With thousands of products competing for consumer attention product marketing is getting harder by the day. Fortunately, there are few things you can do to have an edge over your competition. These things are not easy and takes time to get it right. But once you get it right, you’ll reap the rewards for a long time.
A Well-Defined Marketing Message
If you ask a business owner what their marketing message is many will struggle to come up with an answer or give a wrong answer. Most will mention their tagline while others might describe their product. A good marketing message grabs the attention of your potential customer, tells how you solve their problem and explains why they should choose you over your competitors.
Like the video this also requires lots of iterations. And it will probably take months until you fine tune it and truly comes up with a brilliant marketing message. If you’re struggling to come up with one check this article which explains 5 easy steps to creating a marketing message.
A clearly defined message is just the beginning. The basic principles of your marketing message can be applied across all your marketing communication. How you explain a feature, how to title an article, how you formulate a tweet and many other things can benefit from a good consistent messaging strategy.
Once you define them the whole job of the marketing team gets easier. They know exactly how to explain a feature and its benefits. There is no ambiguity and the message become consistent. This reduces the time spend on figuring out what to say which in turn leads to increase in productivity.
Like creating a video this is also a time-consuming process. But once you get it right, you’ll enjoy all the benefits mentioned above.
A Short Explainer Video
You have a very short time span to convince a user to try your product. And no amount of text can explain a product better than a video. Users don’t have to read and comprehend what the text means and they can visually see the capabilities of the product.
Creating a high-quality video is costly and time consuming. First you need to agree on a style. There are many different video styles with each having various advantages and disadvantages. If you’re struggling to pick one go through some well-known product brands and see how they’ve created their videos.
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Then you need to create a storyboard and agree on the general flow of the video. Once you finalize the rough content of the video you can agree on visuals and fine tune the message. It will usually take multiple revisions to get it done right. However, in most cases the potential returns far outweigh the cost and time.
Great Support and Feedback Mechanism
According to Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, if you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, then you’ve launched too late. This doesn’t mean that you should put out a half-baked product full of errors. What it means is that you shouldn’t delay your launch until you have the perfect product. Rather you should put out a working product and improve it based on customer feedback.
Therefore, a good support system is essential for a product marketing team. You want your customers to come to you with their problems, not blast them all over social media and product review sites. One bad review from the right person can make or break a product.
At the minimum, you should have a well-functioning support system that responds to customers within 24 hours. Depending on your target market you can choose to be active on social channels like Facebook and Twitter as well. However, responding to your customers grievances is just the beginning.
A good product marketing team actively looks for customer feedback. For example, you can build in a review mechanism into your product and get in touch with customers who rate it poorly. One method we had great success with is live chat. Most people can’t be bothered to send an email to give feedback, but they are more likely to raise their concerns via live chat. If you’re high traffic and getting too many chats, you can add it only to key pages like plans and features page. If you have a freemium product like ours you can consider getting in touch with the paid users and understand why they chose to buy your product and fine-tune your marketing message based on that feedback.
Compared to the first two points this is somewhat easier to implement so there is no excuse for not doing this.
Any Other Must-Have for Product Marketing?
Mentioned above are 3 things that have helped product companies reach and acquire millions of users. Your results may vary based on your niche, but I can guarantee that you will get a positive result.
Did I miss another essential? Do let me know in the comments so we can continue the discussion.
