Month: January 2016

Businesses or companies tend to exert more effort to market their products through various marketing elements. They design fancy logos, set up email marketing automation programs, and launch attractive websites. But without a strong product, efforts to build your business brand will be in vain.

It is often heard from several businesses that launch new products and end up failing. Why? The failure can be caused by the following factors:

• Lack of understanding of market conditions.
• Lack of understanding about customers.
• Ineffective communication.
• Ineffective product marketing strategy.

It’s important to focus on fixing those failures given the many parties involved and so much time and money you’ve invested in a new product in your business.

Of course, you don’t want to spend all your time and energy focused on building a business brand that ends up being wasted.

A successful product requires a successful product marketing strategy. That means you need to make sure your business products meet customer needs and satisfaction and position them in the right market.

Product

The first step to developing a Product Marketing Strategy is to make sure you have a strong product.

Before you even strategize, you need to make sure the product is made with your target customer in mind and whether it aligns with their needs.

People tend not to want to just buy things, but they want the things they buy to solve their problems.

So ask yourself what problem can your product solve for the customer.

How will the product make the customer’s life better? Answering these questions will help you determine the right message for your product marketing campaign.

The value embedded in your product is more important than the capabilities of the product itself. In other words, you should focus on the benefits of your product instead of its features.

Later, each feature must be developed for a purpose that will provide benefits for customers.

Customers

Just like products, you also need to focus on the customer or potential customer element of your business in planning a marketing strategy.

To do that, you have to understand them. Characteristics, traits, behaviors, and more are key to understanding customers.

Start by doing research and gathering any information about your intended target customers, such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Marital status
• Education
• Profession
• Hobby

Better yet, interview your customers. Arrange phone calls or meetings with customers and ask about their preferences for your product.

Listen to the way they speak and the language they use, this can help to shape the narrative of your Product Marketing Strategy later.

Any information that comes from customers can help in uncovering your customers’ preferences and the best way to market your products to them.

Once all the information is gathered, start building a buyer persona in the product you are going to market.

In your research, you may find some common patterns among customers.

These similarities can be grouped to help create a buyer persona or archetype of what your ideal customer looks like and how they behave.

Order

You certainly need to communicate with your customers. Because according to several research results related to product marketing, 57% of consumers feel confident when they are emotionally connected to a brand.

And of course, the emotional connection is built through the message you convey regarding the product you are marketing.

Your product message should be narrative. Because the narrative is the easiest way to get your customers connected to your product.

You can write articles on blogs and take advantage of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) feature so that inspiring articles related to your business products can be found easily on the internet.

Marketing Team

Developing and promoting a product requires effort and teamwork in a team.

However, keeping multiple teams on the same track consistently is no easy task.

The product marketing team must be the bridge between sales, marketing, methods, and development.

With so many elements in a team working on a single project, it is easy to miscommunicate and disorganize which will derail the progress of your Product Marketing Strategy.

Make product plans and roadmaps so that all parties involved in the team can work in rhythm and synergize.

The product roadmap provides a summary of the entire product marketing plan and guides the team on what to do and the results at each step of the process.

Promotion

Having a solid product and a solid strategy is not the end of your job.

You can’t expect customers to flock to your product if they don’t know anything about your product.

Therefore, you need to convey the news through strategic promotion.

Your promotional plan should elaborate and deliver your product message to customers promptly.

If you’ve done your research and built your buyer persona, you should have no problem identifying your target customers.

Timing …