Promoting your product and service
Promoting your offer is in simple terms how your customer notices your product or service
When considering this you need to ask yourself whether your customers will notice your offer? A great marketing campaign means that your offer sells itself, so the product has the right features, it’s priced appropriately, marketed to the right market and can be accessed easily and efficiently by those who want it. In summary to get it right you need to sell the right product to the right people, for the right price at the right time.
Depending on who you ask there are several ways to effectively promote your offer however there seems to be some consistency with the experts in that you should cover off the following areas:
Conduct market research so that you know the market, your customers and your product
Profile your target markets or in other words know your customer
Identify your unique selling position or why you are different/ better than other offers
Develop your business brand so your customers can identify what you offer
Choose the way/s that you will market your offer’
Set your goals and budget so that you effectively use your resources and work out whether your campaign works
Build a loyal customer base by delivering on what you promise, adding value and rewarding them for choosing you
Monitor and review with the intent to change and/or finesse where it makes sense
Drilling down further into what makes a campaign stand-out, there’s a few key things that you need to get right and these include:
Tell a (True) Story About Your Product. Many product marketers fall into the trap of selling the product, not the experience. No one wants your product, they just want a solution to their problem. So tell a story about your products, but don’t just make one up – involve your potential customers by taking them behind the scenes.
Don’t Work Against Your Brand Perception (or Product Category). Many product marketing campaigns fail as they sometimes go too far outside their market’s perception. For example McDonalds has tried in the past to go upmarket or healthy which hasn’t worked, as customer don’t think of them this way.
Do What Your Competitors Won’t Do. Nike is a great example of this especially in it’s early days, when it was competing against Adidas and Reebok. As history shows they took a massive gamble with Michael Jordan which paid off making them the most successful brand in the NBA. The takeaway is to try something new and be willing to fail. Your competitors want to “play it safe” and do the same old thing because they’re afraid they’ll lose their market position and never regain it.
Market to Your Existing Customers. Too much attention is paid on attracting new customers at the expense of your existing loyal ones. Banks in Australia are a perfect example of this offering special offers only to new customers. This doesn’t make sense, as it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer rather than a new one. The key learning here is that you don’t necessarily need to find a brand-new audience to increase product sales. You can increase demand even among your loyal fans.
New Product? Try a New Brand Name. If you have multiple products, create a completely new brand. Yes, you won’t have the built-in name recognition. But you’ll overcome the barrier that causes your market to think you can’t possibly do different products well.
Make an Exciting Promise – that You Actually Deliver On. A “big promise” will make a difference to your customers. Product marketers have to make promises to get people excited about trying new things. But if your promise is a lie, you’ll be in trouble because today’s consumers will read reviews at Amazon and other websites to see how well your product actually works. Making a promise, without delivering, means you’ll only survive until your market figures that out.
Fail Fast and Move On. The culture of innovation is a big factor in successful businesses. A very successful bank that I worked for used to say that for every 10 initiatives, 8 would fail, however the 2 that succeeded would pay for those other 8. If you’re always trying new things, it’s OK if some of them fail.
In Product Marketing, Big Risks Can Mean Big Rewards. Businesses that take risks not only recover, they often become enduring cultural icons. And it’s due in large part to their willingness to integrate these lessons into their operations.
We’ll explore this further within the guides, however this should help you get started.