There are two cans of soda on a table. One is a Coca-Cola can, and the other is a cheaper, white label cola brand. Which do you choose?

You’ll probably choose Coke because it’s more familiar. It’s the safer bet. 

Coca-Cola has brand equity that makes people gravitate towards it. With the right framework, any startup can achieve this in their industry.

In this article, you’ll understand what brand equity is and how to build it so your audience reaches for your product, service, or solution over the rest.

Why brand equity matters now more than ever

Every day in the U.S., almost 12,000 new business applications are submitted. In the SaaS industry alone, it’s estimated that every company founded in 2019 had around ten competitors on average.

If you haven’t invested in brand awareness and built connections, why should anybody choose you over all that competition? 

Without brand equity, you can’t tap into a customer’s “consideration span” when they’re ready to buy.

Invest in relationships so when the time comes, your audience will instinctively choose your solution to fill their need.

Take Shopify. It’s one of many ecommerce software platforms on the market but only the fifth most popular by market share.

It’s also not the cheapest ecommerce platform: Squarespace plans start at $12 per month, Woocommerce has a completely free plan, and Shopify’s plans start at $30 per month.

Yet, in 2021, Shopify posted record sales, growing 113% year-over-year and doubling in brand value to $828 million. Squarespace on the other hand, grew 24%.

Why did entrepreneurs turn to Shopify to launch their start-ups and not one of the more widely used and cheaper platforms like Squarespace or WooCommerce?

Brand equity. 

Since its launch in 2006, Shopify has positioned itself as the best solution for small-end and startup entrepreneurs.

Whereas, Squarespace’s value proposition is more about building a beautiful website.

Shopify has also funneled a ton of resources into educating its audience and helping them succeed.

Its tools are designed for beginners and its brand marketing focuses on helping would-be entrepreneurs build successful businesses, as evidenced by their Quickstart Guides: 

And its customer stories, which act as social proof to show customers what people like them have achieved on the platform: 

Shopify boasts 891K followers on Instagram, compared to Squarespace’s 294K followers and WooCoommerce’s 36.3K followers.

Studies show that only 5% of B2B customers are ready to buy. To grow a brand, you have to be familiar to the other 95%. When they’re in the market, they’ll remember you.

This is why Shopify doesn’t have to be the most widely used platform or try to compete on price. It builds brand equity with its entrepreneur audience by sharing helpful resources and creating a community of like-minded business builders.

Building brand equity helps businesses compete through brand-relevant memories. It grows your brand by investing in future buyers, while lowering CAC (less spend on ads) and increasing ROI.

What brand equity looks like, as demonstrated by customers

So, why do people gravitate towards Coke instead of the cheaper alternative brand?

Trust.

It’s the reason that 69% of people buy from a brand they know over one that gets better reviews. 

It’s also why companies can charge a premium for products even when they can’t demonstrate their superiority. And it’s why three-quarters of people will stay loyal to a brand, even if another starts trending. 

Brand equity helps build the relationships between the perceived benefits and perceived costs that people relate to that product. That consumer perception can be positive or negative.

If consumer perception is positive, it indicates that:

• They’ve heard of you
• You’ve built trust

Brands that have built positive brand equity can usually charge a premium. Negative brand equity, on the other hand, means customers would be willing to spend more on a generic product than a well-known brand. 

Negative equity often happens following major recalls, or when a company causes some publicized CSR crisis. It’s why reputation management and following good business practices is a critical but unseen part of a company’s brand.

You don’t have to have been a HubSpot customer to know they’re a go-to company if you ever need a reliable CRM. 

HubSpot built brand equity through community-building, blog posts, social media marketing, and its HubSpot Academy. 

HubSpot has built its brand to over 100,000 customers and $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in 2020. Despite the uncertainty of the times, companies believed in HubSpot and used the CRM to scale their businesses.

Their appreciation of the business didn’t go unappreciated:

On brand building, Intuit co-founder Scott Cook once said:

“A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is, it is what consumers tell each other it is.”

If you’re creating a brand people like, they’ll be happy to sing your praises on social media and in forums.

Take this thread from the Superpath community, where a marketer is seeking some insights on Clearscope and SEMrush. 

By delivering a positive experience, Clearscope has created customer loyalty. This has produced an army of community advocates.

Every word-of-mouth recommendation that Clearscope receives strengthens brand equity. That’s because 90% of people are much more likely to trust a recommended brand, even if that recommendation is from a stranger. 

In this example, HubSpot engages with praise and feedback it receives, strengthening customer relationships:

While the internet has enabled people to advocate for the brands they love, it’s also empowered them to share negative feedback and lodge complaints.

Sprout Social research shows that only 8% of dissatisfied customers would stay quiet on an issue, and 47% of those voicing their opinions and experiences do so on social media. 

Every complaint posted publicly is seen by a person’s friends and followers. And the further a post spreads, the bigger the dent it can make in your brand equity. Stay ahead of this by responding to negative feedback immediately.

Trello works hard across its social media accounts to address complaints and feedback from its target audience:

More than four in five people expect a brand to respond to social media comments in a day or less. Trello counters any negative impact the original comment has made on people browsing YouTube comments by getting involved early. 

Trello is only able to do this because it’s using social listening to gauge and manage brand sentiment. It only takes a single bad review to strip away your competitive advantage.

The components of brand equity (and how to build and acquire them)

When it comes time to decide where to allocate resources to build brand equity, it seems like the best way forward would be to drive a brand awareness campaign.

But if your market is crowded, you’ll need to stand out with more than just recognition. You’ll need to build an emotional connection, too.

In the current landscape, it’s important to both create a strong positive emotional response and to be instantly recognizable. 

When something new and disruptive is around the corner, achieving recognition and connection is critical to establishing long-lasting brand equity. 

To do this, revisit your branding strategy.

1. Brand awareness

Become the top-of-mind brand by tapping into what makes your audience tick. 

• Reverse engineer customer behavior by digging into your existing data to find out how they interact with your business. Ask: What resonates with the target audience? Which current marketing tactics get the most engagement? What images and messaging inspires action?

• Talk directly to your customer base. Use surveys and courtesy calls to establish how customers found out about you, and what they most like (and dislike) about your brand and products. 

• Employ social listening to find out what people are saying about your brand online. 

Use this information to drive your marketing and create campaigns that people want to share and shout about online.

At this stage, the aim is to achieve brand recognition, so focus on value.

One way to do this is through useful content. Document collaboration tool Bit.ai, for example, created a resource to help its target audience make an onboarding checklist:

Not only does this offer tangible benefits (people learn how to create a checklist), it helps position Bit.ai as a helpful, authoritative brand. 

For readers, when the time comes to purchase a document collaboration solution, they’ll remember Bit.ai as the brand that helped them solve a problem. 

Another way is by giving away something for free, such as a trial period or tool. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer is a standalone tool to help marketers improve their headlines.

Right now, marketers are looking to spruce up their headlines. Further down the line, they might be looking to improve their entire marketing campaign. 

And when comparing options, which is going to be more appealing? A brand they’re seeing for the first time in SERPs, or the brand that helped craft a great headline a few months ago? 

2. Positioning

Brand positioning is hard work. Offering a great product or service isn’t enough—that’s table stakes. It takes work to discover what your actual value is to your customer and how you should sit in the mind of your customer.

Once you’ve settled on a position, you need to commit to it consistently. Create a consistent brand message that conveys your core values and mission across every channel so that people know who you are and how you’re different from the competition. 

For example, Toggl is a set of tools designed to help teams work more effectively:

Its USP for its most popular tool, Toggl Track, fits in with the company’s mission to be effective, empowering, and effortless. 

And as any great positioning statement should, it makes it clear who the product is for (teams) and backs it up with substance: “Reliable time tracking software loved by 5M+ users.”

Establish your message by nailing the following four elements:

1. USP. Come up with a compelling unique selling proposition that combines what your customers want with what you do well. Toggl’s target audience wants to work more productively; Toggl Track helps them do this. This is communicated in its USP: “Time tracking for better work, not overwork.”

2. Your target audience. Use customer personas, social listening, voice of customer research, and surveys to learn your audience’s interests, goals, and pain points 

3. Your story. Listen to what your customers say to identify what they consider most important. Then, tell stories that speak to those values to build an emotional connection 

4. Your message strategy guidelines. Develop guidelines that set out how your team will create materials. These should include your mission statement, USP, value proposition, and brand pillars. Build everything from your product to your brand marketing campaigns with these guidelines to ensure your position and messaging are consistent across every platform.

3. Relationships

Give people a reason to gravitate towards your brand from their earliest interactions by showing them you’re a safe bet.

This can be done with social proof in the form of reviews or customer stories, or with brand associations. 

Buffer, for instance, lists its marketing partners and clients on its homepage.

The marketing partners speak for themselves. However, even if you’re not familiar with these client brands, that eight other companies have trusted, Buffer gives them enough credibility to warrant consideration. 

A similar effect can be had by working with influencers.

Take Wix, which partnered with influencers like Karlie Kloss to create instructional ads on YouTube.

If you’re a fan of Karlie Kloss or are familiar with her work, knowing that she uses Wix for a website immediately builds a degree of trust in the platform. It also gives Wix brand equity over competitors that aren’t using similar tactics. 

Trust-building and trust-maintenance are both important. Track and listen to conversations around your brand and become an active voice in the community. Thank customers for their praise and address their concerns, like in the HubSpot and Trello examples. 

Every touchpoint is an opportunity to influence and build sentiment toward your brand. From experiences with your website to conversations with you on email and live chat, to how you reward them for their loyalty, every interaction point needs your attention. 

4. Storytelling

Brands use stories in a variety of ways: to be funny, to incite a movement. Ultimately, the goal of storytelling is to resonate with your audience and build connections in their memories.

“Tell me the facts and I’ll learn. Tell me the truth and I’ll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” – Ed Sabol

Good brand storytelling can stir emotions and encourage audiences to make recommendations.

Regardless of industry or medium, compelling stories share the same fundamental elements: 

• Plot and conflict. A series of events and actions that relate to the struggle between protagonist and antagonist.
• Characters. The hero of the story (protagonist) and who or what they’re faced with (antagonist).
• Setting. The time and place that the story happens, brought to life by landscape, scenery, buildings, seasons, or weather. 
• Theme. A central idea or belief that defines the purpose of your story and why you’re telling it.

For example, in this Mailchimp presents story broken down by Erica Schneider in her guide to business storytelling, the main character is a software developer. The plot is focused on him trying to successfully work from home, but he’s facing conflict from constant interruptions that are derailing a video call. 

It’s a universal story that Mailchimp’s audience of entrepreneurs can relate to. They can see themselves in it. This helps to create an emotional connection. 

In crafting your narrative, follow the tried and tested guidelines of storytelling, as laid out in Pixar’s 22 rules, which say that all great stories are:

• Universal
• Have a clear structure and purpose
• Have an easy to root for underdog
• Appeal to our deepest emotions
• Challenge our perceptions
• Simple and focused

Measuring the impact of brand equity

Brand equity is difficult to measure because it works with the intangible, like feelings and familiarity. There’s no metric to measure customers’ emotional responses and what impact those subjective emotions have on your business. 

You can get a general feel for how your brand is being received by using social listening tools. There are other brand awareness metrics you can measure to build out this picture, including:

• Direct traffic. The number of people typing your website URL into the search bar
• Overall traffic. The number of people viewing your content and spending time on your website
• Social engagement. The number of people liking, commenting, following, reviewing, and sharing your content across social media.

These won’t, however, tell you the financial impact these measures are having on your bottom line. For this, look at figures such as:

• Average transaction value. The total value of all transactions divided by the number of transactions over a set period (e.g., week, month, year). So, if sales of $200,000 were generated from 10 transactions in a year, the average transaction value would be $20,000. 

• Customer lifetime value (LTV). The retention value of your customers, which can be calculated by multiplying customer value times the average customer lifespan. (Customer value is the average number of purchases times the average purchase value.)

• Customer acquisition cost. Analyze how much it costs to acquire each customer by dividing your total marketing spend by your number of new customers over a given period.

• Adoption of loyalty and referral programs. A growing number of sign-ups indicates brand resonance. If numbers are dipping year-on-year (or over a set period), it may be a sign that equity is suffering.

• Market share. Calculate your market position to see how you stack up against your direct competitors. This is done by dividing total sales of a product line or industry by sales of your company over the same period. 

While these metrics aren’t wholly representative of brand equity (pricing, product features, and product quality will all influence sales, for example), positive numbers act as indicators that your brand is hitting the right notes with customers. 

Conclusion

Positive brand equity is a protective fortress for your brand. Your products might not always be the cheapest, newest, or trendiest, but if you give people a reason to care, you’ll be rewarded with advocacy and loyalty.

To become and stay relevant, listen to your target customer. Find out their desires and pain points. Establish what makes you different and tell stories that create emotional connections.

To learn how to build your brand’s equity, check out CXL’s Brand Marketing Minidegree.

The post What is Brand Equity in Marketing? (How to Become Memorable) appeared first on CXL.

Humans love shortcuts to decision-making. Brands do that. 

More than three-quarters of consumers (76%) say they would buy from a brand they feel connected to over a competitor. 

Building that connection with customers requires a clear brand strategy to define why you exist and a solid marketing strategy to communicate that purpose with your customers.

In this article, you’ll learn how to design a successful brand marketing campaign that expresses your brand’s core values, create content your customers crave, and ensure your entire brand ecosystem is designed to support customer loyalty.

Understanding brand strategy vs. marketing strategy

Your business strategy is the roadmap that details your business goals and the actions you will—and will not—take to reach those goals. It sets your priorities and guides all decision-making across the business.

For example, at global employment platform Indeed, one of their values is “Job seeker first.” This means that every job matters, even if they don’t make money from it. It also means that they’ll seek out and post every job they can find because that’s what is best for the job seeker. 

Indeed’s values drive the business, not the other way around. If it were, they would only seek out the most lucrative positions for the highest commission.

Sticking to their values has helped them attract over 250 million job seekers every month. Employers recognize this too, so many of them make sure to post their jobs with Indeed.

A clearly defined business strategy allows you to set your brand strategy. Your marketing strategy is what amplifies that brand.

Brand strategy: Defining why you exist in the world

Your brand is how the world sees your business. It’s your reputation and ultimate differentiating factor. Getting your brand strategy right is critical to gaining and keeping customer attention.

The most important part of brand strategy is to define what your brand stands for: your purpose, core values, and brand positioning. Defining this helps people understand what you do and creates those shortcuts when it comes time to make a decision.

Brand also helps customers understand themselves and gives them a way to self-identify. Customers like to buy from brands that represent their ideal selves. This is called self-congruity, and it helps customers build strong emotional connections to brands that help them reflect the person they wish to be.

You can encourage these connections by shaping your brand purpose and values around your customers’ desired personality and lifestyle.

If you have a global brand, this might mean different things in different markets. Your brand might need to shape its strategy to be relevant depending on where you’re marketing.

Indeed’s German branch was struggling to close sales because they had no awareness in that market. After running a culturally relevant marketing campaign, Indeed rose to number one in traffic and sales in Germany. 

Indeed’s CMO Paul D’Arcy says their priority is brand awareness and reducing friction:

“The number one thing we’re doing is making sure that that product is everywhere and a click away when people are looking for a job or looking to hire.” [via The Drum]

Brand focuses on the big picture—the story you tell to your customers to show how you understand them and their pain points. Deciding on this starts with your “why,” which we’ll cover in a moment.

Brand strategy isn’t just for marketers and their campaigns. It supports long-term company growth by helping every department, from sales to product and customer success, align on the company’s priorities.

Marketing strategy and marketing plan: Reaching and attracting customers

Your marketing strategy is a function of your brand strategy. Brand sets the long-term direction, and marketing outlines the shorter-term actions (which tactics you will use to communicate key messages with your customers). 

Marketing initiatives include campaigns, content, PR, and interactions with your target audience or customer. 

Your organization may require multiple marketing plans at once, with each aimed at reaching different personas within your audience or working in service of different products and services. 

The brand strategy has some roots. Once you decide your brand strategy, you should stay the course to build brand equity. (However, don’t be afraid to pivot when change is needed.)

The marketing strategy is continuously in flux.

You might update your marketing strategy in response to campaign performance, customer needs, external trends and events, budgets, and even competitors’ tactics. 

Take one of the biggest events that many brands have faced yet, the COVID-19 pandemic. Most brands had to immediately pivot their marketing strategy to stay relevant to their customers. 

Their brand values, purpose, and mission remained, but several marketing campaigns were dropped for new ones.

Ads began to feature people in masks, on video calls with family and friends, and staying at home.

Like Yellow’s “Robyn’s Undies” campaign featuring a new business owner and her husband working out of their home:

Branding and marketing overlap slightly in the visual expression of your brand. Your brand strategy should set your brand’s visual identity, and your marketing strategy should incorporate that brand identity into your campaigns.

How business, brand, and marketing strategy work together

Effective integration of these three strategies requires that each informs the others in a top-down fashion: business strategy first, then brand, then marketing. 

Brand strategy cannot effectively communicate a brand with a muddled business strategy, the same way a marketing plan is useless without a brand strategy to set its direction. 

All three strategies rely on a deep understanding of the customer and a clear vision of the organization’s purpose. Build customer research into each and ensure your marketing activities speak to what customers actually need. 

Use marketing as the vehicle to communicate your brand

Most business buyers (95%) are not currently in the market to buy, according to research from the B2B Institute and Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

With such a small cohort of possible buyers at any given time, messages that only aim to move customers closer to purchase fall flat, or worse, overwhelm and annoy potential customers, who are exposed to thousands of ads per day.

Targeting exists to help you reach the buyers who are in-market right now. But those buyers are unlikely to consider your brand if they are unfamiliar with it.

To get their attention, pay attention to the details. Use market research, owned data, industry reports, and market trends to identify what it is that your customers truly value in your brand. 

Build your brand from the inside out to ensure it’s consistently delivered everywhere your customer comes into contact with your company.

Every touchpoint is an opportunity to build or subtract brand equity from your brand.

Create a touchpoint map to find out where these places are. These outline every interaction a customer might have with your brand along their journey.

Invite team members to brainstorm and document touchpoints with you. Then focus on the touchpoints where your brand needs work to fit that consistent brand image. 

Don’t overcomplicate things with new touchpoints—strategically add brand value to the ones that need it, instead. 

Marketers should focus on becoming and remaining the top-of-mind option for customers when they are ready to buy, rather than wasting energy and resources trying to convince out-of-market buyers. 

This requires a shift from marketing designed for short-term gratification to marketing that takes a long-term view. Marketers must adjust their expectations and metrics with expanded brand tracking. 

A focus on brand awareness and brand lift, while harder to measure with numbers and revenue, contributes to overall growth by widening your customer base and deepening your relationship with them.

That’s not to say we should all abandon performance marketing altogether. Instead, we must challenge performance and brand marketers to work together to drive business growth.

The 3 components of a brand marketing strategy

By setting a strong brand strategy, you’ve already done the hard work to define your brand’s story. That strategy and story serve as the backbone of a successful brand marketing campaign.

Stay relevant with your customer using the right channels and tactics to deliver on the promises outlined in your brand strategy.

In practice, this requires marketers to: 

• Build and maintain trust with customers by expressing your brand values;
• Ensure your brand stays top-of-mind through creative that gets noticed and remembered;
• Build brand affinity with your customers through positive brand experiences.

Laying the foundation: Understanding and expressing your brand purpose and values

Successful brand marketing relies on a clearly defined brand purpose and strong brand values to guide your team’s decision-making.

Rooting your brand marketing efforts in your purpose and values helps generate long-term affinity and trust by showing your customers what sets you apart and why they should trust you.

Trust drives purchasing decisions. According to Edelman research, 88% of consumers say trust is an important factor when deciding which brands to use.

Winning brands start with a “why.” They have a purpose beyond just making money. 

That brand purpose or mission statement should not just be an internal north star. It should be clear, pithy, externally oriented, and enduring.

A few examples.

• Sonder: “Eliminating inefficiencies as we grow to deliver hospitality that’s both remarkable and accessible. Because everyone should be able to afford an extraordinary place to stay.”
• LEGO: “Inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.”
• Tableau: “We help people see and understand data.”
• Glassdoor: “To help people everywhere find a job and company they love.”

To understand your “why,” ask: what sets your brand apart? How would the world be worse off without your brand in it? This is usually something your CEO should contribute to.

Brand values answer your “how.” As in, how will we act in service of our purpose? What do we stand for?

Values help make decisions clear. They help guide and shape your brand’s standards, beliefs, behaviors, expectations, and motivations.

Your values must be credible and contextualized. Savvy buyers can see right through values that only exist on paper.

Clearly define your values in the context of your organization. How do you live up to your values and ensure they permeate throughout your culture?

Identify and articulate your brand values with these practical steps:

• Workshop your values and create a list that everyone in your company can vote on.
• Give the winners to a copywriter to make them compelling and align with voice-of-customer. Give them a contextual subheader or short paragraph in the brief to help them get started. 
• Test the brand values and messaging you come up with. Think of situations your company has been in in the past, or might face, and check that they would actually help you make decisions. If not, keep working on them.

If you already have your brand values, or if you’re ready to test them, ask these questions:

• Are they guiding, clear, and unique? 
• Do they correlate with the experience you want to deliver?
• Do they capture the essence of your culture and brand? Survey your employee base to find out if your values are authentic.
• Do they set you apart from similar companies?
• Do they help your employees know how to act?
• Do they inspire behaviors that will help you differentiate?
• Are they credible, and can they be consistently applied?

Salesforce exemplifies proving its commitment to its brand values by contextualizing them:

Adding context on how each value shows up in their organization and a link to learn more about how Salesforce delivers on the value. This extra insight reinforces the idea that Salesforce truly builds its values into its culture and ways of working.

Brand purpose and brand values cannot exist solely on a company’s website. They should guide all brand marketing activities, from what you say to how you say it.

Brand messaging: Create content that engages your customers and sticks with them

Successful brand marketing campaigns show your customers that you understand them. Rather than action-oriented content designed to sell your product, brand marketing content should be memorable, valuable, or simply entertaining. It’s more about building a positive association with your brand than pushing customers to take action.

1. Deliver on a need

Content that teaches, rather than sells, reinforces your brand’s authority as an expert. A deep understanding of your customer and their pain points allows you to create content your customers actually care about.

Consider ServiceNow, a software company that aims to “make work, work better for people with modern digital workflows.”

Its target customers are likely only purchasing software solutions every few years, but the brand stays relevant by producing thought leadership that is of clear value to business leaders.

In partnership with the Wall Street Journal, ServiceNow released a series of branded content that covers topics like low-code IT solutions, workflows, and the habits of agile companies. 

These articles aren’t necessarily designed to push business decision-makers to purchase their products, but they do elevate ServiceNow’s authority and expertise.

Partnerships with respected third parties, like publishers, opinion leaders, or other organizations can add an additional degree of credibility to your message as well.  

2. Elevate your values

Kantar research shows 68% of consumers expect brands to be clear about their values. Being explicit about what your brand stands for and why they should trust you is now the lowest bar.

Today’s consumers are more attracted to brands that make the world a better place than ones that make them better people (63% to 37% respectively, according to Edleman research). 

This is largely due to the younger generation entering the market and making more global goal-oriented decisions. Use this to guide your values-based messaging.

Buffer is a company with deep-rooted values. The company lists its values on its website with a note about its purpose: 

“We want to build a different type of company that’s focused not only on the bottom line, but also the happiness of our customers and team, and our personal growth along the journey.”

That first value, transparency, is especially important. The company goes a layer deeper into why this value matters and how they live up to that value with clear language on the site:

Each element of the transparency value is clickable, allowing site visitors to investigate each element further.

Buffer consistently creates content that speaks to its values, which it posts to social media and its Open blog about remote work culture. 

Stories like these two about the company’s pay analysis and process give the company a platform to express the ways it lives up to its values like transparency. It also demonstrates leadership from Buffer by being so transparent.

To stay culturally relevant, speed matters. The majority of respondents in Edleman’s 2021 Trust Barometer Report expect brands to issue a timely response following major news events.

3. Tell a good story that sticks with them

Brands can establish an emotional connection with their customers through storytelling, which builds a narrative using an artful blend of data and emotions.

Storytelling is personal. It creates relationships and provides value to customers, as Carla Piñyero Sublett, IBM’s SVP and chief marketing officer says:

“As B2B marketers … our number one responsibility is to create relationships and add value. That’s not going to happen by peppering LinkedIn inboxes, chasing with banner ads, or flooding inboxes. We need to create more of that pull than a push by educating and inspiring customers through right storytelling.” 

Narrative can be an extremely effective tool for brand marketing because it not only holds an audience’s attention and cultivates intrigue, but also helps people remember information.

Jennifer Aaker, a professor of marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, says that people remember information when it is weaved into narratives “up to 22 times more than facts alone.”

Brand content that leverages storytelling can help reinforce your customer’s recall of your brand.

Some brands create storytelling in partnership with publishers, as HBO did when it teamed up with The Atlantic to create a branded content piece about its limited series, Watchmen.

While it is an advertisement for a TV show, the brand and the show are not the central focus of the piece. Instead, it tells a story of the forgotten history of Tulsa, Oklahoma—a history and place that serves as the backdrop and the setting of the show.

The story unfolds across several panels of content in the style of a graphic novel.

This approach is unexpected from a brand looking to drive engagement with its services. It de-centers the brand in favor of telling a story that audiences can appreciate. 

This shift is what makes it so memorable: storytelling that prioritizes the customer over the brand helps build trust and affinity.

Whichever approach you choose, creating content with authenticity and consistency is key. Authenticity is easy when guided by your brand values; consistency ensures you’re capturing awareness.

Post regularly on social media, engage with your audience, and keep an eye on how your content is performing to understand where you can optimize current and future content.

Perfect the message, and don’t get stuck on the medium. You can easily tailor content to each of your brand platforms. 

Developing a brand ecosystem and brand experiences that drive client loyalty

Your brand marketing strategy must encompass your entire customer experience. This determines how much your audience trusts you and how likely they are to be loyal to your brand.

Half of customers say they would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience, according to Zendesk, and that number jumps to 80% when customers have more than one bad experience.

To create a consistent brand experience, you must understand and prioritize all of your brand touchpoints.

Conduct a brand audit to compile all of the ways a customer interacts with your company. Consider any action a customer might take in service of specific goals. Is your platform designed to make that action simple, or is it unnecessarily complicated?

Be an advocate for your customer. All brand marketing activities should have a clear purpose and a clear value. Consider audience research to unearth your blind spots and learn the voice of your customer (how they’re talking about your solution).

Simplify the user experience whenever possible by removing friction (e.g., help them get to your solution in as few clicks as possible). 

Evaluate each touchpoint to ensure the messaging is true to your brand. Consistency is key; a sudden change to your brand language or even the look and feel of a piece of content can erode trust with a customer.

The goal is for every interaction with your brand to deepen your customers’ connection. Understand what your customers want and need—and deliver on it.

Conclusion 

As author Stephen King once said, “A product can be quickly outdated, but a successful brand is timeless.” 

Getting your brand right is essential. And expressing that brand through marketing is what helps your brand stay top-of-mind for your customers, increasing the odds that they’ll think of you when they’re ready to buy.

To learn more about marketing strategies from top experts, take CXL’s Marketing Strategy course.

To build a strategic brand from the inside out, check out CXL’s Brand Marketing Minidegree.

The post Brand Strategy vs. Marketing Strategy (And How they Work Together) appeared first on CXL.

Founded in 2015, revenue intelligence startup Gong is now valued at $7.25 billion. They’ve grown to attract big-name clients like LinkedIn, PayPal, and Shopify, mostly through social media channels rather than organic search.

Gong is an excellent example of a company dedicated to finding the best content marketing fit and delivering insights that resonate in formats that engage.

In this article, you’ll learn how to use social media brand marketing to build a well-known brand and grow your business.

Why social media is one of the best approaches to building your brand

People spend an average of 145 minutes on social media every day. And users say that social media has increased their access to information, ease of communication, and freedom of expression.

Sprout Social research shows that 55% of people learn about new brands on social networks, and 68% agree that they enable them to interact with companies. 

With potential customers spending so much time engaging and absorbing information on social platforms, it’s an obvious place to gain awareness and build positive relationships with your brand.

Social media lets you get close to your target audience and build relationships that put your brand top-of-mind when they need you. It also helps you learn about your audience, gaining qualitative insights that help you understand their unique pain points and how you can solve them.

It’s how people are using these channels that makes social critical to brand perception and business growth. 

Refine Labs CEO, Chris Walker, summed this up perfectly in an appearance on UserGems’ “The First 100 Days” podcast:

“The reality is buyers trust their peers way more than the results they get. They know there are affiliate links. They know there’s pay-to-play stuff. They know that the vendor’s blog isn’t objective. And so, when people are making buying decisions, they make those searches elsewhere. They make those searches in places where their peers are: a Slack community, a Reddit channel, a Facebook group, a direct message, an email, or a Zoom. They talk to somebody that they trust more than the results they get in Google.”

These places where people hang out, learn, share content, and form opinions about brands are what’s known as “dark social.”

When someone shares your YouTube video on Twitter, you can track that metric.

What you can’t track as easily are “dark social” shares that increase your brand awareness. Around 77.5% of all shares happen organically (e.g., via a WhatsApp group chat or an email to a colleague) and are amplified by word-of-mouth. Of the remaining shares, 7.5% happen on Facebook and 3.1% on Twitter. 

This is the kind of hyper-personalized social sharing you need to build your brand.

In a New York Times study, a research group looked at the psychology of sharing. It found that 73% of people process information more deeply, thoroughly, and thoughtfully when they share it. 85% of people also said that reading other people’s responses helped them understand information and events. 

“Sharing information helps me do my job. I remember products and information sources better when I share them and am more likely to use them.” – Anonymous study participant 

When people share your content with like-minded groups on social media, it helps build affiliation and keeps you top-of-mind. These are key ingredients in building a brand people care about. 

Develop a social media marketing strategy that nurtures relationships

Your social media marketing strategy should tie back to your brand’s goals. This is the value that you’re trying to get from your social media marketing efforts.

For example, your goal could be to increase customer satisfaction scores. The strategy you build around this goal would look completely different to a strategy built around driving free trial sign-ups.

Once you know your goal, there are two approaches to take to a social media strategy: meeting demand and generating demand:

• Meeting demand tries to discover what’s out there already and respond to it to stay relevant to the target market. It’s about injecting yourself into the conversation.
  
• Generating demand makes the story more about your brand. It’s about trying to create a conversation yourself. 

Meeting demand is much easier out of the gate than generating demand. It’s also easier to measure. Generating demand is more challenging to get right.

It’s less granular and harder to measure (a lot of shares happen through dark social). But it generates greater reward when your brand has created a conversation that puts you front of mind for months to come.

You can blend the two across different social media channels, but you’ll more likely want to select one or the other as your primary means of engaging with your audience.

No matter how you choose to approach your content creation, make sure it’s something worth sharing. Impressions and likes are not inconsequential, but sharing content improves activity performance and creates a bond with your customers. It does this by building brand equity and aiding recall. 

The New York Times study also looked at what drives people to share content. It identified five key motivations that reveal sharing is all about relationships:

When developing your strategy, think about the kinds of content that will help your customers enrich the lives of others, connect with others like them, and feel valued in their own circles.

1. Choose the right social media platforms 

Focus only on social networks that progress your brand marketing goals and objectives. If your audience isn’t active on a platform, it makes no sense to spend your marketing budget there.

Embrace trial and error (and testing) to establish whether a platform meets your long-term brand marketing objectives. Use data to validate this.

Look at your audience demographics:

• Who are they?
• What age are they?
• What is their job role?
• What are their interests?
• What problems are they looking to solve?

Take this information and dig deeper to understand what your audience is saying about your industry and products and where they’re discussing them. 

Find out where you’re most likely to get in front of the right people by:

• Looking at social demographic data;
• Running competitive analysis to identify which platforms your rivals are using;
• Carrying out surveys and customer calls to ask people which platforms they use to interact with brands.

If you are targeting women between the ages of 30 and 49, Pew Research Center’s social demographic data reveals you should look into Facebook:

Most brands operate across more than one channel. But the idea is to focus your efforts where your audience is and tie everything back to your objectives.

2. Create brand consistency at every touchpoint

Customers tend to evaluate their options on several channels before buying. Your brand must be consistent across these touchpoints to maintain trust.

But if each social platform has different audiences and intentions, how do you create consistency? 

Build a value proposition and a sub-brand for each channel.

By creating a sub-brand for each channel with a sub-voice, you can maintain your brand values and purpose while communicating in the best way for the audience on that platform.

Cross-posting without considering the audience puts your content at risk of not getting seen or shared, which is a waste of resources. 

The overall aim with consistency is not to be identical on each platform, but to maintain your brand’s purpose and build trust. 

In a world where trust in the media is at an all-time low, people are turning to brands to fill the void:

“Businesses build institutional trust on honesty and consistency through transparent messaging and authentically caring about their customers. Because so many other institutions are falling short in these areas, this is where businesses, whether big or small, can pick up the pieces and fill the trust gap.” – Pamela N. Danziger [via Forbes]

Brand trust is now one of the biggest considerations people have when making a purchase. It’s also a key ingredient for turning customers into advocates.

Earn trust by sticking to your brand’s purpose and creating your brand’s value proposition for each channel to maintain consistency. 

Take Gong’s LinkedIn content:

Each social media post, even when it includes a video or infographic, features Gong’s brand tone of voice. But the style of written posts is also consistent within the platform.

Moving over to Instagram, their brand is instantly recognizable with their use of all caps and business-building purpose:

They feature more photography, especially people-based images, on Instagram because that’s the best practice on that platform.

On LinkedIn, they share mostly text-based posts and infographics or webinar clips while maintaining their brand message and purpose. In a feed full of brands vying for attention, this familiarity makes customers (and potential customers) stop and take notice.

Build your brand value propositions for each channel with your main brand guidelines in mind (the rules related to your message, positioning, and brand identity). 

Find the balance between reaching your audience, meeting their intentions, and maintaining brand consistency. Use this to build your sub-brand framework that every digital marketing campaign must follow.

3. Maintain posting cadence

To stay top-of-mind, extend consistency to how often you share content.

Posting cadence can be a tricky thing to get right. You don’t want to overwhelm followers or come across as inauthentic and dilute your brand. You also don’t want followers to overlook you or forget about you.

Research from Hootsuite suggests the ideal number of times to post on the major social platforms are as follows:

• On Instagram, post between three and seven times per week;
• On Facebook, post between one and two times a day;
• On Twitter, post between one and five tweets a day;
• On LinkedIn, post between one and five times a day.

What works for one brand doesn’t always work for another, so these numbers represent where to begin your testing. 

Aim for consistency over frequency, and quality over quantity, as Jay Baer reinforces at Convince and Convert:

“The best social media publishing frequency is: when it’s worthwhile.”

The best practice is to create a social media posting plan and stick to it.

The content Gong posts to its Instagram feed is a mix of sales tips, social proof, themed-based content (e.g., related to a holiday or cause), and light-hearted posts.

It loosely follows the “4-1-1 rule,” popularized by Joe Pulizzi at Content Marketing Institute. The rule suggests publishing four educational or entertaining posts for every one soft promotion or hard promotion post.

Valuable content builds your brand. Promotional posts work to capitalize on their success. 

A content calendar will keep you organized. It will also give you a bird’s-eye view of what you’re sending so that content doesn’t become repetitive or stale.

When CoSchedule began using a social media calendar to promote posts consistently, it found that clicks to a single piece of content increased by 3150%:

Posting on a regular schedule helps you harness the repetition principle. This works on the basis that if something happens often enough, people will eventually be persuaded. 

Repetition creates a pattern, which first grabs attention and then creates the comfort of familiarity.

Monitor results to learn when people are most likely to engage with your posts. 

What signifies meaningful engagement is somewhat of a sticking point: headline metrics given by social media platforms are not usually as valuable as they appear.

For example, “views” on Facebook can be very short (three seconds). Videos on the platform also autoplay as users scroll, so don’t consider Facebook’s view count meaningful. 

This is where an external social media analytics platform, like Sprout Social, can help qualify metrics like views, likes, shares, saves, etc.

Your posting schedule shouldn’t replace an active social media presence. Building a brand on social media requires your participation. This means joining conversations and responding to feedback. 

One of the reasons Lessonly, a corporate training platform by Seismic, has been able to grow its brand on Twitter and LinkedIn is because of team members like Marketing SVP Kyle Lacy posting and engaging with his own followers.

He strengthens audience relationships with every comment he responds to. People who trust Kyle are more likely to trust Lessonly.

Your customers want to hear from and interact with the leaders and employees behind your brand. It helps them feel like there are real people behind the business.

For every post that goes live, set aside time to interact with your audience.

Create social media content that serves your audience

When Facebook first launched in 2004, it was text-only. Since then, more social media platforms have arrived with a multimedia approach.

Video content typically performs best on social media because it keeps users on their platforms for longer, meaning algorithms are likely to favor your content over text-based posts alone.

It’s also more engaging. For example, tweets with video attract 10 times more engagement than tweets without video. And video content gets the most engagement on Instagram.

Engaging your audience is easier with paid social, where you’re in charge of the context. You control the audience and the placement. This is good for contextually specific content aimed at an audience with prior knowledge of your brand.

But when building a brand organically, you need to think differently. 

Wistia’s Phil Nottingham notes in his organic social media course: 

“We need to understand that people really, generally speaking, don’t know much about us when they discover us on social media. And we have to create for that lack of context and embrace it.”

Create contextually broad content that offers value regardless of where users view it or if the audience has prior knowledge of your brand.

Fuel this content by responding to industry culture to meet the demands of your audience.

Creative consultancy Long Dash does this often:

Their posts about bias and inclusive stories are relevant to their target market. They’re also valuable and shareable. 

People can share this content in their Instagram stories, direct messages, and off-platform to spread knowledge. It’s also a way for them to self-identify if they feel Long Dash helps them reflect the person they wish to be.

Look closely at your chosen social platforms and decide if your content meets the needs of your audience and suits the style of the platform.

YouTube users, for example, can watch videos in many ways. Users will often search for a video, or they’ll watch one that the algorithm suggests, or one that’s embedded on another site, or a video that another user has shared with them on dark social. 

Since users discover content through search and social sharing, you’ll need to have both an SEO-focused strategy and a social strategy.

Facebook and Twitter users, on the other hand, consume content more passively while scrolling through the platform.

Formats are also widely varied. YouTube is mostly for watching videos. Instagram is exclusively video and static image content. Facebook content is a mix of video, text, and images.

When creating content, think about who will be viewing it.  

Where there’s a crossover in type of content, repurpose what gets engagement. Chop long-form videos on your YouTube channel into bitesize clips for Instagram.   

Turn long-form posts on LinkedIn into a blog post and link to them on your Twitter account. 

Experiment with contextually broad content to get more eyes on your brand. Learn what’s resonating with your audience and amplify popular content with paid social to extend its reach.

Boost organic posts that are getting traction with some of your paid media budget. This will allow you to generate more awareness and engagement from content you already know resonates with your audience (meaning you’re likely to see a lower CPC and CPA).

Use your brand to build a community

Break down the barriers between business and customer by cultivating a community where people can interact without expectation. 

80% of companies say that brand community building has helped increase traffic, while 64% say that it has improved decision-making. 

To reap the rewards of customer insight and advocacy, learn what your audience wants from your brand and build your community around the results. 

As FeverBee founder Richard Millington notes:

“The secret to a thriving community is relevance. Your audience will only visit and participate in your community if it is the most relevant way for them to satisfy their needs and desires at a given moment.” 

Knowing what is most relevant to your audience will come from your research.

The one-to-one interview is the best way to understand your audience on a deeper level, but it’s costly and time-consuming. 

Supplement interviews with asynchronous surveys via platforms, like Wynter. Shortlist some pain points and benefits statements, then validate them with real responses from your audience.

Segment your audience based on their responses to identify unique clusters. What needs and interests do people share? What problems do they look to you to solve?

With those segments, choose three to five people to interview. Find out what content they consume, the types of people they want to connect with, and the kind of roles they take on.

Use this information to establish the main goal for your social media community, and develop personas for the kind of people you want to build it for. 

Taking the time to strategize will help you create content that encourages your audience to participate.

For example, the founder of social platform Bloc, Joshua Wood, runs a community on influencer platform Tribe to interact and learn from its audience:

“We use the platform for our user base and advertisers to discuss almost everything regarding our software. We also encourage our users to complete surveys that we can use for SEO purposes. 

For example, we ask people an array of questions on ‘restaurant marketing’ and then use the answers and data to write data-driven articles. These are always very easy to get published by journalists and bloggers.” [via Natalie Luneva]

CXL uses Facebook Groups to unite marketers, entrepreneurs, and business owners around conversion optimization, analytics, and growth.

CXL creates trust and reliability by providing a group for people to talk about CRO, analytics, marketing, and growth. CXL team members actively participate and stimulate engagement alongside user-generated content:

Employees are your earliest brand advocates. 72% of people report feeling a bond with brands when employees share information about the business online.

Their buy-in is as important as that of stakeholders. Encourage your team to engage with your community and spread the word around their own social circles. Let them build their personal brands. 

Extend this encouragement to members. 75% of people say they favor companies that offer rewards. They’re also more likely to recommend them. 

Use community-exclusive offers such as product discounts, member-only resources, and referral incentives to show your appreciation. This will help strengthen relationships and foster loyalty that results in customers choosing you over the competition. 

Conclusion

Social media brand building is about relationships. Earn trust and create emotional connections by being consistent with your purpose but tailoring your content to each platform. 

Create valuable, engaging content that people feel compelled to share, on the major platforms and on dark social. Build a community around your brand and reward loyalty. Show your authenticity and reliability, and people will repay you with advocacy and loyalty.

Learn how to build a winning brand on social media in CXL’s Brand Marketing Minidegree.

The post How to Build an Audience with Social Media Brand Marketing appeared first on CXL.

When WordStream began receiving complaints that the seven-day free trial of their PPC management software wasn’t long enough, the brand decided to A/B test 14-day and 30-day trials.

The results? Prospect trial to conversion rates fell with the longer trials.

WordStream confirmed that seven days was plenty of trial time, and they didn’t need to waste resources chasing customers down a longer funnel. 

No changes were made to the customer journey, and it had nothing to do with revenue lift. Yet, this was a successful growth marketing campaign. 

Lessons were learned, resources were saved, and “opportunities” were confirmed to be bad moves. 

In this article, you will learn how growth marketing compares to traditional marketing and its key components. You’ll also learn how to apply growth marketing to five key channels and how to plan and execute experimentation. 

What is growth marketing? (And what it isn’t) 

Growth marketing is a data-driven approach to marketing. It uses rapid experimentation and learning to identify and capitalize on growth opportunities without blowing a ton of budget. 

It isn’t about finding quick hacks to boost short-term revenue.

Growth marketing borrows a concept from the lean startup methodology. It starts with the premise that the marketer doesn’t know the ideal strategy or messaging, and the only way to establish this is through testing.

Marketers following this practice start with a hypothesis, design and run an experiment, and interpret results to fuel future experiments. This provides context on which growth efforts to focus on in the short- and long-term.

For example, a growth marketer at Grammarly might begin with the hypothesis that a promotional email campaign targeted at millennials will result in a 10% increase in new subscriptions.

The growth marketer would design and run an experiment (ideating, drafting, and sending the email), and then review the data to confirm or disprove the hypothesis.

From the standpoint of the growth marketing team, it’s a win-win situation.

If they’re right, they will have influenced an increase in new subscriptions with a target segment. 

If not, they’d know that promotional emails don’t have an impact, and they won’t waste time or resources on similar campaigns going forward.

Having tested and confirmed their hypothesis, Grammarly’s growth marketers could then run more granular A/B tests to establish:

• What degree of discount has the biggest impact?
• What is the point of diminishing returns?
• What type of messaging works best for these emails?
• What day of the week is most effective for engagement with these emails?

Growth marketers can then use audience segmentation and multivariate testing to understand what resonates best with different sub-segments, informing more personalized communication.

Growth marketing is a practice that is applied to the full marketing funnel. Traditional marketing efforts tend to be directed at the top of the funnel (brand recognition, recall, etc.).

As such, successful growth marketers must have a broad understanding of a variety of digital marketing strategies and tactics.

Growth marketing is about moving toward organizational goals and objectives with confidence from experimentation, meeting them efficiently without overspending.

Optimization across the entire funnel: Growth marketing vs. traditional marketing

The first distinction between traditional and growth marketing models is that traditional marketing, which is often product-focused, is oriented toward top-of-funnel efforts. 

Traditional marketers work to build awareness and emotional connections to product and brand.

Growth marketers focus on the entire customer journey. They work to improve top-of-funnel metrics like brand awareness and identify opportunities to improve customer activation, retention, and referral efforts.

The second distinction is growth marketing’s emphasis on experimentation.

With traditional marketing, you set a goal, such as improving brand awareness, and then put a chunk of your budget into one or two avenues (e.g., a live stream with an influencer on social media).

If your campaign works and your brand awareness metrics improve, you win. But if you’re wrong, you might spend an awful lot of money with little results.

It’s also difficult to tell if your brand campaign directly influenced brand recognition. Perhaps the seminar your CEO led at the same time is responsible for some of the surge in new followers.

Without experimentation parameters, you can’t rule out other variables.

The growth marketing approach to this problem would be to develop a series of experiments.

You might start by running brand-focused LinkedIn ads with geotargeting. Then, compare any change in the awareness metrics you’re measuring in that region with other markets. You might conclude that running brand-focused ads on LinkedIn does improve brand recognition.

Your next experiment might be to test new messaging, or media, to understand what has a greater impact on brand recognition.

What are “pirate metrics?” 

Pirate metrics is a model growth marketers use to guide their growth activities.

They are so named for their acronym coined by Dave McClure, AAARRR:

• Acquisition (generating leads and gaining new users);
• Activation (getting customers to use the product more often);
• Revenue (crosses over into pricing strategy);
• Retention (reducing churn and influencing repurchasing);
• Referral (influencing customers to refer others).

Many growth marketers will include “Awareness” in their model to tackle experimentation at the top of the funnel.

Where does growth hacking come in? 

Growth hacking is a term that emerged from the Silicon Valley tech community and the lean startup methodology. 

Lean companies focus on building an MVP as quickly as possible using minimal resources (like “hackathons” where programmers compete or collaborate in sprints to design a program by the end of the event).

Growth hacking is the mindset of someone who wants to work quickly to find the best solution fast (not always the perfect solution) to start getting results.

This evolved into the notion of looking for a silver bullet; a single hack to skyrocket your company’s growth.

But the silver bullet doesn’t exist, and it’s not growth marketing. 

Growth marketing doesn’t prescribe quick-fix hacks that any company can apply to “10x their revenue.” It’s about identifying the channels and tactics that work best for your organization and then maximizing marketing efforts by confirming the best moves through experimentation.

How to build a growth marketing strategy: Setting off on the right foot

Compared to traditional marketing initiatives, growth marketing is more pragmatic. Because of this, growth marketing is strategic in different ways to traditional marketing. 

The danger of being so methodical about marketing is getting stuck in the experimentation phase. So growth marketers need to set up their tests and then get started quickly.

Before running your first experiment, take these three steps: define your growth model, map the customer journey, and prioritize your channels.

1. Define your growth model: Uncovering worthwhile experiments

To build a growth model that achieves business-critical goals, you must first map out the metrics, activities, and touchpoints that influence them.

For example, say you’re trying to improve top-line revenue. This is a broad goal, so you’ll need to uncover experiments that improve any metric influencing purchasing behavior and retention. Think of it like a “trickle-down” model. If X increases Y, then you’ll want to increase X.

Drill down to determine which metrics contribute to your goal: revenue per user, number of paying customers, churn, and new customer acquisition.

How do people discover you? At what point do they sign up, and where does the “aha!” moment occur that inspires users to subscribe? Getting your analytics house in order will give you the data you need to answer these questions.

2. Map out the customer journey: When to test 

Using your analytics data, you can uncover which channels drive action at each stage of the funnel.

At the acquisition stage, channels might include SEO, paid advertising, content marketing, etc. For activation, it might involve push notifications, email marketing, and so on.

The best way to establish the journey your audience takes from awareness to purchase and advocacy is to approach things from the customer’s point of view.

Spotify does this with its map of the customer’s music sharing experience:

Spotify conducts customer research to identify how users feel at each stage of the sharing journey, from visiting the app to how the share was received.

Once you’ve mapped out the entire user journey, including customers’ emotional states at each stage, you’ll reveal available channels for testing.

3. Identify and prioritize your key growth channels: Where to test 

Once you’ve identified the best channels from your customer journey map, determine which to prioritize based on the impact they make on your business goals.

For example, if Spotify wanted to improve advocacy, the frustration users have with shuffle play after sharing may be a good place to start.

Spotify could then test whether alternative play options improve the user experience at that stage and whether it impacts how often users share music with friends.

In another example, let’s say most of your acquisition comes through organic search, but conversion rate to signups is lower than you’d expect. 

This channel would become a priority, and you’d design experiments to improve on-page conversion rates. These experiments could include:

• Identifying highest performing pages or content and creating more like it;
• Testing new calls-to-action by aligning offers with the funnel;
• Evaluating new tools or widgets to serve those calls-to-action, such as OptinMonster or Sumo.

Good channel candidates for growth marketing experiments are those that demonstrate a high return on investment and a high ability to scale. 

Perhaps LinkedIn gives you a great response rate for the time invested in reaching out to prospects. You can also see that there is a huge pool of candidates to choose from.

However, with cold email, perhaps you get a good response rate but you don’t book as many demos. In this case, ROI is good but scale is limited, making LinkedIn the better option.

Infusing 5 channels with a growth marketing approach

The philosophy behind growth marketing can be applied to any channel. Let’s see how that applies to five of the most common among marketers.

Paid social: Turning marketing dollars into users

Paid social is primarily used to impact awareness and acquisition metrics, so your experiments may be designed to understand how best to influence:

• Website traffic;
• Ebook downloads;
• Webinar signups;
• Free trial activations.

Take Semrush, a suite of solutions for keyword research, PPC planning, competitive research, and content optimization.

A hypothetical goal may be to increase the total number of users. A growth marketer at Semrush might design a series of experiments to understand how to grow qualified leads and nurture into paying users.

They’d start with the simplest hypothesis: “Running paid ads on Facebook promoting a lead magnet will grow our total number of MQLs.” Then they run the experiment.

Having confirmed that paid advertising does impact the acquisition of new MQLs, a second experiment would be set up to determine what offer delivers the most new leads.

For example, Semrush has a variety of case studies, webinars, and ebooks available for download.

Semrush’s growth marketer might next set up a multivariate test to run a series of paid ads. Each campaign would promote a different lead magnet, with the goal of understanding which offer generates the most leads.

Having established this, a third experiment would test new copy and messaging.

This webinar, for example, teaches two things: lifting traffic and improving conversion rates.

The growth marketer would then run an A/B test, with one ad pushing the traffic message and another pushing the conversion message.

When running paid media experiments, start with a small budget, measuring results early and often. Look for metrics that act as an indicator of success or failure. For example, if you’re driving traffic to a landing page and seeing a high bounce rate, it’s wise to pause the campaign to figure out what needs improving (targeting, creative, messaging etc.).

Organic social: Build a community

Brands with large audiences may find organic social to be an effective channel for acquisition, retention, and referrals.

Take Dollar Shave Club, a subscription service and retailer of razors, skincare products, and shaving accessories.

Dollar Shave Club’s product launch strategy involved a series of humorous videos that skyrocketed user growth to 3.2 million subscribers and grew their Instagram following to over 235K.

With a significant following, organic social is likely a key growth channel for Dollar Shave Club, particularly for retention and referrals.

Take this post, which leverages user-generated content to both promote their product, and publicly thank a new subscriber. 

A growth marketing experiment might start with the interpretation that promoting user-generated content (UGC) improves customer lifetime value (CLV).

 Validating this assumption can be as simple as using a UTM code to measure traffic from this specific page. This will help you attribute traffic to UGC and understand the impact it makes on conversions.

Once this assumption is validated, test the hypothesis that content promoting rewards for sharing UGC (like t-shirts) will increase engagement metrics and encourage more UGC.

A third experiment could be run to understand the best time to post content like this. Knowing that shares peak at around 10 p.m. EST, an A/B test could be run to explore the hypothesis that posting about UGC at this time will improve visibility and drive more engagement.

Though Dollar Shave Club’s organic strategy appears to be growing their following, there is an opportunity to improve by differentiating content across social channels.

Currently, Dollar Shave Club cross-posts the same content on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Instagram is better for engagement than Twitter for the same piece of content, indicating that the brand might not reach its audience as effectively as possible on Twitter.  

A growth marketer at Dollar Shave Club could set up an experiment to test the hypothesis that customer storytelling content performs better on Twitter than meme-based content.

They’d then use the number of likes, comments, and shares each type of post earns as a guiding metric in confirming this hypothesis.

How you experiment with organic social will depend on your existing audience size and the amount of traction you get on a given channel.

For example, if you’re starting from a blank slate, the first decision should be which channel you prioritize. Once you know this, you can focus your resources on building an audience there.

Reverse engineer what already works and run experiments over the long-term. Building a social audience is a marathon, not a sprint. Dedicate yourself to a content format and aim for consistency. Work toward increasing your audience size before moving on to user acquisition or sales.

Leading growth at a more established brand? You can afford to get more granular with your experiments as it’s likely you already have ample attention on your chosen social channels. For example, if you’re looking to convert more Instagram followers into users, consider testing content formats that demonstrate the value of your solution.

Search engine marketing: Driving ROI from searchers

Running search engine marketing (SEM) experiments requires testing more than just the ads themselves. You must work to optimize the entire customer journey; from search to click to conversion.

Take Smartsheet, an online collaboration and work management tool, that relies heavily on Google Ads to drive traffic and free trial users.

Smartsheet runs heavily measured PPC ads. Before it can start testing things like creative and copy, the brand needs to determine the best keywords.

There are nearly 1500 search phrases related to “spreadsheet software” alone, so step one would be to identify the most intent-focused keywords, and then run ads against each of them.

Having established which search phrases perform best, Smartsheet’s growth marketers will run testing experiments to understand what messaging performs best in generating click-throughs:

“We’ve found rearranging copy in a headline or changing the description line from prose to a customer quote can increase click-through rates by 8% or more.” – Brent Frei, Co-founder of Smartsheet [via FastSpring]

Subsequent growth marketing tests could focus on identifying the best geographies to target. They’d do this by designing a multivariate experiment that compares click-through rates and subsequent signups by geographic location.

Here’s a rundown of each stage of the SEM journey and how you should experiment on each.

• Keyword targeting: As illustrated in the Smartsheet example above, look to identify and test new keyword opportunities. Similarly, seek out “negative keywords” that drive wasteful traffic (users not searching for your product or solution).
  
• Ad groups: What happens when you break out keywords into their own ad groups? Do you see an increase in performance across those groups? Does one perform better than the other?
  
• Ad copy: Always be testing your messaging. Test new headlines and descriptions against each other. Once you find a winner, test it again.
  
• Ad extensions: What happens when you include call, text, or even download extensions? Experiment with ad extensions to see if they improve or hinder the customer journey by measuring conversions.
  
• Landing pages: This is where the action happens. Test headline copy, calls-to-action, and forms to increase conversion rates from traffic.

Organic search: The holy grail of reliable traffic

Testing new organic search experiments can be invaluable in understanding what on-page optimization tactics improve sign-ups and conversions.

Take Qless, a SaaS platform for queue management and appointment scheduling. One of Qless’s core verticals is the retail industry.

Qless holds several page one positions, but they don’t hold one for the search phrase “queue management system for retail.”

This would be a prime target keyword for their current Retail page. It has a low keyword difficulty and a higher search volume than the phrase the page appears to be targeting: “queue management for retail stores.”

An initial experiment could answer whether it’s worthwhile to change the URL slug from “queue-management-for-retail-stores” to “queue-management-system-for-retail.”

Additionally, the phrase “queue management system” isn’t used on the page verbatim. 

A second experiment could be designed to test the impact of including this key phrase, with subsequent experiments testing how the frequency of use impacts search rankings.

It can take Google some time to recognize changes. Like all things in SEO, you must be patient to see how these experiments impact results.

Content marketing: Turn readers into raving fans

Content marketing is an effective channel for building trust with new customers and turning existing ones into advocates. By demonstrating your expertise, you build authority, awareness, and get in front of an audience that are looking for the solution to a specific problem.

Take Zapier, a SaaS tool that helps users connect their tech stack and use automation to create custom workflows.

Zapier’s content marketing strategy, which helped propel them to $140 million in ARR, started as a series of experiments on their blog.

Now, Zapier uses a variety of content marketing tactics to influence both acquisition and retention metrics.

The Zapier University, for example, is a series of online videos aimed at helping users get the most out of the platform.

A growth marketing experiment could be set up to investigate the impact of these videos on retention at the onboarding stage.

The brand might do this by distributing the content via email to half of their audience, tracking engagement metrics, and measuring the influence on CLV.

How to plan and execute growth experiments 

The first thing growth marketers want to do is develop a hypothesis. But before that happens, you need to make sure you’re setting up experiments to work as efficiently and effectively as possible.

There are three considerations to bear in mind when planning growth experiments:

1. How can you develop tests that can inform effective changes? If you’re testing aspects that make no difference, then you’re wasting time and money.
2. How can you reduce the cost of testing and optimization? You shouldn’t spend months planning; you need to generate tests quickly.
3. How can we improve the speed of experimentation? The more tests you run, the faster you can establish answers and use them to drive growth.

To achieve all three goals, you need to understand the problem you’re trying to solve. This starts with customer research.

Growth marketers must understand what is important to their customers and what motivates them to purchase (or to keep purchasing). This understanding is what informs the hypotheses.

Start by developing a series of questions that aim at this need, such as:

• What do our customers need?

• What do they think they want?
• What are they doing about their problem currently?
• How are they making the decision?
• What gets in the way of deciding?

Strategies such as voice of customer research can help you to establish answers to these questions. You’ll then use your findings to question each aspect of your marketing efforts.

Take Codecademy’s strategic testing program, for example.

Codecademy knew that price is a decision-making barrier for customers, but they were driven to increase annual subscriptions. Codecademy designed an experiment to understand the impact of pricing differentials between monthly and annual subscriptions.

They tested the hypothesis that “exaggerating the price difference between annual and monthly plans will increase annual subscriptions.”

They found that this was the case in high-GDP countries, but not so for low-GDP geographies, meaning that they’d need to adopt a region-based pricing strategy to optimize annual subscription rates.

Conclusion  

Growth marketing is a process of continual evolution, testing, tweaks, and experiments that seek to improve user experience right through the customer lifecycle. The aim is to drive growth through the channels that have the greatest impact.

Though growth marketing should be carried out strategically, it’s crucial not to get caught in the trap of continuous planning and strategy. Start running actual experiments as soon as possible.

Become a powerful growth marketer in CXL’s Growth Marketing Minidegree.

The post Growth Marketing: The Skills and Frameworks You Need appeared first on CXL.

In 2015, chiefmartec.com reported a “staggering” 1,876 SaaS vendors. In 2020, there were over 8,000. That’s some serious growth.

Drift’s CEO, Dave Cancel, says there are three phases to every industry:

1. The Edison phase, where companies are innovating and everything is new;
2. The Model-T phase, where companies are improving early versions, and it’s easy to stand out because you’re one of the first, and;
3. The P&G phase, where you have to find a way to be the top 1% in a saturated market either by becoming a massive global brand or a leader in your niche.

SaaS is in the final phase. It’s now winner-take-all.

Product marketing gives you the edge to compete in this hyper-crowded market—and win. It helps you pinpoint the unique positioning and messaging that builds an emotional moat around your brand.

In this article, you’ll learn how to design an effective product marketing strategy that propels your brand to that top 1%.

Getting to know product marketing (and what it is not) 

Product marketing is one of the most crucial yet misunderstood marketing functions.

One of the reasons for this confusion is its relatively recent appearance in the organization. The other reason comes from product marketing’s existence at the intersection of four critical departments: sales, marketing, product, and customer success.

As a standalone function, product marketing’s primary focus areas are positioning, voice of customer research, messaging, pricing and packaging, customer segmentation, and product launches.

While product marketing forms its own department, product marketers spend much of their time collaborating with each of the four teams.

Here are some examples of tasks they’ll perform in each department:

1. Product. Reporting research back to product managers to inform future product developments, receiving key information on changes and updates across the product lifecycle, and gathering product usage insights.
2. Sales. Assisting the sales team to develop content used throughout the sales process and leveraging insights from sales conversations to develop messaging. 
3. Marketing. Using research results to develop positioning and messaging that marketing teams can then access to promote the product and generate demand.
4. Customer Success. Using insights from customer support conversations to understand common problems and solving these objections by creating informative content.

Product marketing’s main goal is to contribute to revenue generation; other marketing and sales teams are product marketing’s most important internal customers.

Product marketers help by:

• Educating sales on the challenges buyers are having;
• Conducting win/loss analyses to understand what’s working well and what’s not;
• Developing collateral and sales assets to help agents sell better.

They also work very closely with the product team, primarily on research tasks that inform product development. 

They gather intel on competitors, perform market research, and deeply understand how other products function to inform the direction and roadmap of product development.

The role of product marketing is more about answering key strategic questions (who needs the solution, where are they, how do we reach them, etc.) than it is about running specific marketing campaigns.

That’s where we see the collaboration between product marketing and traditional marketing teams.

Product marketing vs. traditional marketing 

Marketing is a broader function responsible for communicating value to prospects across various disciplines (content, performance marketing, brand marketing, etc.). 

Traditional marketing usually focuses on developing brand awareness and generating sales opportunities, users, and conversions.

Product marketers are concerned with the success of the product at every stage of the product lifecycle.

The two functions work closely together.

Product marketing performs customer research, develops product positioning and messaging, and collaborates with other departments throughout the product lifecycle to understand how the product is performing from a consumer standpoint.

They communicate insights to the marketing team, who leverage this information to build lead generation or brand-focused marketing campaigns, reporting the results of those efforts back to the product team for further analysis.

Sales and product marketing: Who owns what? And why?

Product marketers are the masters of their product. As such, it is their responsibility to oversee all content and collateral used to drive the promotion of the product, particularly in the market. 

However, this is rarely recognized by many startups. It’s critical to understand how to distribute ownership of certain duties across the two teams.

There are three aspects of sales that product marketing teams should own:

1. Sales content;
2. Competitive strategy;
3. Messaging and positioning.

Sales content

Sales teams own content creation for their pitch desks, product demos, email campaigns, etc. However, they should run everything through the product marketing team to ensure they’re positioning the benefits of a product accurately.

Take this slide deck from Leadnomics, a customer acquisition platform.

By having the product marketing team own the creation of assets like this, Leadnomics ensures their messaging is relevant and really speaks to the customer.

Competitive Strategy

Product marketers are strategic thinkers. They’ve invested time in market research, so they know what their competitors are selling and their messaging and positioning.

Product marketers make it their job to understand the entire state of the market. As such, they can justify decisions with the most objective lens.

Messaging and positioning

Product marketers are best positioned to communicate the product’s value. They’ve researched and analyzed the market, informed and collaborated with the product development team, and developed the product messaging strategy.

Take HubSpot.

Their product marketing team understands a common customer pain point: CRMs are often too feature-dense and difficult to use.

They address that pain point directly in their homepage messaging: “Powerful, not overpowering.”

Product marketers should be responsible for training marketing and sales teams on the best messaging narratives to keep the whole organization aligned. 

Product marketing goals: Empowering GTM teams to excel

One major function of product marketing is to empower the teams responsible for go-to-market strategy.

This requires foresight and understanding—product marketing teams must know where buyers are today. 

They seek to understand how an audience makes buying decisions, what criteria they used to assess solutions, and how that might develop according to trends.

They need to know the product and market today and have a deep understanding of what both will look like tomorrow to remain competitive.

Defining product marketing’s contribution to revenue success

As a function that sits between four major departments, product marketing owns a variety of responsibilities that work toward overall revenue growth.

Responsibilities can vary across industries (particularly in B2B vs. B2C). Broadly, product marketing duties include customer and market research, product positioning and messaging development, and collaboration with internal stakeholders at different revenue departments.

“Riling up” internal teams

Product marketers work with internal teams (particularly sales and customer success) to get them excited about how their product can help transform the lives of those who use it.

Product launches

Product marketers design marketing plans for new product launches. They assess and analyze consumer sentiment to quickly adapt positioning and messaging if a product launch plan goes wrong.

Product positioning and messaging 

Product positioning and messaging are major components of the product marketer’s role.

They research the competitive landscape to determine how best to position their product’s unique features and conduct studies, like voice of customer research, to inform and develop messaging strategies.

Creating sales assets and collateral

Product marketers collaborate with sales team members to understand weaknesses in the sales process and identify opportunities where conversations can be improved using sales enablement content.

For example, reps at the hypothetical productivity tool startup may find it difficult to communicate the benefit of the company’s minimalist UI. Product marketing can design a practical one-pager detailing the real-world benefits.

They would then manage the creation of deliverables such as pitch decks and product demonstrations.

Customer & market research

Research is an integral part of the product marketer’s role. Product marketers perform research to understand:

• The processes new customers go through before a purchase;
• The key considerations buyers make during the customer journey;
• What kind of messaging resonates best with their audience;
• The state of the market and competitive landscape;
• How competitors are positioning and marketing their products;
• Where competitors are falling short (and how to capitalize);
• Customer engagement with marketing campaigns.

Reporting back to product teams

Product teams develop a roadmap for product development. This roadmap must be malleable, and should be informed by product marketers’ research.

Product marketers report back to the product team on customer sentiment related to product updates and relay information such as competitor developments or common issues existing customers have to inform future product developments.

Storytelling

Product marketers use customer research to develop stories that resonate with their audience.

Take Pipedrive, a CRM platform, and the cases studies they share:

Case studies are an ideal storytelling method because they typically feature familiar story figures: the hero (the client), the guide (the business), and the villain (the issue the client was facing).

Align these case studies with your target audience to attract more of the right customers.

Product marketing success analysis

Being a highly-strategic function, product marketers regularly analyze the impact of their messaging and positioning to understand what’s not working (and get rid of it) vs. what is (and double down on it).

For example, the hypothetical tool’s product marketing team might analyze how their social media messaging resonates with customers. They determine that messaging focusing on reducing email and meeting load converts better than messaging about the tool’s technical abilities.

Content marketing

Product marketing uses the insights identified through various research undertakings to inform content creation for assets used in sales and marketing efforts.

Take Square.

Their Town Square business resource center is a powerful product marketing example.

It provides a comprehensive resource database for its target audience, delivering marketing information, data insights, and customer services. 

Square also profiles users of their tool, using storytelling to convince and convert potential customers.

Measuring success: Product marketing metrics to track growth

There are many metrics marketers can measure, but everyone cares about one core metric: revenue.

Revenue allows companies to innovate and serve the developing needs of the market, and it’s why product marketers have paychecks.

Revenue growth over time (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly) should be the primary metric product marketing teams pay attention to.

Outside of revenue, product marketing teams have multiple internal customers to serve:

• Marketing;
• Sales;
• Product;
• Customer Success.

This means product marketers should also be paying attention to the KPIs measured by those internal teams.

For example, your sales team’s win rates are critical to understanding how a market responds to your product. 

Additionally, competitor presence in deals is an important metric to track. You can spot challenges before they become problems and get ahead of them.

Driving business success through customer-led product design

The products that win in today’s environment tap into a customer need that competitors aren’t filling.

Product marketers advocate for your customers, seek to understand the market’s needs, and work with the product team to ensure your product fulfills these needs.

They also work with sales and marketing teams to leverage the insights they identify through deep audience research.

Take Billie, a shaving and cosmetics retailer.

They made a stark discovery by studying the competitive landscape: most razor brands don’t show body hair on women in their campaigns. This omission really annoyed their customer base.

Billie carved out a niche by highlighting this pain point and launching a marketing campaign titled Project Body Hair.

By deliberately showcasing body hair on women in their ads, Billie appealed to a target audience of people who’ve felt alienated by unrealistic portrayals of the shaving experience.

Future-proofing your business 

Product marketers help companies build and sell products for today’s market, but they also look ahead to determine what market demand will look like in the future.

Today, many verticals are oversaturated. While proper positioning is key to succeeding now, product marketers must understand how product, sales, and marketing can adapt and stay competitive moving forward.

Take Hyundai, a car manufacturer and proponent of electric-powered vehicles.

Hyundai’s product marketers know that Gen Z and millennials are more concerned about renewable energy than previous generations. 

So, they launched a product line called Hyundai Home to capture the growing demand for home charging solutions.

With Hyundai Home, customers can capture energy using solar panels on the roof of their home, store it in Hyundai’s proprietary Energy Storage System, and use it to charge their electric vehicle with a Home EV charger.

Note that these products are unavailable, but Hyundai have a waitlist to generate demand for up-and-coming products and build an email list at the same time:

Building a product marketing team: The crucial traits that spell success

Many product marketing managers don’t have a strong understanding of how to structure a team or what to look for in a product marketer.

Most product marketing teams have a Product Marketing Manager at the head of the team (typically reporting to a VP of Marketing) and several product marketers with varying expertise (and various titles like PM Associate and PM Researcher).

As a general rule, you should look to hire for gaps in your own skillset rather than looking for clones of yourself.

For example, suppose you’re strong at audience research and developing product positioning but less well-versed in creating sales assets. In that case, you’d do well to complement your skillset by hiring a product marketer with content creation expertise.

Traits of a powerful product marketer 

Beyond experience and expertise in specific product marketing functions, look for these traits when hiring and building your product marketing team.

Communication & storytelling

Research demonstrates that effective communication (in narrative form) leads to a coupling in neural activity between the storyteller and the listener, resulting in enhanced comprehension.

Hire product marketers with strong communication and storytelling skills. They’ll effectively present a message that will resonate with your prospects (and convince them to make a purchase).

Cross-department functionality

Product marketers work intimately with team members from sales, marketing, product, and customer success. 

They’ll need a team-oriented mindset and a degree of understanding of how those departments function.

Go-getter mindset

Effective product marketers are those who demonstrate entrepreneurial traits.

They’ll grow your business by identifying gaps in the market, spotting weaknesses in your strategy, and keeping an eye on market developments.

Customer-centric

Senior Director of Product Marketing at Outreach, Jordan Greene, offers his advice on product marketers:

“An excellent product marketer is customer-obsessed. They’ve built a set of practices that keep them regularly in touch with customers and ultimately produce significantly more effective messaging and content.”

If a product marketer can think like and sympathize with your audience, they’ll also understand how to put your product in front of them.

Industry knowledge

Great product marketers not only know your product inside and out, but they have a strong understanding of your industry too.

That means understanding who your competitors are, how their products work, and how they promote. It also means investigating market trends, customer pain points, and sentiment toward product direction.

Build a distinctive, customer-driven product marketing strategy 

An effective product marketing strategy is driven by the voice of the customer and a strong understanding of the competitive landscape.

To differentiate your brand in saturated markets, you must understand what drives customer purchasing decisions and how existing competitors promote their products.

Analyze the market 

Product marketing strategy is a research-heavy undertaking. In the early stages of a product’s lifecycle, an understanding and analysis of current market conditions drive strategy.

Market research breaks down into two main types.

Primary research involves conducting customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc. Organizations often outsource this type of research to an external company.

Secondary research includes analyzing existing data from internal sources, online sources, journals, and industry studies. 

For the sake of speed, consider a hybrid approach.

Secondary research can access market insights, such as demographic makeup and demand for given product features. Then, use customer feedback surveys and brand tracking tools to assess more qualitative features, such as brand associations and perceived quality.

Take Drift. They invested heavily in customer feedback and user behavior analysis to understand what drives their target audience: Revenue.

Then, they go right after the pain point in their messaging.

Customer surveys effectively gather large-scale, quantitative data (like understanding which pain points are most important to resolve).

To establish qualitative insights (like how those pain points impact day-to-day performance), conduct long-format video interviews. Transcribe conversations using a tool like Rev for deeper analysis you can share between teams.

Complete a SWOT analysis 

Use the SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) framework to analyze your positioning strategy and to answer the following questions:

• Where does our product fit?
• How can we improve upon competitor offerings?
• What challenges exist that threaten our success?

Take this example SWOT analysis from a B2B shipping supplier.

A SWOT analysis for this company identifies a weakness in its email marketing initiative.

It also shows that sales conversion is increasing, which might point to a successful messaging change.

Use the opportunities section of your SWOT analysis to identify your product marketing strategy priorities. For this company, developing an effective email marketing strategy would be critical.

Identify your target audience 

Use your market analysis and research into your current user base to develop user personas that can inform marketing campaigns, messaging, and product positioning.

Buyer personas should be heavily data-driven, using surveys and one-on-one customer interviews to develop an understanding of what drives purchasing decisions for your audience.

Adrienne Barnes, the founder of Best Buyer Persona, recommends interviewing three kinds of customers.

1. Biggest Fans: The customers who use your product day in and day out, and can explain exactly why they work with you over anyone else.
2. Greatest Enemies: Those who used to be customers but canceled abruptly and left a negative review. 
3. “Meh” Customers: The customers who’ve joined recently and can provide fresh feedback on the decision-making and sales process.

Talking to all three kinds of users allows product marketers to understand why customers buy, stay, and leave.

Drift, for example, already knows that revenue is a key driver for customer acquisition.

Their “Meh Customers” can teach them what recent revenue challenges motivated them to sign up. From their “Biggest Fans,” they can understand exactly how Drift delivers revenue growth for their clients.

Collate the answers across all conversations and divide insights into four categories to build out your user personas.

1. Roles;
2. Responsibilities;
3. Rituals;
4. Relationships.

Craft your positioning statement and product messaging 

You’ve done your research. You know who uses similar products and may have an interest in yours. You know your competitors, their weaknesses, and how you’re going to differentiate your product and brand to get ahead. 

Now, it’s time to declare your unique value and communicate it to your target market. 

For larger companies, product messaging may be segmented across the different audiences and user personas you’ve developed.

Take Mailchimp.

They offer a comprehensive tool with analytics and a design studio suitable for large-scale enterprise customers.

But, they know that startup customers use their tools to grow their businesses.

To cater to this segment, they created a landing page with that simple message: Mailchimp will help you grow your business.

Use your messaging to highlight the unique pain point to your target customer. Show them how you’ll help solve that challenge. Describe why your solution is worth choosing over your competitors’.

For Mailchimp, the target audience was small companies, and the pain point was driving growth. Their messaging demonstrates how Mailchimp is powerful and effective but affordable and intuitive enough for small businesses.

Product messaging should be short, to the point, benefit-driven, and within branding guidelines. 

Take Yac, an asynchronous communication tool that stands against video meetings.

Their product messaging is direct and straight to a pain point.

Use simple language (no industry jargon) to communicate product positioning. Describe the challenge discreetly (Zoom fatigue), address your product’s primary use (async meetings), and the group of users you serve (remote teams).

Conclusion 

Product marketing is one of the most crucial disciplines in today’s environment. It bridges the gap between product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams, and owns key initiatives such as market research, product positioning, and messaging.

Build your product marketing team by analyzing your own strengths and weaknesses and hiring to fill any gaps.

Then, engage in intensive market and customer research to develop a data-driven product marketing strategy.
Become great at product marketing by taking our Product Marketing Minidegree.

The post The Complete Guide to Product Marketing in 2022 and Beyond appeared first on CXL.

Around 30,000 new products launch every year. Many of them fail. 

The biggest reasons? Poor product-market fit, positioning, and messaging. Effectively, they don’t understand their customer, nor where to play or how to win.

Many companies are so focused on building the perfect product that they put off their growth efforts until it’s too late.

In this article, you’ll learn how to create a product marketing strategy that reaches your ideal audience and converts them into customers. We’ll cover positioning, messaging, pricing, and team alignment to help you get ready for launch. 

We’ll also show you how to plan for launch and gather data to keep your product relevant in the long term.

What is a product marketing strategy?

Your product marketing strategy is a roadmap for how you position, price, and promote your new product in the market. 

It’s what tells you where your biggest fans are and how to reach them.

Your strategy should integrate with the product life cycle, informing how you market your product from development to growth. Its creation and implementation require input from product managers, product marketing managers, marketers, and sales teams. 

A good product marketing strategy helps customers perceive you as a better product for their needs, and through the constant feedback loop, you become the best solution.

ConvertKit launched in 2013 to face early-on-the-scene competitors like Mailchimp and Constant Contact. Instead of quitting following a slow first two years, founder and CEO, Nathan Barry, doubled down on a niche: email marketing for bloggers.

Barry used product marketing to pinpoint ConvertKit’s positioning and messaging and evolve into the specialized email marketing suite it is today. 

The platform can’t compete with the big players on features, so instead it focuses on specifically and purposefully addressing the needs of their users through content. 

Create a research-backed product marketing strategy that captures and creates demand  

Developing a product marketing strategy requires the skills of both product marketing and product management.

• Product marketing is responsible for the voice of the customer, positioning, messaging, and product adoption.

• Product management sets out the vision, identifies pain points, and develops a product that solves them. 

The two then come together on product pricing, gathering research, and influencing product development.

As we go through the process of creating your strategy, you’ll see where the strengths of both teams are needed.

1. Analyze the market and define your target audience

Early-stage research will determine success. Market research will validate the demand for your product and provide insight into customer needs. It’s broken down into two main types:

1. Qualitative research. Conducting customer interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc.;
2. Quantitative research. Analyzing swathes of customer and audience data from internal sources (CRM), online sources (audience intelligence tools), journals, and industry studies.

Discover if your product is viable with data-driven research

Begin by analyzing the customer data you have access to. What does your sales data reveal about territories, customer types, average sales, and pricing? Financial data can provide insights into which type of products bring bigger profits. 

Gather external data from governmental and local organizations. Data.gov and Eurostat offer volumes on demographics, economics, trade, and production data in the U.S and Europe, respectively.

Supplement this with reports and studies from trade associations, industry journals and media, and commercial marketing data. 

Conduct competitive and social media research to see who you’re up against and how they market their products. 

This information will help you answer questions around the size of the potential market, how it will grow or shrink, and what market share competitors own.

Get specific with primary research

Where quantitative research gives you a top-level view, qualitative research gets you into the consumer’s mind. 

Interview your existing customers. Ask them to complete surveys and questionnaires (including open-ended questions to gain qualitative feedback).

If you’re launching a new product, speak to the audience you’re looking to attract. Reach out to them on Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn and invite them for a short conversation. 

Base your questions around: 

• Pain points. (e.g., What are your biggest challenges with X? What would help you solve that challenge?)
• Goals. (e.g., What do you look for in a product? What do you hope to gain?) 
• Pricing. (e.g., What is a reasonable price range? How would you rate industry prices?)
• Psychographic traits. (e.g., What interests you? How do you prefer to buy?)

Depending on your product, you can also run Minimum Viable Product (MVP) testing. By releasing a version of your product with a few priority features for new customers, you can gather feedback to determine its viability and improve future versions. 

The data you get from customers will help shape the product that management develops and the customers that marketing targets. So it’s important not to rush it.

2. Define your target audience

According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. If their needs aren’t met, 58% will switch companies.

Defining your target audience gives you that initial understanding of your ideal customer, their expectations, and what they like and don’t like. It also gives you insight into how to market your product so it’s the best choice. 

Use your qualitative research data to build robust customer personas that focus on:

• Behavioral drivers. Customers’ goals, ambitions, and their journey to finding your business;
• Obstacles. Hesitations and concerns potential customers have. How do they view your product, and how will this impact the information they need to buy?;
• Mindset. Customers’ preconceived notions around the buying experience. Do they want a tailored experience, or are they looking for a bargain?

Segment data based on common threads. Start with intent, then look at hesitations and mindset. This will help you find a small number of clearly defined personas.

Where possible, round out these personas with quantitative data from on-site behavior from Google Analytics. Gather data such as:

• Average revenue per user;
• Transactions per user;
• New versus repeat customers;
• Frequent customers.

Base your personas on real people. As buyer persona expert Tony Zambito points out: 

“Buyer personas are archetypal representations of real people. If they sound and look like stereotypes—they probably are. They must sound believable and represent believability as well.”

It’s much easier to market a product if you can visualize the buyer. Paul, 35, who values family time and cares about online privacy, for example, is a lot more relatable than Persona #4.

3. Solidify your product positioning and messaging

Positioning and messaging are crucial elements of marketing a product people want to get behind. 

As Aha! CEO and co-founder Brian de Haff notes:

“Positioning and messaging are how you describe the value you deliver. Positioning is the background to organize the team—the real-life reason you are telling your story in the first place—and messaging is the actual content served to customers. Both are used by marketers to be their best.”

Both elements help you tell an original story that attracts customers away from the carbon-copied competition.

Establish your product’s market position

Positioning should always come first. It creates the customers’ perception of your product, who it helps, the problems it solves, and how it compares to the competition.

In her Product Messaging course, Maya Shah-Ceccotti explains the importance of good positioning:

“From your positioning work, you should be coming to the table about developing messaging with a really solid understanding of a few critical things. Those things are: 

What your product is and what space it plays in. What category is it in? How do customers understand and reference it? 

What is the narrative around your product and your company? What is that story that inspires the customer and communicates and drives home the why? 

Who is your best-fit customer? Who are your target audiences (also sometimes referred to as your ICP)? 

How do you want to be perceived within the competitive landscape? And, also, what are your product’s unique attributes and values?”

Your positioning is the foundation that your messaging is built on. Nail your positioning, and it’s easier for your team to communicate product benefits to your target audience. 

To hone in on your product position, start by thinking about the four Ps:

1. Product. How does your product compare to others? What’s unique about it?
2. Price. How does your price relate to your audience and value? (More on this soon.)
3. Promotion. How do/will your customers discover you?
4. Place. Where do your products live? Purely online, or do you have other distribution channels?

The Four P’s may be a primitive marketing model, but combining this with your data-driven research will illustrate what customers value most about your product and how it’s different from the competition.

Use this to shape your product narrative and give you the building blocks for developing a positioning statement for internal consistency.

Know that while it’s crucial for positioning to be standardized for all teams, it may eventually shift. 

Loom’s positioning as an “async video messaging for work” wouldn’t have made sense when they launched in 2015.

Since then, the world has changed dramatically. Loom pivoted from a video recording platform centered around user feedback to a platform that helps professionals (remote ones in particular) avoid excess meetings and emails.

Their messaging is crystal clear across their website, saying what they do and who they do it for: “Record quick videos of your screen and cam. An essential tool for hybrid workplaces.”

Their “async” lean is also echoed across social media. Such as on LinkedIn: “We’re bringing video messaging to work and empowering everyone to communicate more effectively, wherever they are.”

And Twitter: “Record and instantly share video messages of your screen, cam, or both. Faster than typing an email or meeting live.”

Define your positioning statement, then ensure everyone in your organization sticks to it.

Use positioning to craft a compelling narrative

If positioning determines your target customers and how you want them to perceive your product, then messaging is how you communicate that concept.

To stay consistent across all departments and touchpoints, create a messaging strategy.

Your messaging strategy should include the following four elements.

1. Unique selling proposition (USP): Why you’re different from the competition;

2. Target audience: Your buyer personas;

3. Brand story: A narrative of how your product came to be, why you make it, and your mission; 

4. Messaging strategy guidelines: A playbook that includes a mission statement, tagline, value proposition, brand pillars, positioning statement, brand promise, and design and tone of voice guidelines.

To plan and deploy this strategy, focus on:

• What sets you apart. Pinpoint at least one thing that makes you different.
• Not trying to appeal to everyone. Don’t just be another option. Be the product your audience has been looking for by appealing to their individual needs.
• Speaking to your customers. Find out their motivations and current level of satisfaction with available options.
• Continually testing. Test your messaging on a small audience, then analyze and adjust. Be ready to change your messaging to suit the product, audience, and opportunity.

4. Set measurable goals unique to your objectives

Research shows that there’s a strong connection between goal-setting and success. Make this step practical by writing down what you want to achieve with your product.

For most brands, success comes in the form of sales. Strong brand awareness and customer satisfaction makes this goal easier to achieve.

Divide your goals into three categories: sales (or user acquisition), customer satisfaction (or retention), and brand awareness. Set a specific goal for each pillar. 

Here are some goal examples you might try to increase or decrease:

• Sales. Revenue, assisted conversions, qualified leads, cost per acquisition, close rate, customer lifetime value;
• Customer satisfaction. Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer sentiment, product usage;
• Brand awareness. Market share, share of voice, website traffic.

Keep your goals realistic by using the SMART framework. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.

This will ensure team members focus on the most important objectives, helping you achieve them more efficiently. 

5. Align your teams

Aligned companies grow faster and experience lower churn. Ensure everyone involved in the development and implementation of your strategy is on the same page.

Research from Sprout Social shows that people feel more connected to brands when the CEO and employees share information online. If the information coming out from these sources isn’t aligned, it can confuse customers. 

Worse still, it can lead to distrust. 

Each member of your team should be clear on:

• Product features and benefits;
• Customer pain points;
• Positioning and messaging;
• Buyer personas;
• Product goals;
• Pricing strategy.

Make this information accessible by creating an internal knowledge base. Many tools offer templates to help you do this:

• CloudTutorial;
• Document360;
• Confluence;
• Tettra;
• HelpJuice;
• Zoho Desk.

Promote collaboration by utilizing tools like Slack, Asana, or Trello. The easier it is for teams to access a unified source of information, the more cohesive your marketing will be across different departments and practices.

6. Price your product based on value

In a study on what influences customers’ buying behavior, researchers found that over 70% of respondents rated price to be a “very important” factor influencing their decision. 

The actual price of your product is important. Customers need to be able to afford it. But equally as important is how customers perceive that price. 

Price low, and your product could either be seen as a bargain (good) or as cheap and inferior (bad). Price high, and your product can either be seen as luxury or premium (good) or overpriced (bad). 

A good way to think of pricing is covered by ProfitWell’s Patrick Campbell in his Pricing and Packaging course:

“Your pricing is the exchange rate on the value you’re creating in the world.”

When you view pricing in this way, one method becomes the outstanding option: value-based pricing.

Where cost-based and competitive pricing can help you quickly reach a ball-park figure, both neglect the unique value your product offers.

On the ProfitWell blog, Patrick explains why focusing on value-based pricing over the alternatives is something his company recommends:

“Value-based pricing gives customers trust in your product and brand. Your pricing matches what they’re willing to pay for the value you provide. You can offer packages and price points that precisely meet their needs because you understand what they truly want. You can price higher than competitors because you conducted the research that proves how much customers are truly willing to pay. You can also re-evaluate prices as you add value to your product and learn more about your customers and their evolving needs.”

Value-based pricing is based heavily on data. But by this stage in your strategy, a lot of the hard work is already done. 

To find the right price points for your product:

• Analyze buyer personas;
• Survey customers on how much they would pay for a product and which features and benefits they most value.

Use this data to create tiers and pricing packages. Test and measure your strategy before rolling it out fully.

Zenefits, for example, offers plans that increase in price based on the features they include: 

This personalized price plan is reasonable and suits multiple personas. It also offers clarity. Buyers can see the value they will receive and can choose the most suitable plan for their needs.

This can only be achieved through experimentation and understanding what customers want and value.

Hit the ground running with an effective product launch plan

To successfully implement your product marketing strategy, you need an action plan. How you launch will depend on whether your product is rolling out to the market or existing customers.

Momentive’s Morgan Molnar covers this in her Product Launches course, where she says that each type of launch comes with its own set of goals.

A launch that prioritizes new customer acquisition might consider awareness, user acquisition, and impressing investors as primary goals. If retention is your goal, then improving the existing experience and engaging existing customers is likely to be the priority.

The type of launch will also influence your strategy:

• Soft launch. Rolling out to a small portion of your customer base at a time;
• General availability (GA) launch. Open to your entire customer base.

A soft launch aims to work out bugs, gain feedback, and validate product-market fit. With a GA launch, your goals should tie to common marketing tactics, such as building awareness and acquiring new users.

To focus your resources, choose a product launch tier that best represents your product:

• Tier 1. A strategically important product that you want everyone talking about. Example content for this tier might include client events, press releases, or webinars.
• Tier 2. A product that will impact many customers. Example content for this tier might be blog posts, social media posts, and sales collateral.
• Tier 3. A product upgrade. Example content for this tier might be blog posts, chatbots, and help center guides.

Develop product marketing roadmap and define team roles

Ensure everything goes to plan with a product marketing roadmap that visualizes your growth plans.

Your roadmap can be goals-based, deadline-based, or task-based. It must keep all stakeholders and individual contributors aware of what’s happening, what needs to happen, and what they need to do to move the project forward.

Here’s an example from Roadmunk that shows how a product marketing roadmap might look:

As well as Roadmunk, there are many tools you can use to build and manage your roadmap:

• ProductPlan;
• Productboard;
• Aha!;
• Wrike.

Weigh up the pros and cons of each to see which best suits your needs.

To populate your product roadmap and define roles and responsibilities for team members, use the DACI model (Driver, Approver, Contributor, and Informed).

This framework is designed to bring clarity to a project and promote easy communication by giving each person a clear role:

• Driver. The person responsible and accountable for driving the project (usually the marketing manager);
• Approver. A key decision-maker to give the go-ahead, provide feedback and approval;
• Contributors. The people that do the work (e.g., marketers and sales reps);
• Informed. Those who are kept up-to-date with milestones and completed phases.

By using the DACI model, you can speed up decision-making and work productively and efficiently from the get-go. 

Measure product performance to inform your next steps

When building your product marketing strategy, you base every decision on what you can assume from the research. Post-launch, you have the advantage of concrete data. 

Gather feedback as your product gains traction to improve and add features. The same goes for content marketing. What assets generated results, which didn’t, and why?

Track product metrics and KPIs to evaluate performance. Measure:

• Market penetration rate. Calculate the success of your marketing strategy by dividing existing customers by the size of your target market and multiplying by 100 (number of customers / target market size x 100 = market penetration rate).

• Return on Investment (ROI). Calculate success by looking at the efficiency of your investment (net income / cost of investment = ROI).

• Net Promoter Score (NPS). Gauge how likely customers are to return and recommend your product by running NPS surveys. NPS scores grade your product from 0–10. Customers who rate you between zero and six are detractors. Customers who rate you between seven and eight are passives. Customers who rate you between nine and ten are promoters. Your NPS is then calculated by dividing the percentage of promoters by the percentage of detractors (promoters – detractors = NPS).

Continue to monitor web and social analytics to ensure you’re meeting your targets. Employ social listening to keep track of your mentions and the conversations around your product. 

What are customers saying about your product in their online communities? The insights from these sources can be a goldmine that guides future decisions.

Finally, continue gathering customer feedback at every opportunity through surveys, customer support, and social media. Communicate this feedback across your teams to keep your product relevant.

Conclusion

Successful product marketing is about meeting customer needs at every stage of the product life cycle. Strategy will help you achieve this.

Dedicate time in the early stages of your strategy to learning as much as possible about your market and audience. Conduct in-depth research so that you can develop a product that meets expectations, backed by a product marketing campaign that sells it as the best choice.

Keep teams aligned and updated on every aspect of the product and marketing goals so that implementation is consistent and efficient. Once your product hits the market, continually gather and assess feedback, and tweak your strategy to maintain momentum.

Learn how to create an effective product marketing strategy that attracts your best-fit customers with our Product Marketing Minidegree.

The post Excel in 2022 with our Complete Guide to Building a Product Marketing Strategy appeared first on CXL.

By the time Robinhood launched, it had already gained almost a million users. 

The stock-trading company called out one of the biggest trading pain points (fees) in their tagline: “$0 commission stock trading. Stop paying up to $10 for every trade.”

Then they used a waiting-list product launch model to create excitement and FOMO while giving them access to beta-model feedback ahead of launch.

Robinhood’s messaging aimed at the right audience, at the right time and place, is what gained them a million subscribers before they even launched. It’s also a prime example of successful product marketing.

In this article, you’ll learn how to strengthen new product development with product marketing so you can deliver on customer needs.

Product marketing ensures new product development solves real customer problems

Without truly knowing your customers, you can’t create something they need. Product marketing helps you develop a solution your customers are hungry for. 

The product marketing team uses market research to guide product development’s direction. 

Conduct product marketing research before developing a new product. Ask questions like:

• Is this something consumers want or need? How does it help them solve an existing problem?
• Who are they? What attributes do they share? Which of these attributes matter most to us?
• Where can we reach them? What publications do they read? Which movers-and-shakers can we befriend to access them?
• What is the competition doing? What gaps are they leaving unfilled?
• What is our USP? How can we ensure we stand out from our competitors?

Product marketing helps you understand who your brand is selling to, where to play, and how to win. 

As a product marketer, you must keep each department aligned, continually optimizing the product and marketing and sales strategies to meet customer needs.

I’ll lay down four steps you need to take when launching a new product and explain how to execute them.

1. Identify your ideal customer through buyer personas 

Buyer personas fuel efficiency during new product development. They’re a detailed archetype of someone who represents your ideal customer, identified through extensive user research. 

It’s critical that your buyer personas represent real customers that want to buy your product, not who you hope they are. 

Build your personas from the bottom up. Find people who would buy your product, then fit your personas around them.

Identify realistic, testable elements to your personas. Then substantiate them with interviews and home in on the most relevant real-life pain points and challenges.

Be specific. Then combine personas with overlapping characteristics and segment personas that are clearly different.

There are several tools that allow you to do this. HubSpot has a Make My Persona Tool that takes you through a workflow to deliver a cartoon persona.

From there, you’ll need to do some tweaking to ensure your buyer persona contains the most relevant information for your brand.

In order to populate tools like this with accurate, useable information, base your workflow answers on market research—not educated guesses.

A buyer persona aligns your whole company on what challenges a new product could solve. It informs how you’ll deliver value, the messaging strategy, product development, sales strategy, etc., so it’s worth investing time to make this a useful exercise.

2. Conduct market research to see how you stack up

Identify threats and opportunities by digging into what your competitors are doing. Review your competitors’ products to identify the gaps in their offerings.

Get your new target customer and any existing customers involved by:

• Interviewing them; 
• Sending surveys to list subscribers;
• Using tools to survey users outside your list.

One of the biggest challenges when building a new product is finding representatives of this new audience to ask those important questions. That’s where third-party sites can help.

Wynter has panels of B2B specialist, mid-level, and senior-level audiences. 

Momentive targets both B2B and B2C users.

No matter how you conduct market research, design your questions to understand where current products fall short, what new features are most relevant or exciting, and what customers expect next.

3. Rally the entire company around the new product

Product marketing is responsible for positioning alignment across the company, including why you’re upgrading your current product or adding a new featureset, and how you’re selling it. 

There are several ways to do this:

• An internal press release;
• An FAQ guide;
• A sales messaging playbook.

Because product marketers are masters of the product and its positioning, you’ll brief all departments on assets like sales scripts and marketing collateral. You’ll also help create the go-to-market strategy and define the new product’s USP. 

The positioning and messaging document you create will help teams get a head start, but you’ll be there to ensure alignment.

4. Use data to guide product development post-launch

During the new product development process, product marketing supports the product team with their research. This data informs product ideation and iteration, helping the product team make strategic adjustments as needed.

Successful new product development cannot happen in a vacuum. As responses come in after launch, you’ll adapt your product to become an even better fit.

Product marketing helps strategize, iterate, and ultimately produce a unique product worthy of demand.

Listen to your biggest fans: Leverage consumer sentiment and anecdotes

No one knows your brand better than your existing customers. Invite them to help shape your new product.

Conduct customer research with your advocates and loyal customers. Collecting voice of customer data helps you make sure users are experiencing your product in the best way possible. 

​​In a Marketing Science paper, researchers defined four aspects of voice of customer research:

• Customer needs described in the customer’s own words;
• Hierarchical grouping of needs;
• Prioritization of needs;
• Segmentation of needs and perceived benefits by audience.

The paper illustrates the critical need to talk to your customers. It shows them you care and that you’re taking steps to solve their problems. 

This research begins with your existing customer base. 

CXL’s voice of customer data course recommends using surveys and polls to ask open- and closed-ended questions. This gives you both quantitative and qualitative to understand your customers’ motivations and goals.

Open-ended questions are helpful for gathering in-depth answers. Customers can respond to questions freely, in writing or via an interview.

The downsides to open-ended questions are that interviews take longer, and survey questions get lower response rates. Longer responses require more of your customers’ time and effort. 

It’s also more challenging to compare results between customers or segments due to response variance.

Closed-ended questions encourage participation and allow for comparison. They can be helpful for benchmarking, perception measurement, and direct questions that don’t require nuance to answer.

However, there’s more room for bias. 

Bias can creep in from the question creator (you) or from the respondents, meaning you might not get an honest answer. This is because the answers are provided via multiple-choice, yes or no, ranking, etc., and questions can inadvertently guide respondents’ answers. It takes practice to design bias-free questionnaires.

Design a survey that helps you understand your customers’ motivations and goals using a mix of the two question types. 

Ask questions like:

• What pushed you to purchase our product/service? This helps to understand your customer’s mindset at the point of purchase. 

• What problem does our product solve for you? Your customers might use your product or service beyond your original value proposition. Asking about the problem it solves for your customers can help you identify new target audience segments.

• Did you consider any similar products? What helped you make your final decision? This helps you understand your competition better and helps you understand your differentiating factors from your customers’ POV.

• Did you have any concerns before purchasing our product? What helped alleviate those concerns? Learn where you can remove friction and optimize the buyer’s journey.

• Are there times you wish our product could do more or perform differently? This helps identify the problems that still exist.

These questions help you shape your product strategy. 

New product development cannot begin without product marketing

Waiting until after launch to deploy product marketing is a mistake. User research sets the direction for development, ensuring your new product solves real problems for your customers.

Design a survey or conduct focus groups with your target audience to better uncover their needs, wants, and motivations. 

Ask questions like:

• If they’re already using a competitor’s product, why did they choose that brand? 
• What do they love about the product? 
• What do they dislike about the product?
• What features do they wish were included? 
• What made them pull the purchase trigger? 
• How does the product address pain points or goals they have?

Get to the root of your customers’ behaviors and motivations to identify the top-priority features for your new product development. 

Only once you’ve done this research can you create an accurate, useful buyer persona. Like this one from virtual whiteboard platform Miro:

Creating a buyer persona based on market research is critical. SparkToro’s Rand Fishkin explains personas often contain:

• Information with no business application;
• Demographics and psychographic traits that are hard-to-apply at best and stereotyping or biasing at worst;
• Data that’s aggregated based on informal interviews and guesswork alongside data from surveys or market research tools (with no indication of which ones came from which sources);
• Idealized versions of singular, representative customer targets that narrows, rather than broadens, to whom a product or marketing campaign might appeal.

These personas are not useful. Rand goes on to say what they should contain:

• The information your team (or client) needs to effectively do their job;
• Details about that information’s source and accuracy;
• Enough breadth to represent the range of individuals covered by the persona;
• Segmentation of those personas only when there’s a relevant need to target, build-for, or market-to individuals in those groups differently.

Don’t make your persona-building workshop a pointless exercise. Substantiate every claim with data and segment into purposeful groups you plan to market to.

SparkToro is a great resource for this. Using search behavior, the platform offers a unique take on audience insights:

Make decisions with confidence knowing your new target customer’s motivations (e.g., allocate marketing budget, tweak messaging, focus sales outreach, etc.).

Differentiate from the competition (and yourself) 

The market is saturated with lookalike products. Zero in on differentiation to create a better product that’s worthy of conversion.

Creating a differentiation strategy helps you in two ways:

1. It helps teams align on what sets you apart;
2. It determines how you communicate your new product’s value.

Conduct competitor research in the development phase to better understand how your organization compares.

This framework from Buffer can help you determine your direct competitors:

Competing brands may sell to the same customer or sell the same solution to a different customer. Your direct competitors solve the same problem for the same customer with a similar product.

Conduct a competitive analysis to analyze where similar products with the same audience fall short. Ask questions like:

• Can you create features their products are missing?
• Are there features where your competitors’ product is weak but yours excels?
• What about your brand makes you better positioned to sell this particular kind of product?
• Can you distinctly improve the user experience?
• What can you learn from your competitors’ product reviews? 
• Are there aspects of your competitors’ products that you can’t beat (e.g., brand recognition, labor-intensive features, etc.)? Is there a cost-efficient way to close that gap?

Create a full picture of your opportunities and threats compared to your direct competitors. 

Your customer research is invaluable here. Talk to your customers to understand their problems, then prioritize the features and experiences they care about most.

Feature or plan upgrades, as well as entirely new products, should hit on the customer pain points identified during your research phase. 

Ask yourself: 

• Why should customers buy your latest release? 
• Why can’t they get the same features from product A? 
• Why is it worth jumping to product B? 
• What have you addressed in product A to come up with product B?

New customers might come from your existing customer pool if you have an established product line. 

Determine your messaging for both new and existing audiences. Their pain points may not overlap.

Be transparent when communicating value with your customers. You’ve already identified your ideal customer’s pain points, so speak to that directly in your messaging.

CRM monday.com calls out its competitor, Asana, on a landing page. 

monday.com also understands that empty words don’t mean much to consumers. They want to know where the true value-add lies. 

Further down on the site, there’s a way for buyers to compare the two products directly. 

In a table, monday.com compares their platform to their biggest threat, highlighting where they excel (tied to customer pain points). 

Asana’s landing page, by contrast, focuses more broadly on the value they bring their clients, including stats like: “Teams report they’re up to 45% more efficient with Asana.”

Stand out from the competition and highlight new products for existing customers by clearly communicating your USP. Tie this directly to customer pain points to help them understand its value.

Build a winning product marketing and go-to-market plan

Where your product team focuses on creating a successful product, product marketing acts as the customer’s advocate throughout the entire new product development process. 

According to Epsilon research, 80% of today’s consumers expect a personalized experience from brands. 

And a positive customer experience is tied firmly to a company’s success—yielding 20% higher customer-satisfaction rates and a 10% to 15% boost in sales conversion rates.

Talking to your customers directly also deepens your relationship with them and makes them feel heard. 

Customers that see their concerns addressed through your new product or product features will strengthen their affinity and loyalty toward your brand.

This comes across in your bottom line—a PwC report shows that customers will pay up to 16% price premiums when they feel appreciated.

As your product nears market readiness, create a product marketing and go-to-market plan that highlights how you’ll elevate the customer experience. 

Building a customer-centric product marketing plan

A product marketing plan outlines the positioning, messaging, and value proposition for a new product. 

This strategy is what your teams will use to communicate the value of your new product and secure the best path toward a successful launch. 

We’ve already covered some of the work that goes into this plan, like creating buyer personas. Those personas are a key first step to building your product marketing plan. 

The research you conducted to create those personas gives you a complete understanding of your customers’ pain points, needs, challenges, habits, and motivations. You’ll use all of that information to build out the product marketing plan.

Next, you’ll leverage your competitive research to conduct a SWOT analysis. A SWOT analysis considers your product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

You’ve already done similar work during the product development process to understand how to differentiate your product. 

Now, assess how much of that intended differentiation comes through with the final product.

After conducting the SWOT analysis, use your product’s strengths to create your product positioning and messaging. 

Positioning refers to your brand or product’s ability to influence buyer perception relative to your competitors. Your positioning should tell the story of your product—what makes it different, why you created it, what need or problem it aims to solve. 

Keep your customers at the heart of this positioning work. The story you tell through positioning should combine all the strategy work you’ve done so far to incorporate your ideal customers’ needs.

Let’s look at Privy. It’s positioned as “the ecommerce marketing platform for online brands that need to grow sales.”

It directly calls out Shopify sellers to let them know they’re in the right place: “One-click signup with Shopify.”

Messaging is a subset of your positioning. It outlines what and how you’ll communicate with your audience about the new product.

Privy’s messaging communicates speed by saying it’s the “fastest way to grow sales with email and SMS.” 

It tells visitors exactly what they can expect: “build your list, save abandoned carts, send money.” And it tells them they can do this “all in one place.”

When it comes to messaging, consistency is key. Share the messaging and positioning with sales and product to make sure everyone is on the same page about how to talk about the product. 

Create an elevator pitch for your product that succinctly outlines the products’ benefits and value. Align on the tone and style for your messaging, leveraging your buyer persona to determine how to speak to your customers at their level.

This pitch will keep the whole company on the same page when it comes to interacting with your customers.

Finally, your value proposition is the clear articulation of why customers should consider your product above all other potential options. Getting your value proposition right is crucial for conversion.

Your value proposition should make three things immediately clear to your customers.

1. Why your product is relevant: How does it solve a problem for your customers?
2. What the products’ benefits are: Be specific about the quantified value of your product.
3. How your product is different: Tell your customers why they should buy your product over your competitors’ products.

Privy’s relevance (email marketing for online brands), benefits (build your list, save abandoned carts, etc., all in one place), and differentiating statement (the fastest way to grow sales) are all included in their value proposition.

Positioning, messaging, and value proposition are three important strategic pillars of how you’re perceived in the market.

Hashing out these three elements ensures your entire company is aligned on the distinct value of the new product, how to talk about it, and what sets your product apart from the rest.

Creating a go-to-market plan 

A go-to-market strategy is a guiding framework for who you’ll target, how you’ll sell your product, how you’ll win against the competition and a high-level launch timeline. Each element of this strategy is influenced by research insights.

While a product marketing plan can evolve as your product and the market shift post-launch, the go-to-market strategy is more fixed on the new product launch itself. 

Zero in on your competitors and differentiate

Differentiation is a major consideration here. Start by understanding who the key players are, which you can do by using Gartner Magic Quadrants. 

You can also narrow in on your competitors by conducting SEO research. This helps you see who is paying for ads against certain keywords and how they’re framing their product messaging. 

Like these results for the term “email marketing”:

After you’ve identified your competition, do deeper research on your three to five biggest threats. This should be a realistic view of your direct competitors.

Audit the positioning, messaging, and value proposition work you’ve done and figure out what your top differentiators are. 

Identify your launch audience

Build on your existing persona research to identify your launch audience. Select the segments you’re going to target and get even more specific.

For B2B products, develop a company profile. Narrow in on the industry, company size, and internal accounts that fit your product best. 

For both B2B and B2C brands, build out a customer profile, including their department, title, level, and demographics (gender, age, income, location, etc.). 

Beyond personal details, work out their challenges and pain points, specific to the product you’re selling. You’ll eventually tie these points to the features of your product and how you solve their challenges.

Finally, list the marketing channels where you can reach your ideal customer: 

• What publications do they read? 
• What related interests can you tap into (e.g., apps or other companies)? 
• What social media or communications platforms do they use? 

Leverage this customer research to identify where, when, and how you’ll need to communicate with them about your new product.

For example, an email marketing company like Klaviyo might target marketing and sales executives at B2B companies with 50+ employees. 

To reach this audience, they might distribute content through marketing blogs or trade publications.

With a full picture of your customer, define the product you’re taking to market. You first iteration may not match what you take to market—the same product can launch under a different name, brand, or messaging. 

To learn this, ask questions like: 

• Do multiple personas need your product? 
• Are there multiple use cases? 
• How might you need to adjust messaging across different use cases? 

Many B2B products and software solutions can be used differently across different industries. 

Even if you don’t end up launching one product as multiple products, you can identify opportunities to update your messaging based on the persona you’re targeting. 

Naming

Naming your product is perhaps the most intimidating step. In their Product Marketing course, CXL outlines five essential steps to name a product:

Customer research is invaluable here. A name that doesn’t resonate with the customer can cripple a product’s success. 

Survey your customers to understand their associations with your kind of product, such as:

• How do you refer to the process you do when you’re using [competitor’s] product? 
• What words come to mind to describe this process or the problem the product solves?
• How does using this product make you feel?

Names can be descriptive (literally describing what the product is or does) or branded (loosely related or unrelated to the product). Testing, voting, stakeholder interviews, and legal review will all help you determine the name that is the best fit.

Create your launch messaging and pricing strategy

Once you’ve determined a name, create product messaging that ladders back to the challenges your ideal customers are facing. 

Launch messaging should include short descriptions, use cases, key value propositions, differentiation, and supporting proof points. This messaging will inform your launch campaign creative, sales outreach, and product pages.

Develop a pricing strategy that takes into account the value you’re offering to your ideal customer. Pricing should pass the following tests:

• Can you explain the price to your customer without being embarrassed? If the value does not align with the price, you risk letting your customers down post-sale or failing to get to a conversion in the first place.

• Is your pricing easy to understand? Avoid “black box” pricing models, which set the price of a product based on complicated algorithms and sets of conditions. If you can’t explain the pricing easily, your sales team won’t be able to either, and you’ll leave customers confused and frustrated.

• Can you leverage existing packages or offerings? Your existing products can help you gauge the appropriate price for a new product based on comparable value. You can also consider how your products might price out when combined in a single sale.

Consider acquisition

Use your customer persona(s) to determine how you’re going to acquire customers. Two common methods are self-service and sales-assisted.

Self-service relies on inbound customer activity. This method can leverage:

• Ecommerce platforms and app stores, where customers find and purchase your product;
• Free trials, which hook customers by allowing them to test out your product;
• Upgrade triggers that move customers from free to paid products;
• Conversion funnel optimization, bringing people through awareness, consideration, conversion, and, eventually, loyalty and advocacy.

Sales-assisted service is driven by inbound and outbound demand generation. Leverage your inbound marketing funnel to ensure a steady flow of leads for your sales reps’ outbound and cold prospecting efforts (as well as any account-based marketing strategies).

Build your timeline

Finally, determine a launch timeline. This outlines specific dates, such as:

• When to have your GTM strategy completed;
• When your GTM execution plan must be ready (and budget acquired);
• The deadline for recruitment and onboarding of beta customers;
• Training and sales development, and;
• Launch day.

When determining launch day, consider what works best for your product and your customers. 

External factors to consider include major holidays that could drown out your launch, competitor releases, and industry events. 

Internal factors include product readiness, other company launches, and where you are in the sales quarter. 

Optimize for repeat buyers 

If your existing or new products don’t require repeat purchases, additional new product development can act as a retention strategy. 

Consider what add-ons you can offer your customers to increase purchase frequency. These can be products or services.

Can you offer a more personalized package for select customer personas (e.g., service upgrades like one-to-one consulting with your team, tailored reports, or performance data)?

Take Pipedrive, for example. Its core product is CRM software that helps sales professionals manage their customer pipeline.

In addition to multiple pricing tiers that help customers customize their purchases, Pipedrive has add-ons to further support different customer personas. 

A LeadBooster add-on might be valuable for a startup sales team looking to add leads to their funnel for outreach. Another team may opt for the Web Visitors add-on to better understand online behavior.

By offering features that go beyond the standard, bundled product, Pipedrive creates more opportunities for additional revenue and shows its customers that it understands their needs. 

For B2C brands, what related products can you sell to diversify your revenue streams? 

For example, a bike manufacturer may only sell someone a bike once every five years. But offering a cleaning subscription box or bike trail app could encourage customers to spend more.

Conclusion

When done well, launching a new product can help with two things:

1. Increasing usage or revenue of existing customers;
2. Penetrating new markets or target segments.

Differentiation is key in a crowded landscape where many products fail. Product marketing strategy work helps your new product stand out.

Center the customer at every step of the new product development process. Ensure you’re delivering on their needs and solving their real problems, rather than creating new products for the sake of new products. 
Learn and master the skills you need to successfully launch a new product in our Product Marketing Minidegree.

The post The Role Marketing plays in New Product Launches appeared first on CXL.

No one is better at building anticipation ahead of a launch than Apple. New product launches trigger publicized spec leaks and reveal events draw crowds in the millions (over 2.7 million people watched the iPhone 12 presentation live). 

In the iPhone 13’s first quarter, it generated $71.6 billion in revenue (despite parts shortages and a global pandemic).

You don’t have to create Apple-level hype to see a successful new product launch. Trading app Robinhood launched with almost one million users thanks to a pinpointed market need and waitlist pre-launch campaign.

Unfortunately, many product launches take a “build it and they will come approach,” failing to gain traction and eventually fizzling out. These launches lack the key component of promotion and acquisition.

In this article, you’ll learn how to design an effective new product launch plan to avoid this pitfall and generate demand.

Before starting on your new product launch plan, make sure you’ve crafted a product launch strategy. This’ll help you inform and execute the tactical aspects of your product launch plan.

Pre-launch: Paving the way for a successful product launch 

The pre-launch stage is often the busiest and most impactful stage of a new product launch. Rushed or poorly planned product launches will flop.

Activities during this phase focus on building brand awareness and anticipation, developing product messaging, identifying key marketing channels, and driving demand for your new product to ensure a successful launch.

1. Challenge yourself to become a product expert 

Some marketers stop learning about their product after the initial research and strategy development. In reality, you’ll be learning and adapting your product and strategy as you gain more insights from your customers.

Through the entire product lifecycle, the product marketing manager (PMM) and their team should be the masters of the new product. Using the product marketing strategy you’ve developed, your product marketing team must know:

• What the product does;
• Why it exists;
• Who it serves;
• How it helps them, and;
• Why it’s the best option.

You’ll continually develop this expertise by working closely with other departments. Learn from marketing, sales, and customer success what customers are raving and ranting about.

Interview product managers and engineers to gain a technical understanding of the product. Or better yet, use the product yourself. Tie challenges back to your product benefits.

Slite, a digital workplace for async teams, connects their customers’ challenges to their product benefits on their ”Discussions” feature landing page.

Slite found that a common frustration around a competitor’s tool is communication getting lost in Slack threads.

Instead of dancing around the topic, they called it out on the landing page: 

• “A place for more focused discussions.”
• “Tired of endless Slack threads?”
• “Slack isn’t cutting it, and it’s about time for a better alternative.”

Learn all you can from market research and by interacting with other teams. Then tie your customers’ challenges to benefits in the clearest way possible.

2. Generate excitement and buy-in with an internal press release 

Create an internal press release to communicate your positioning with your entire team.

Having a single source of truth document ensures clarity and consistency across marketing, sales, product, and customer success teams. It also builds internal excitement for the new product launch.

Amazon’s former director, Ian McAllister, describes a framework he uses for internal press releases:

“Heading: Name the product in a way the reader (i.e. your target customers) will understand.

Subheading: Describe who the market for the product is and what benefit they get. One sentence only underneath the title.

Summary: Give a summary of the product and the benefit. Assume the reader will not read anything else so make this paragraph good.

Problem: Describe the problem your product solves.

Solution: Describe how your product elegantly solves the problem.

Quote from You: A quote from a spokesperson in your company.

How to Get Started: Describe how easy it is to get started.

Customer Quote: Provide a quote from a hypothetical customer that describes how they experienced the benefit.

Closing and Call to Action: Wrap it up and give pointers where the reader should go next.”

Keep it short and simple (under a page and a half), and avoid overly corporate or technical language. McAllister revealed his trick for communicating the product’s unique positioning and messaging is to pretend you’re talking to Oprah:

“Imagine you’re sitting on Oprah’s couch and have just explained the product to her, and then you listen as she explains it to her audience.’”

The press release should help shape every aspect of product development. The product team can refer back to the document, asking at all times if what they’re developing meets the brief.

Doing so will keep the product team focused on customer benefits and help them avoid wasting resources on features that aren’t important.

3. Building genuinely useful marketing personas 

Often, marketing personas are empty, unrealistic imitations of who marketers hope their customers are. This happens when the persona development process is top-down instead of bottom-up. 

Rand Fishkin, founder and CEO of SparkToro explains his experience with the typical user persona:

“Build personas → Make sure they get used across the company → Create product and marketing initiatives to employ the personas → Get no benefit at all → Doh!”

Fishkin recommends a five-step approach to creating genuinely useful buyer personas:

1. List out the applications your personas are solving for. Who’s doing what with your product? What information might they require to do that work effectively?

2. Audit and cull. Identify realistic elements that can be tested and proved through data-gathering exercises.

3. Substantiate with data. Leverage internal customer data from social accounts, web analytics, email subscribers, and current product usage data. Scrape insights from market research, industry statistics, and competitor press releases. 

Interview your customers, your prospects, and your lost deals to understand real-life needs and challenges. Access audience intelligence from tools like SparkToro, Brandwatch, and Helixa to gather quantitative data at scale.

4. Segment your personas. Use the data you’ve gathered to establish the characteristics that separate one group from another. If two or more sets of your market share overlapping behaviors and characters, group them under one persona. 

5. Settle on a presentation format. Present your personas in a way that makes sense for your team to digest. That might be a Google Doc with a few bullet points, an infographic-style design, or a short video.

HubSpot offers a free tool that creates personas like this:

4. Determine which channels you’ll capitalize on 

Your product marketing strategy should inform the channels you’ll use to reach your audience (leading up to and including launch day).

Build a list of the specific channels you’re going to use. Then consider:

• What you’re going to share in which locations;
• When you’re going to share it;
• Who is responsible for executing and monitoring each task.

Here are four common channels to build hype and reach before you launch and on launch day.

Paid Media

Consider which channels you’ll allocate ad spend. Your next steps will depend on the channels you use.

For example, will you run Google Ads? You’ll need to determine the key search phrases you’ll target. 

Considering a publisher network? You’ll need to identify where your audience is most engaged and ensure your budget is going to the right places.

No matter your chosen channel, ensure messaging and creative tie back to your product marketing strategy.

Organic

Customers who want your new product may come to you through various organic channels, like search and social media. 

If you want to encourage organic traffic by investing in content marketing, you’ll need to identify the topics most relevant to your new product users. 

You’ll also want to consider how your website needs to change to reflect the new product. Will you need to create a new landing page, feature the product on your homepage, create new content on your blog, etc.?

Take Later, an Instagram marketing platform.

When it dropped a new product feature (first comment scheduling), Later knew it could reach its existing audience on Instagram. 

The platform designed an informative video to demonstrate exactly how the new product works, and published it on Instagram where their target users are.

Digital PR

If you have existing relationships with media (newspapers, magazines, radio, online publications), use them to broadcast your launch. 

If not, where do opportunities exist to form new relationships?

Develop a strategy for media outreach. Develop easy-access content that journalists, PR, and other media professionals can use (e.g., press releases and brand kits).

Take Happsy, an organic mattress retailer.

When launching its new product, Happsy leveraged PRNewswire’s large reach to promote a press release announcing its certified organic bed-in-a-box.

Take advantage of relevant media outlets and include an exclusive offer to entice readers:

Traditional press releases can only take you so far. Happsy leveraged media outlets they had relationships with and issued a press release.

To make a real splash, you have to be where your audience is most active and give them content they’re looking for. 

For example, AI video editing software Kamua launched on Product Hunt, where tech-minded individuals learn about new tools.

Their launch campaign on a site targeting their user base gained them so much engagement, they rose to the third “most hunted” product on the site in a day.

Leverage digital PR by showing up where your audience is active and engaging with them on launch day.

Influencers

Think about how you’ll leverage third parties, like thought leaders and other brands, to promote your product and spread your message. 

Mention is a platform where you can find influencers and track their activity once employed to see how it’s impacting your reach. 

Consequently, Mention put this to good use when marketing its new product. It created an influencer marketing microsite and got other marketing influencers involved to help capture more attention.

There are many ways to use influencer marketing. Consider:

• Whether you’ll use a partner channel;
• Whether you’re involved in any communities that you might engage; 
• If you can leverage online forums like Reddit to maximize reach and conversation; 
• Whether you’ll use more formal influencer relationships to promote the new product launch.

Millennials don’t want to be advertised to, which is why many businesses are using influencers instead. Learn your audience’s preferences, then fit your channels to your audience.

5. Increase organic visibility to boost brand awareness and demand

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial growth driver for B2B product launches.

Because organic content can take time to reap traffic rewards, publish before launch. This allows time for pages to be indexed, spark conversation, and rank.

Create high-value, intent-focused long-form content to attract top-of-funnel prospects, based on both product-driven and problem-driven topics.

Take sales CRM Pipedrive. One of their target markets is real estate agents.

Pipedrive uses concise, informative, search-optimized descriptions to win top positions, like this featured snippet for the keyword “real estate CRM.”

Pipedrive also focuses on developing top-of-funnel, problem-driven content to attract real estate agents struggling with cold-calling and lead generation.

Prioritize topics that have a higher likelihood of ranking.

For example, take these two search phrases “top real estate CRM” and “best CRM for real estate investors.”

Both keywords have similar monthly search volume, but one has a keyword difficulty of 39% and the other has a difficulty of 63% (according to SEMrush).

Having identified which key search phrases provide the best opportunities, use a tool like Airtable to build out a content calendar, detailing for each piece:

• Topic;
• Headline;
• Keyword;
• Project status;
• Due date;
• Writers and editors responsible;
• Distribution channels.

6. Debug website issues and improve user experience 

Most of your product launch campaign activities will direct traffic back to your website. So, before launch day, make sure your site is prepared to handle traffic spikes.

OrangeValley found that if their site was just one second slower, their conversion rate dropped by 25%.

Ensure that your site:

• Has a healthy load speed;
• Is not bogged down by excessive code;
• Doesn’t have any 404 warnings or dead links;
• Is easily navigable;
• Is mobile-responsive;
• Doesn’t host any duplicate content;
• Is secure and uses HTTPS;
• Has an XML sitemap to help search engines crawl and index pages.

Find tools and learn how to fix these issues to prepare your website for traffic and growth in CXL’s article on technical SEO.

7. Collaborate to develop initial messaging 

Develop your product messaging in the pre-launch phase, but be prepared to adapt it as you collect customer feedback during and post-launch.

Morgan Molnar, Director of Product Marketing at Momentive, shares a template for developing initial product messaging in her CXL course on product launches.

Use this template to write a short description of your product. Detail key value propositions and the features that deliver them.

Share your product messaging with other teams across marketing, sales, product development, and customer success to gather important feedback. 

For example, sales representatives may be able to identify common phrases or language your target audience uses to describe their pain points.

8. Test your message before it gets to your customers 

Use message testing products like Wynter to understand how your customers see your product and messaging before bringing the product to market.

Build your target audience using Wynter’s proprietary B2B panel, set up the test creative (e.g., your new landing page), and customize your test questions.

Use this feedback to amend your product messaging where appropriate, and run a second test to validate changes.

9. Create shareable pre-launch content to generate hype

Prepare for launch day by creating shareable content. This will help generate discussion around your new product.

The more people you have sharing and interacting with your product, the more likely it is to land in front of people who need it and want to buy it.

For example, Rand Fishkin, co-founder at SparkToro, created pre-launch content detailing their funding journey.

Marker.io also launched in public, transparently narrating the entire process along the way. Hotjar describes Marker.io’s launch in their case study:

“Gary Gaspar and his team launched Marker.io, a visual communication tool, back in 2015. Being featured on Product Hunt within a month made them think they had ‘arrived’, but they were far from it: they attracted about 20 upvotes and 2 comments (…one of which was Gary’s).

For the second Product Hunt launch, the team worked relentlessly. They made a very detailed action plan, sharpened their product visuals and copy, built shareable documentation that included a demo video—and only then did the hard work pay off: Marker received 600 upvotes and around 3,000 new signups over the course of one month.” 

Marker.io even made their Product Hunt launch plan publicly available in a Trello board:

Leading up to your new product launch, focus on creating highly-shareable content like this to build awareness and stimulate conversation.

Launch day: Deploying your new product launch plan 

Launch day is all about coordination. Without coordination, your chances of reaching the right audiences (and even virality) are lower.

Enable sales and marketing teams to spread the word about your new product, and have a clear plan for doing this.

Advocates and influencers should be prepared to push your message to their own audiences to further your impact.

All parties must understand how the product works, where it brings value to your audience, and why competitors’ customers should second-guess their choice. Luckily, you’ve covered this in pre-launch.

Here’s how to bring everything together on launch day.

10. Develop a coordinated plan of attack 

Coordinate sales and marketing teams to have the right activities ready to go at the right time:

• Who is available to book product demo meetings?
• Will you be running live streams, webinars, giveaways, etc.? Who owns these tasks, and when and how will they take place?
• What emails will you send? How will they be scheduled? Who’ll be responsible for handling responses, and what kind of responses can you anticipate?
• If you have a sales team, who is making phone calls? To whom? When? 
• Who is responsible for inbound calls?

Prepare your teams by having step-by-step plays ready to go (when X happens, we do Y). You won’t anticipate every customer challenge, but you can help your team operate autonomously by preparing as much as you can.

Leaders (particularly those with established audiences), should also be prepared to push the message out and engage with the community.

Let’s revisit Rand Fishkin. 

On launch day, Fishkin engaged consistently with his Twitter audience, answering questions, demonstrating use cases, and helping the community get the most out of SparkToro.

Use your collaborative work platform to organize your plan so everyone knows where they’re meant to be and what they should be doing on launch day.

11. Share relevant content across your primary channels 

Share a formal product announcement message along with other communications on launch day.

You’ve determined which channels you’ll rely most heavily on during the pre-launch phase; now’s the time to act on that plan:

• Roll out new product landing pages;
• Publish and share new blog posts and how-to articles;
• Schedule social media posts throughout the day that promote your product’s value props;
• Encourage discussions with your audience when they engage with your content;
• Coordinate media and PR releases to drop on the same day and link back to your main launch platform (such as the new product landing page).

The best way to communicate your new product launch is to show potential customers exactly how your product is going to solve their problem.

Take CRM platform monday.com.

When they released their new product workdocs (a collaborative document editor similar to Google Docs), monday.com used a short, informative video to demonstrate the product’s value and key competitive differentiators.

The video featured a face-to-face comparison with existing word document editors demonstrating workdocs’ speed and collaboration abilities, showing their audience exactly why they should choose workdocs over a competitor product.

12. Galvanize your advocates for sharing launch-day content 

Leverage any influencers you have a relationship with—without “buying” them. 

Ensure that your influencer partner sincerely backs what you’re selling and that it’s helpful to their audience.

Engage your advocates to upvote your new product on Product Hunt, and to share content on relevant social media platforms.

To maximize engagement (and to allow influencers to retain authenticity), have advocates publish unique content rather than simply retweeting your existing posts.

Take Ashley R. Cummings, freelance writer, and SparkToro advocate.

Rather than simply retweeting one of Fishkin’s product videos Cummings shares a quick tip on using SparkToro to find interview sources.

Fishkin then leverages this user-generated content by sharing this insight and product advocacy with his own audience.

13. Use a referral program to turn your customers into advocates 

Referral schemes are an important part of long-term product marketing strategy, generating a near-passive stream for customer acquisition.

Take Airtable, a low-code platform for building collaborative apps.

Airtable encourages users to invite their network by offering $10 worth of credits for each person invited.

Use a compelling referral offer to grow your customer base quickly at launch.

For example, you could offer a “first month free” initiative for both the inviter and invitee. Offer this incentive for a limited time to boost initial launch sign-ups before reverting to your long-term referral scheme offer.

Post-launch: Conducting a post-mortem 

Focus areas for the post-launch phase are retention of your new, hard-won customers, and KPI tracking. Consider:

• How do we retain the customers we’ve attracted at launch? How can we convert trial users into paid ones? What tactics do we have in play to upsell and increase customer lifetime value (CLV)?
• What KPIs are we tracking? How does our performance stack up against expectations? What are the underlying causes behind low performance (if applicable), and what will we do about it?
• What lessons can we learn from this experience to apply to future product launches? What insights have we gained that might apply to product development in the next life cycle?

The launch isn’t over at midnight on launch day. Here’s what to do next.

14. Execute your customer retention strategy 

Your product launch tactics were successful. You’ve attracted a group of prospects and converted them into users.

Now it’s time to keep them from switching to the competition.

• Use customer-facing webinars to show existing customers how to get the most out of your product and to demonstrate specific applications.
• Leverage email marketing campaigns to introduce users to product features step-by-step. 
• Send out product updates when resolving bugs or adding new features.
• Encourage customers to follow your social media pages, and post insightful, shareable guides to using your product in a real-life context.

Make your customer retention strategy a two-way conversation by encouraging customers to give feedback on your product. Ask those who switched from a competitor what drove them to leave. 

Alex Turnbull of GrooveHQ shares a simple email template for capturing customer feedback.

Analyze customer service data and support logs to identify areas of friction. Review email performance to understand what actions take place (or don’t) when you send out retention-focused emails. 

15. Conduct a post-mortem and analyze results 

Start by evaluating your performance on metrics that measure the success of your product launch. Track metrics like:

• Content engagement metrics such as time on page, bounce rate, and page views;
• Click-through rates for ads and organic content;
• Volume-based KPIs like the number of new trials, new customers, referrals, sales qualified leads;
• Total revenue from customers acquired through online marketing; 
• Cost Per Lead segmented by acquisition channel, and;
• Average Customer Value.

Compare your actual metrics against your forecasts and goals, and ask:

• Which goals did we achieve?
• Which goals did we not achieve?
• In either case, why?

Try not to make assumptions about the reasons behind meeting (or not meeting) your goals. 

Engage with your customers (and non-customers) to understand how your marketing efforts impacted performance against benchmarks.

If you hit your goal for sales qualified leads, but fell short of the KPI for the number of new customers, this may indicate a breakdown somewhere in the sales process.

Analyze sales pipeline data to understand drop-off rates at each stage. Meet with sales reps to find out how customers respond to your messaging and word tracks. Set up interviews with missed opportunities, and ask them why they chose not to sign up.

16. Share key learnings with internal departments 

Don’t make the mistake of keeping your post-mortem insights to yourself. Sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams can all learn from your findings. They may be able to provide additional insights into what worked and what didn’t.

Use these questions to deconstruct the results of your new product launch marketing plan, and share your answers with all relevant departments:

• What lessons can go toward the next product launch?
• What could sales have communicated better?
• What new issues are being presented to the support team?
• What assets could optimize your marketing campaigns?
• What demos could ease customers into the new product?
• What does our product usage data tell us about the usefulness of the new product?

Post-launch insights can also prove invaluable for informing the product roadmap, so make sure to share key learnings with the product team as well.

Take Wonderflow, ​​a voice of customer analytics company.

Wonderflow was working with a client who produced an innovative new baby monitor. Unfortunately, the product launch didn’t go as planned, and the client wasn’t gaining a lot of traction.

The post-launch feedback analysis identified the problem: the monitor remained silent if there was nothing to report, but parents wanted a regular update, problem or not.

The product team used this feedback to change the monitor’s update sequence, the product marketing team adjusted their messaging and marketing collateral, and sales communicated the updated feature to prospects.

Conclusion  

New product launches are a core aspect of product marketing. They require careful collaboration and coordination of sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams to execute effectively.

The majority of your new product launch plan activities take place pre-launch, but don’t discount the importance of a post-launch analysis of your new product’s impact, and subsequent changes to your product marketing strategy.
Master new product launch planning to start getting revenue out the gate with CXL’s Product Marketing Minidegree.

The post New Product Launch Plan: What To Do during Pre-launch, Launch, and Post-launch appeared first on CXL.

In the early 2000s, DVDs were the primary way to watch videos. Netflix streaming launched in 2007, and the DVD player is now a technological antique.

Products, much like humans, live on borrowed time. From the moment they launch, they’re on a journey towards decline. 

How this journey plays out is what marketers try to predict by using the product lifecycle as a model. 

According to the classic sales curve, products go through four stages:

1. Development and introduction;
2. Growth;
3. Maturity;
4. Decline.

During introduction and growth, products rise along the curve as sales grow before reaching the peak of maturity and its eventual decline.

Whether your product follows this curve or a different path is determined by product life cycle management—the decisions you make to evolve and promote the product at every stage.

In this article, you’ll learn how to set goals at each product life cycle stage to maximize profits.

Demystifying product life cycle marketing

Your marketing strategy should adapt to each stage of your product life cycle. If it stayed the same, you’d miss out on opportunities to reach customers as your product matures.

Product life cycle marketing aligns marketing efforts with the life cycle stage of your product. 

The product life cycle above is a roadmap for your product. Developed by German economist Theodore Levitt, it provides a view of how the product progresses from introduction to launch to eventual decline.

The life cycle makes it easier to visualize your product’s stage and adapt your marketing strategy as you unlock new distribution channels and marketing assets. Adaptation is the difference between accelerating the curve and becoming obsolete. 

For example, focus on building awareness and generating demand if your product is in the introduction phase. If you’re in the maturity phase, leverage your brand equity to lure customers away from the competition.

Smart Insights’ RACE (Reach, Act, Convert, Engage) Framework life cycle marketing model shows how marketing efforts might evolve in line with the classic sales curve. 

While this curve makes the product life cycle easy to illustrate, it rarely translates to reality.

Your product’s life cycle will be unlike previous iterations or rival products. Which is why, as Derek Gleason points out: 

“The goal of product lifecycle marketing is not to match the curve but to outline what may work best now and plan for the future.”

Leverage previous product life cycles to gain a broad understanding of how your product fits into the life cycles of products in its class. This will help you spot early signs of a pending transition to a new stage and avoid pitfalls (e.g., waiting too long to get out of the introduction stage). 

That said, for them to be of use, your product must first gain attention and demand. And this isn’t always easy. Of the approximately 30,000 products launched every year, many will fail.

Hitting the ground running: Product development & market introduction

The development stage and introduction stage are rarely profitable. Even Facebook didn’t net positive until year three. New products are unlikely to be their most optimized selves. Development and promotion costs will also outweigh sales. 

Your goal is to progress from introduction to growth as quickly as possible to start turning a profit.

Your marketing objectives for the introduction stage of the product life cycle are to:

1. Get internal buy-in;
2. Generate product awareness.

People must start discovering your product, why it exists, and why they should buy it. Your teams must be able to communicate this messaging. 

Achieving this starts with customer and competitive research. 

You should already know your ideal customer from work done by product marketing and development teams.

Use this to establish customer goals and pain points. Use qualitative research methods like surveys and interviews to find out how customers are currently meeting their needs.

What are they using to help themselves? What are they not using? Look for gaps in the market that product marketing can exploit to differentiate your product. 

Use these insights to fuel your competitive intelligence and discover how customers perceive your rivals.

In his course on intelligence and market research, Andy McCotter-Bicknell, Head of Competitive Intel at ClickUp, lists three questions you should seek to answer about competitors:

1. How do they position themselves?
2. Who typically buys their product?
3. What do customers think of it?

Gather these insights by:

• Checking out competitor websites and knowledge centers;
• Reading reviews on websites like G2 and TrustRadius;
• Researching online communities like Reddit, Quora, Facebook Groups, Slack, and Discord channels;
• Subscribing to Google Alerts to track company mentions;
• Tracking employee growth with LinkedIn Premium.

Make your marketing consistent by refining your product messaging.

Secure internal buy-in with pre-launch documentation for sales teams

To convert customers, your team needs clarity and belief in what they’re selling. Pre-launch documentation ensures everyone is on the same page before you begin pushing your product.   

Document product benefits and how it’s different from your competitors.

There are several ways to do this:

1. Sales messaging guide;
2. Internal press release;
3. User manual, or;
4. FAQ guide.

Develop your document from the customer’s perspective. Consider how they’ll perceive the product and the value they’ll get. Customers are much less interested in you than they are in themselves. 

Keep your marketing consistent with clear messaging guidelines

To generate awareness quickly, target your audience across multiple channels (e.g., social media, PR, paid media). Your message must continually drive home the benefits of your product for customers to remember it.

In his book “Successful Advertising,” Thomas Smith suggests that people need to see a message 20 times before it sticks: 

“The 1st time people look at ad, they don’t see it.

The 2nd time, they don’t notice it.

The 3rd time, they are aware that it is there.

The 4th time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen it before.

The 5th time, they actually read the ad.

The 6th time, they thumb their nose at it.

The 7th time, they get a little irritated with it.

The 8th time, they think, ‘Here’s that confounded ad again.’

The 9th time, they wonder if they’re missing out on something.

The 10th time, they ask their friends or neighbors if they’ve tried it.

The 11th time, they wonder how the company is paying for all these ads.

The 12th time, they start to think that it must be a good product.

The 13th time, they start to feel the product has value.

The 14th time, they start to feel like they’ve wanted a product like this for a long time.

The 15th time, they start to yearn for it because they can’t afford to buy it.

The 16th time, they accept the fact that they will buy it sometime in the future.

The 17th time, they make a commitment to buy the product.

The 18th time, they curse their poverty because they can’t buy this terrific product.

The 19th time, they count their money very carefully.

The 20th time prospects see the ad, they buy what it is offering.” [via The Financial Brand]

More recent studies put the number at seven. Either way, it’s more than once, which is why consistent messaging is key. 

To keep marketing unified, develop messaging guidelines. This playbook should include your:

• Mission statement;
• Value proposition;
• Positioning statement;
• Brand pillars;
• Brand promise;
• Brand story;
• Design and tone of voice guidelines.

Here’s the contents of Skype’s brand book as an example:

Reading this, marketing teams (whether in-house or external) get a clear idea of how to talk about and present the brand online. This ensures the messaging customers see is the same at every touchpoint and interaction. 

Ramp up excitement with a go-to-market strategy

With aligned teams and consistent messaging, start generating awareness and encouraging early adoption. 

A go-to-market strategy sets out how you’re going to do this and catapult your product into the growth stage.

There are three options available to you at this stage:

1. Sales-led strategy. This is the best option if you aim to adopt a small number of profitable users. However, customer acquisition costs can be high. 

2. Marketing-led strategy. This is an efficient way to scale but relies on strong communication and data-sharing between marketing and sales. Some methods, such as PPC, can be costly in the early days.

3. Product-led strategy. For SaaS companies, using a free-trial or freemium product can help scale awareness using features and usage to drive acquisition while reducing marketing outlay. It’s a strategy used successfully by the likes of Slack and Grammarly.

Your go-to-market strategy will help determine your call-to-action. 

For example, if you opt for a sales-led strategy, your marketing may focus on pushing demo requests. If you opt for a marketing-led strategy, you may push for email sign-ups to nurture your audience over time. If you lead with your product, you may encourage users to take advantage of a free trial.

Basecamp’s homepage uses a product-led strategy by offering a trial:

Use what you know about your market and target audience to develop a go-to-market strategy that resonates with how they use products like yours.

The growth stage: Firing on all cylinders

The growth stage of the product life cycle is the phase with the steepest increase in sales. There are two clear signs that you’re moving from introduction to growth:

1. Marketing begins to move from getting customers to consider your product to getting them to prefer your brand over the competition;
2. You’re considering how to push product updates to an existing customer base.

Now that your product has a foothold in the market, marketing objectives for the growth stage of the product life cycle are critical. This means:

• Widening your audience;
• Increasing market share, and;
• Encouraging brand preference.

To achieve these goals, switch your focus from marketing to customer behaviors and attitudes to customer experiences.

Leverage existing intelligence to find out how customers perceive your product. Gather qualitative user data from:

• Customer reviews;
• Customer service calls;
• Phone and in-person interviews;
• Live chat transcripts, and;
• Surveys.

Find out how your product is helping customers solve problems, what they like and dislike about it, and what more it can do. Revisit your marketing strategy with this information:

• Update customer personas;
• Refine marketing copy to target specific pain points;
• Make UX changes to increase conversions, and;
• Prioritize product updates based on demand.

Look again at product positioning relative to your success and competition.

Refine positioning to stamp your authority on the market

At this stage, you’ll know where your product sits in the market. This makes you well-positioned to start establishing authority.

If you boast a more advanced product than competitors, lean into its benefits. Show your customers how you fill gaps in the market that nobody else has. To do this, you’ll need to put more budget behind current campaigns on successful channels.

Use social proof to drive home the authority of your product. Product reviews can increase conversion rates by 270%. Utilizing them helped the likes of Slack and Canva achieve rapid growth.

“Social currency in the sense of our community has always been incredibly valuable for us. Much of that growth has come through word of mouth and our users sharing about us.” – Melanie Perkins, Founder and CEO of Canva [via Forbes]

Take customer data platform Segment. It built its homepage around social proof. 

The second you land on the website, you’re immediately informed that this is a product with authority.

The headline and supporting copy position Segment as a market leader, used by big-name brands. This positioning is hammered home further down with page with a case study:

That Segment can show it’s “trusted by startups and the world’s largest companies” instills confidence in customers.

Ask customers to review your product. Incentivize them to recommend you to others. Use their feedback as a marketing tool to elevate yourself above new competitors.

Build a strong brand to stand out from the crowd

If your product development lags behind the competition, focus on brand building.

Rather than marketing around differentiation of features, branding appeals to people’s emotions and influences how they perceive your company and product.

Insurance company Lemonade, for example, is able to thrive in a market populated by institutions like State Farm and Prudential by building a fun, lovable brand. 

Its founder Daniel Schreiber explains the company’s approach in a blog post:

“Insurance brands are some of the least loved and least trusted, and we came to understand that the cause is structural: every dollar your insurer pays you is a dollar less for their profits. Their interests, in other words, are profoundly conflicted with yours.

“Brands that make money by delighting their customers deserve to be loved; those that make money by disappointing customers are destined not to be. With Lemonade, we’re hoping to deliver an insurance experience that is instantaneous, un-conflicted, and downright lovable.”

Its imagery, tone of voice, and social content push Lemonade as a people-first brand—a world away from its corporate rivals: 

To create a strong brand marketing campaign, work on these three components:

1. Fit. Target your marketing at the right audience, in the right tone of voice, where they hang out online.
2. Focus. Talk about the issues and topics that are important to your audience.
3. Consistency. Show up regularly to develop familiarity. Post consistently on social media and engage often with your audience across all marketing channels.

Developing a strong brand now will help grow a community that carries you through the maturity stage.

Map out how your team will handle new product updates

Data from the introduction stage will help to shape the future of your product. It will provide insight into which areas require improvement and bring to light new features you should be building.

Launching these features in the growth phase will help you to build better products going into the next stages of the product life cycle. 

To market updates effectively, work with product management teams to plan in advance. Consider:

• How frequent updates will be. Regular smaller updates may only require a tweak to messaging and documentation, whereas infrequent larger updates may need a big marketing push.
• Who features will target. Do you need to create new customer personas?
• Whether features require significant marketing investment. Will updates require new content, PR, and landing pages? 

In 2020, Drift launched Audiences to help marketers quantify their marketing efforts.

The platform talks about this new feature update as a unique product. Audiences gets its own messaging, its own strategy.

Empower sales to drive growth

The growth stage is prime for onboarding new users and penetrating new markets. As teams create new content to engage customers, update all sales documentation with information on new audiences. 

Arm sales reps with fresh collateral to sell the product and maintain consistency with marketing messaging.

Reaching the peak: How to navigate the maturity phase

The maturity stage is the height of your product’s success. By now, you’ve reached the top of the growth curve. 

Market saturation and competition from cheaper and more advanced rivals mean that customers in your target audience are familiar with your product class. Those who want it will either have it or a competitor’s version of it. 

Therefore, the marketing objective for the maturity stage of the product life cycle is to:

Squeeze as much profit as possible out of your product while defending market share.

When the market is saturated, marketing focus often switches to enticing customers away from the competition. This is a popular tactic with mobile phone providers like Verizon:

Slite does a similar thing in the B2B space, positioning its solution as an alternative for weary Slack users. 

However, such tactics often rely on offering customers a better deal, lower price, or added incentives. If you’re unable to differentiate in such ways, brand becomes your biggest asset.

Thanks to the work done in the growth stage, you can use brand equity to maintain momentum. Work on nurturing your community with valuable content and rewarding customers for their loyalty. 

Appealing to your customer’s emotions and making them feel valued will go a long way to retaining and turning them into advocates. 

According to research by InMoment, when their needs are satisfied, 77% of customers have maintained loyal relationships with their preferred companies for ten or more years. During this time, they purchase more frequently and spend more money.

In other words, by creating loyal customers around your current product, you’re growing an audience for years to come. 

To encourage brand loyalty:

• Research your customers to find out what they want the most;
• Develop your product, site, and offers based on existing customer feedback;
• Evaluate whether a loyalty or rewards program will drive repeat business, and;
• Make your retention strategy personal to create brand attachment.

While laying the groundwork for long-term success, you should also keep one eye on the market. 

Invest in research to extend product profitability

A key question you need to answer in the maturity phase is: where is the market headed?

Investing in third-party market research will give you an understanding of what market segments drop off first and which customers stick around longest. It will also help identify late adopters.

Combine this research with data from sales teams to find out:

• What product features are sticking;
• What prices, upgrades, or experiences customers use to choose your product over a competitor’s.

This will help you target marketing campaigns towards your most profitable demographics to improve ROI. Data will also help shape your next steps.

Mailchimp, for example, used customer insight to evolve its product and shift marketing from email to business growth.

Its website and marketing campaigns now push people towards its all-in-one marketing platform.

Mailchimp’s founder Ben Chestnut explained the company’s evolution in a blog post:

“Our email marketing product has helped millions of businesses grow, but our customers have been asking for years for us to build something that would enable them to do all of their marketing in one place. 

Small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t have time to manage three, four, or five different platforms that each serve one specific purpose, and they don’t want their data all over the place: They need a tool powered by data and expertise that will help them know where to invest their marketing dollars.”

Research on how customers are using your product can also unearth insights for potential new uses that prolong its lifespan. 

Bubble-wrap, for example, was invented as textured wallpaper. When the product began to decline, creators Al Fielding and Marc Chavannes pitched it to IBM as packaging material for its new computers. 

Granted, such a significant pivot is the exception rather than the norm, but a previously unknown benefit can extend market reach and stave off decline in the short- or mid-term.

The party is over: Weathering the decline

As your product hits the decline phase, profit margins and sales volumes shrink, and lesser competitors begin to fall away, leaving only industry leaders to serve the market. While the writing’s on the wall for your product, marketing can make the fall a gradual one.

The marketing objective for the decline stage of the product life cycle is to:

Slow down decline and cut marketing costs as you develop fresh products. 

It’s important to note that, like Mailchimp, innovation and development should begin during the growth and maturity phases of the product life cycle. Slowing down decline is simply a way to gain more time to refine your next offering.

Identify where to scale back marketing to reduce costs

The decline stage is the time to begin scaling back marketing.

Analyze marketing platform analytics to see which offer the best return on investment and which are low producers. 

Start with the easy cuts. If a channel isn’t producing sales or customer acquisition costs are higher than customer lifetime value, it’s time for it to go.

Costs from these channels can be invested in other priorities such as product development or brand marketing. 

Now is a good time to focus more on nurturing existing customers. 

Creating value-led personalized content and fostering brand advocacy will mean you’re able to align marketing spend with the decline in sales and rely on brand loyalty to promote your product to late adopters.

This is known as harvesting—squeezing the last bit of profitability from a product before sunsetting it. Investopedia gives this example: 

“A harvest strategy may involve the gradual elimination of a product or product line when technological advances render the product or line obsolete. 

For example, companies selling stereo systems gradually eliminated sales of record turntables in favor of CD players as compact disc sales soared and record sales declined. 

Also, when product sales consistently fall below the target level of sales, companies may gradually eliminate the related products from their portfolios.”

Take Coda. It nurtures existing customers with a referral program. When someone signs up for Coda using a referral link, both parties get $10 in credit.

This encourages loyal customers to share the product with little marketing spend (the referral program sits on the Coda website without promotion). 

It also gives Coda access to potential early adopters. Customers happy enough to tell friends about a current product are likely to be open to hearing about a new venture. 

Gather customer data for future product launches

While your eyes may be firmly set on new product development, the decline phase can offer valuable insight into how to market your next product. Look at:

• Which demographics stuck around until the end;
• Which marketing tactics resonated with late adopters;
• Which customers have engaged with referral and reward marketing campaigns;
• Which customers have expressed interest in new products.

Conduct qualitative research to gather feedback and insights from customers to gauge sentiment. Learning about user experiences and brand perception will help shape positioning and messaging for your next product launch.  

Conclusion

By visualizing the stages of a product journey, product life cycle management promotes a proactive approach to marketing. When you know what’s coming next, you can plan ahead to make each phase profitable. Let’s recap the goals for each phase:

• Development and introduction phase. Secure internal buy-in and generate product awareness.
• Growth phase. Widen your audience, increase market share and encourage brand preference.
• Maturity phase. Maximize profits while defending market share.
• Decline phase. Slow down decline and reduce marketing spend.

To achieve these aims, let the research guide you. Shape your early messaging and positioning based on what you know about your target audience from competitive and market research. 

As you grow, tweak your marketing to match customer experiences with your product. Nurture happy customers and foster brand loyalty to manage decline and create a ready-made audience for products to come.

To master marketing across your product’s life cycle, check out CXL’s Product Marketing Minidegree.

The post How to Define Your Product Life Cycle Marketing Goals appeared first on CXL.