Your product has been tweaked, tested, and perfected and is finally ready to launch. Now what? The marketing is often more important than the product itself, but how do you create a successful and impactful marketing campaign?
Understand Your Product
It may seem obvious, but in order to market a product, you need to fully understand the product and its purpose. What is the core benefit of your product and what value does it bring to consumers? What are its strengths and potential opportunities? Immersing yourself in test results and product specifications and discussing these points with stakeholders is essential before developing a marketing plan.
Define Your Target Audience
Certainly, a huge part of understanding the value of your product is understanding who it serves. Creating a buyer persona can help structure the profile of your ideal consumer in an actionable way. After conducting qualitative and quantitative research, buyer personas should be built to outline demographics, motivations, objections, goals, personality traits, and media consumption outlets. They can indicate which sets of products the buyer is likely to prefer, as a persona is typically created for each marketing channel.
Select Your Competitors
Once you have a thorough grasp of your product and your audience, it’s time to dive into the competition. Identifying and analyzing your competitors is possibly one of the most difficult and time-consuming steps in the process, requiring extensive research, focus, and self-awareness. It is best to keep the list focused to a maximum of 10-12 competitors; any more than this, and your sales and marketing teams will lack a true compass. Finding the right subset for your product might mean accepting it isn’t in the top echelon of the industry… yet.
Set Yourself Apart
As you discuss marketing strategies with your product team, you need to be fluent in the language of technical specifications.. Listen and understand the technical specifications, sure, but don’t let them jade your marketing campaign or garble your story. The product team’s newest toggle feature isn’t always “marketing worthy” for new leads. Talk to existing customers and the sales team to uncover what really peaks interest and converts leads. Stay grounded in your product’s true value and points of differentiation.
Align With Your Team
In companies with many departments and multiple stakeholders, communication can be a chronic issue. Ensuring all contributors are in agreement regarding the product’s value, competitors and selling points is essential. From marketing and sales to account management and customer service, alignment among all involved parties can make or break a buyer’s journey.
When you do launch, remember the journey isn’t over. Track your campaign’s success and pivot your message as needed to maximize your results. Product marketing, much like your product itself, shouldn’t be a set it and forget it mentality.