate a 7 or 8 are considered neutral. They are likely satisfied with your product, but not enough to become an advocate.
  • Customers who respond with score of 0-6 are detractors and are unhappy with your product. Your product team should solicit feedback from these customers to help influence product requirements, and your customer success and marketing teams should nurture these customers to try to turn around the relationship.