Two things every product marketer can do right now to grow MQLs

Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.

Yes, we’re product marketers. MQLs can sometimes be a dirty word to us.

But you know what’s going to score you brownie points with your fellow marketing and sales teams? Delivering projects that drive marketing qualified leads!

Here are two, pretty simple projects that you could get done – in less than two weeks – that will help you become the belle of the marketing all-hands.

These are great opportunities to show off your product marketing skills and support your marketing and sales teams with new call-to-actions as part of your buyer journey.

In this post:

Create a pre-recorded demo video

It sounds pretty simple, and yeah, it actually is.

Offering a pre-recorded demo video on your website, gated behind a form asking for just an email, is one of the simplest data-for-information exchanges you can set up. It’s a perfect soft call-to-action for website visitors that don’t want to sign up for a trial, don’t want to speak to sales, but want to see more than just the information on your website.

Your demo video should be like the actual demos your sales teams give – or at least, should give. It definitely shouldn’t be feature-heavy, and it definitely shouldn’t bore viewers.

Your demo video should focus on the outcomes and value your product delivers, not the features. Instead of the standard “you click here, do this, and then see that happen,” voiceover, you want to tell a story that combines your product features, benefits, and ultimate outcomes into a packaged nugget of value (funnily enough, I call these value nuggets).

Here’s a simple outline for your first pre-recorded demo video.

The situation, problem, and implication of what the customer’s life is like today – be clear on who the target customer is, the impact through their organization, professional, and personal lenses. Use 1 or 2 slides.
Value they desire – the three ideal outcomes that your product solves (that they want to achieve). Use 1 slide.
Switch to a product screen recording. For each value, create a narrative that walks through;
- Importance of the outcome
- The progress to achieve the outcome with your product, connecting features to benefits
Recap each value, and finish with overall messaging in one slide.

Making these happen can be complex, if you’re after a super high production quality video. You can start with something you can make in Apple iMovie or Descript. Maybe work with a pre-sales or customer success manager to perfect the flow and capture a screen recording that you can chop up. Make a scrappy first version, and then see if you can get the budget to work with someone from Fiverr, Upwork, or a local student to perfect it.

Then, distribution: get it up on a separate ‘[product name] demo video’ page, gated behind an email form, then start linking to it – here are a few quick ideas:

Review past and upcoming content plans to find opportunities to post a soft call-to-action
Use in marketing email campaigns – send a one-off email to your entire prospect database, then build it into regular newsletters and lead nurture campaigns
Let sales reps use an ungated version of the video as an alternative call-to-action in their nurture campaigns and cold emails: ‘Can I send you a quick demo video?’
Promote in retargeting paid acquisition campaigns to visitors who viewed the website but didn’t sign up
Include it in follow-up emails to all leads collected at online and IRL events

The placement of your demo video in the buyer journey should be determined by what you know about your buyer journey – make sure that it’s a logical progression between your buyer’s previous step, viewing the video, and the next step (likely, talking to sales).

P.S. Don’t forget to add a ‘book a demo’ section on the webpage, and make it really simple for those who view the video to put their hand up for sales interaction.

A one-two punch: regular demo webinars

You’ve gone to the effort of designing a demo script that speaks to your product value, benefits, and features. You’ve made it into a recorded demo video.

But not everyone likes demo videos – they need a bit more interaction. And not everyone wants to speak to sales.

So, get the most juice out of your efforts and set up regular – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly – demo webinars.

These will be approx 30 minute sessions that you can host as a product marketer – trust me, you’ve got this! – or with a customer success or pre-sales rep. And they’ll follow pretty much the same flow as the demo video:

Introduce the problem you’re solving and the challenge that customers are experiencing
Present how you help
Walk through the similar narrative: value > benefits > features
Maybe bulk up with a case study
10 minutes at the end for an AMA, so folks can get their questions answered live

My recommendation is to use Demio for effortless webinars. Use a few slides from your sales deck, practice a few times to build confidence in your pitch and delivery, and make it human. Tell stories. Your viewers will love it. Maybe brand it ‘The [Product] Rundown’ or ‘[Product] 101’.

You’ll promote your regular webinars in pretty much the same way. Throw up a webpage where you can update the date of the next webinar and the registration link, then drive traffic to it through very similar methods as above:

Call-to-action in content
Add a call-out in every prospect-facing newsletter
Share with sales reps to include in cold emails as an alternative to replying
Try some paid retargeting campaigns, maybe paid social on LinkedIn to target a specific market
Include a link to the webinar page on every ‘thank you’ page from your other gated content – give those leads a place to go next
Share it via organic social and create some snazzy banners to share

These will feel much easier to carry out than creating a demo video, because they’re more human and natural. But, creating a demo video first will really help set the scene and perfect what you’ve got to say, and how you’re going to say it.

Make SaaS tangible with demos

I think this is a principle that we can all lean into more. SaaS is pretty intangible sometimes – a bunch of buttons and fields on a webpage.

When we link that to the bigger problems we’re helping customers to achieve, we’ll do better. When we show the outcomes that our features solve, we’ll do better. When we talk about our product in a human way, we’ll do better.

Good luck, and hit me up if you’d like some examples of good demo videos and demo webinars!

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you thought – find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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