From Redefining The Marketing Funnel To Sustaining Hypergrowth, Here’s What TMS2021 Has In Store For Product Marketers

This article is part of Inc42 Plus’ upcoming conference — The Makers Summit India’s largest product conference scheduled for 12th-14th March, supported by Netcore, Amplitude and HPE. Click here to know more.

There was a time when a product was considered the brainchild of the product manager but not anymore. Over the years, product functions have evolved dramatically and become excruciatingly complex. It is no longer a standalone monolith, crafted and sanctified by one breed professionals. Today, product, design and marketing functions have intertwined with each other in a helix of sorts to deliver the superior experience that a user seeks.

That’s why The Makers Summit 2021, India’s largest product conference, will bring together 10,000+ makers from the product, marketing and design functions of India’s top product startups to share knowledge and understand each other’s best practices.

As the conference would be spread over three days with over 50 sessions and more than 100 speakers, we think it would be right to streamline the agenda for you. So, we are consolidating the masterclasses, keynotes and firesides, sessions by unicorn founders separately for your benefit.

In this article, we take a look at everything directly related to product marketing folks that has been planned for the conference.

Browse All Sessions Here

Redefining The Marketing Funnel For Bharat

In the last three decades, the marketing funnel has evolved with each advancement in the tech world — first came email marketing, then came the search engine and most recently it is social media that has changed the dynamics of marketing.

While product marketers have always relied on a blend of all three to design their marketing funnel, the target audience of Bharat and next billion users don’t fit into that paradigm. The Bharat user doesn’t use email as much and prefers social media in the form of short video apps. 

How does the product marketing funnel adapt to this segment? This is what Sidharth Shakdher, chief marketing officer, Hotstar; Gajendra Jangid, cofounder & CMO, CARS24; Kanika Mittal, business head, Twitter and Damandeep Singh Soni, VP, Growth, boAt will talk about in a panel discussion.

They will decode the metrics that matter for high growth product marketing in Bharat, unravel the secrets of tapping into Bharat’s aspirational mindset and shed light on the nuances of referral marketing in the Bharat mould.

Stream The Session Here

Sustaining Hypergrowth — The Role Of Growth Teams

The growth stage is the most exciting time for a startup. But it must be sustainable. The product toolkit that a growth team brings to the table  — funnel testing, adtech integration, segmenting cohorts are quite different from those required at the early stage. The key factor to consider  for growth teams is that they don’t look for 100x better experience for 1% users but 10x value for 99% of them.

For this reason, we have a panel to help the audience understand how a growth team is structured and what skills product builders in such a team must have. Arun Pattabhiraman, chief growth officer, Freshworks; Manan Bajoria, assistant vice president of growth and marketing, Ixigo; Anuj Rathi, vice president of product, Swiggy;  Julio Bermudez, vice president APAC and LATAM, Amplitude will be the speakers in this session. Mona Gandhi, founder of product manager upskilling platform Upraised will be the moderator.

The key takeaways for the audience would be decoding the GaaS (growth as a service) model of product ownership, the best prioritisation frameworks of growth teams, the secrets of using bottoms-up experiments to hit top-down KPIs and more.

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The Product Playbook For India’s Rising D2C Brands

One of the segments that the Covid pandemic’s online rush benefitted has been direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands. However, just creating an ecommerce presence or a website doesn’t cut it for a D2C startup, unless backed by an effective marketing strategy. 

From social media marketing, social commerce, video marketing, email marketing, content-driven purchases and more, new-age brands have tapped the influencer market and are gaining customers through digital word-of-mouth. Though it might appear to be a simple checklist, innovating and differentiating in a crowded market is not easy by any measure. 

Further, acing the agile framework of product experiments and building a brand persona for the target audience is something every young D2C startup struggles with. That’s why Tanvi Malik, cofounder, FabAlley; Tarun Sharma, cofounder & director, Mcaffeine; Ajith Karimpana, founder & CEO, Furlenco; and Shashank Mehta, founder & CEO, The Whole Truth will lay open the playbook for D2C success in a session moderated by Sid Talwar, a partner at VC firm Lightbox. 

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Defining Your Product Analytics Maturity & Advancing It For Growth

When talking of an early stage startup, one of the recurrent themes of the conversation is its difficulties with data. How much data does it collect? Is that data enough to iterate product and target consumers effectively? Does the company have resources to parse through its data? 

Often startups put the building of a product analytics framework on the backburner. “We will do it after X traction or Y revenue,” a founder may tell himself. But this strategy backfires all too frequently.

Ross Walker, lead solutions consultant, International Markets, Mixpanel will deliver a Masterclass session on what are the different stages of product analytics maturity and why it matters when building products for the next billion. Walker will also explain how to assess your startup’s data maturity level and what it takes to move up the ladder.

The Role Of Product Marketing In SaaS 

The product marketing mandate for a SaaS product is quite different from the rest. The target audience of your product might be small, the cost of shifting from a dominant player in the market might be high and the conversion of lead generated might be very low. If these seem like a lot already, you would be surprised to know that we have barely scratched the surface of the puzzle that product marketing in SaaS is.

What is better than to have a top product marketer from one of the most iconic SaaS companies help you navigate the troubled waters? That’s why we are bringing Praval Singh, vice president of marketing and customer experience at Zoho, to host a Masterclass that will reveal the secrets of evangelising a SaaS product, churning out leads from the best customer acquisition channels, retaining users with newer value propositions and much more.

Stream The Session Here

Product-Led Growth In Practice

Traditional sales-driven and paid marketing that involve a high customer acquisition cost, are slowly taking a back seat for many product companies. Wonder why workplace collaboration tool Asana or even B2C products like Hotstar go for a freemium model? 

This strategy to hook users to the basic product until they are compelled to subscribe for more features available in the paid version is called product-led growth. But does something like this work in India? Companies might look for jugaad rather than upgrade and individual consumers could be content with the limited functionalities.

In this panel discussion, speakers would talk about building frameworks for product-led growth, transitioning from a service mindset to the product mindset, empowering high growth teams to innovate on top of product and more.

This panel includes Shobhit Singhal, associate director of product, Hotstar; Minal Thukral, head of growth at CoinDCX; Yann AïtBachir, head of data, Shopback; and Rachel Bethany, head of customer success, Amplitude.