Marketing and product go hand in hand. While many people here on Growth Pilots will be able to tell you how important marketing is to the success or failure of a business, and many can also tell you what it takes to create an effective marketing strategy. I thought it would be useful to write a blog post that brings these two things together – marketing strategy and product development. I’d like to discuss first of all the importance of the product in the development of marketing strategy; secondly, what is a good marketing strategy; thirdly, how to write a marketing strategy for a new product. I hope after reading this article, you will walk away with a better understanding of how to develop your own successful marketing strategy for your own products.
Developing a marketing strategy is quite essential when it comes to starting and developing your own business because, without it, you’re most likely going to fail. However, some may still ask what the importance of a product is in the development of a marketing strategy. If you didn’t know, having a product is essential in making any profit. This may not seem important now, but it will be once your business grows and you begin to expand.
Why Is Marketing Important In The New Product Development Process?
Your product development strategy is incomplete without a marketing strategy focused on potential consumers. You cannot make any significant return on investment if you don’t generate the right leads.
Here are some reasons why you need marketing in your new product development process.
- Helps to understand your audience through buyer personas and user stories
- Provides information about target market and competitors
- Encourages flexibility in idea generation and implementation
- Puts the entire company on the same page
- Improves lead generation and conversions
- Distinguishes your product with a unique value proposition
When To Initiate Marketing In The New Product Development Process
Every product development cycle happens in stages, which move from generating a concept to finalizing a market-ready product. But the one-million-dollar question involves identifying the best stage to start implementing your new product development marketing strategy.
In that case, let’s identify the non-skippable stages in new product marketing:
- Idea screening
- Aligning the final idea with business objectives
- Analyzing the target market (competitive analysis)
- Creating a product design or prototype
- Creating the product
- Concept test (new product testing)
- Launching
- Commercialization
You can start the marketing process at any stage, depending on your company’s overall business strategy. In some cases, the product itself can dictate the timing of marketing initiatives.
For example, say you want to start marketing activities for a new product idea. But even before that, you should present an MVP to a focus group, involve potential customers in the process by asking them about their previous experience with similar or existing products, behaviors, and preferences.
By involving the audience in the early stages, the marketing team can acquire valuable intel to create the marketing strategy. Such feedback is also beneficial for your business analysis.
10 Marketing Strategies to Launch Your Product
1. Organize a Pre-Launch Giveaway
For a product to take off quickly, you need to create a feeling of anticipation and excitement for its release weeks or even months in advance.
One of the most popular ways to do this is through pre-launch giveaways and contests. Give your product away to an exclusive group of lucky participants in exchange for them helping get the word out. There are a variety of options like Instagram contests, creating a challenge on social media, giveaways, etc.
Whatever option you choose, try to come up with content or ideas that can help your product go viral. For example, ask users to share their participation on social media, or come up with a good TikTok challenge. Be creative in your messages to make sure people don’t see it as spam and offer extra points for bringing in friends.
2. Increase Your Organic Visibility
Your SEO needs to be on point. Having a well-positioned website on search engines gives you a steady base of traffic to show off your new product, which is much easier than starting from square one.
For your search engine optimization strategy to work, you need to give users information that will truly be useful to them. Focus on optimizing these three areas.
- Keywords. Don’t think about what you would call your product or how you would describe it, but rather how a new user would search for it.
- Meta descriptions. Meta descriptions are the summary of your web page on search engines so they need to be short and attractive. But beware! Google sometimes ignores this description and shows the first lines of text on your page, so make sure they are up to scratch too.
- The first paragraph of text. The goal is to make sure readers know and understand what your product is in the least amount of reading time possible.
3. Create Shareable Content
Consistently creating content is one of the most reliable digital marketing strategies, especially in the medium to long term.
Invest time in creating a high-quality blog that talks about your business or related topics that consumers will be interested in reading about. The goal is to get the users themselves to share your content, bringing traffic to your website on a regular basis.
4. Take a Chance With Remarketing
Consumers are in different moments of the purchasing process and they might not be ready to purchase from you the first time they hear about your product. But, this doesn’t mean they’re not still potential customers! You can nurture them over time using different remarketing tactics, like remarketing ads.
Remarketing can also be used on your regular brand followers. Keep in touch with your more dedicated customers (through a newsletter, for example) and of course, don’t forget to tell them about your launch.
5. Create a Recommendation System
Word of mouth continues to be an incredibly effective way to spread the news about new products or services. Users naturally talk to their friends about the products they use and recommend. You can also give them a little push to get the wheels turning. How? By creating an incentive system for recommendations.
Everyone likes getting freebies so all you have to do is offer a discount coupon or free shipping in exchange for them telling their friends. This is a popular tactic used on many apps like Uber and Airbnb.
6. Optimize Your Website Speed
This is a trick that is as simple as it is effective: make sure your website is running at top speed.
There is nothing more frustrating than a website that takes ages to load. A quick and fluid website improves user experience and brand perception.
There are several things you can do to improve your website’s loading times, many involve code and behind-the-scenes processes, so we recommend talking to an expert. In the meantime, a quick fix could be ensuring your images are of a high enough quality to look clear, but not massive files. The bigger the file size of the image, the slower your website will run.
7. Establish Relationships With Influencers
Influencers are the kings and queens of social media marketing. As experts in a given area or industry, they tend to have a loyal audience waiting and willing to follow their recommendations. Think of influencer marketing as the digital version of word-of-mouth marketing.
In order to get bloggers and influencers talking about your brand, the most common strategies are to organize events and to send free samples. Be sure to keep in mind however that you can’t “buy” their opinion or recommendation as they have to be loyal to their audience as well and be honest about what they think. In order to avoid any disasters, take time to investigate which influencers would be most interesting for your product and mostly willing to collaborate with you.
8. Take Care of Your Customer Service
Over the past few years, customers have gotten used to getting answers from companies 24/7 so set up a system to help them whenever they need it.
Customer service is most likely one of the areas in which careful employee selection is most important. Your company’s ambassadors should be patient and empathetic in order to offer your client the experience they deserve.
9. Prepare Your FAQs Before Launching Your Product
When you launch a new product or service, users usually have a bunch of questions about how it works and what they can do with it. The more innovative it is, the more you will have to explain it. Our recommendation is to get as much as possible done and prepared ahead of time by creating a complete and easy-to-find “Frequently Asked Questions” section. Ideally, encourage users to visit it before reaching out to you with their questions and make it as easy as possible to access.
You can even include FAQs in your social content as a way to get ahead of new user questions and share how your product works.
10. Don’t Forget About Email Marketing
Email marketing often gets a bad rap for being out of fashion, but the truth is it continues to be as effective as ever. Don’t overlook this marketing strategy!
In order to effectively implement an email marketing strategy, the first step is to create a database with your clients. The more information you have on each one of them the better. Think about things such as age, residence, children, and of course, previous purchases or products they have shown interest in.
Use this information to create a highly personalized messaging strategy. Try to make the user feel like the emails have been written especially for them. Marketing automation can be a big help in efficiently managing all this information.
Conclusion
Creating a marketing strategy for your new product is essential to ensure that you can go to market as efficiently as possible with a high potential for success. But what exactly is a marketing strategy and why is it so important? In this post, We have shown you a marketing strategy and the importance of a marketing strategy, as well as some basic components of a marketing strategy.