To connect your product with the market, you need to understand that there is an inherent challenge in creating an adequate alignment between sales, product development, and marketing. To do so, you need to have a deep understanding of your target market. This means that you need to know what your prospective customers need, how they think, and what influences their decisions when purchasing products. As such, the main aim of product marketing is to analyze your target audience to get as much information as possible for the development of products, sales, and pricing. The following are the basic elements that can act as a guide for product marketing
1 Product
Having a strong product is the first step to developing a viable product marketing plan. You must make sure that the product you are looking to sell aligns with the needs of the customers before you come up with a product marketing strategy. Ensure that your product can provide some benefit to the customer instead of just focusing on the product features.
2 Target Audience
When coming up with the best product marketing strategy, you must ensure that you know everything about your target audience. Gather any necessary information by conducting some research about your target market. Depending on your product, some of the information you need to understand about your audience includes gender, age, education, location, lifestyle, and personality profile.
3 Competition
Analyzing your competitors is another crucial step when developing a product marketing strategy. This gives you an idea of areas you can improve on to provide your customers with better products that can solve their problems. This can also help you to improve on their marketing strategies that will reach a larger customer base.
4 Messaging and Positioning
This step involves communicating with your audience. You need to provide answers to some important questions such as what your product can do, and what differentiates your product from similar products that are on the market. Narratives are one of the easiest ways to connect your product with your audience. As such, you need to create an effective story that identifies the unique selling proposition (USP) for your product.
5 Product Promotion
Once you have a working strategy and a product that is well defined in place, you now need to introduce the product to your audience. You need to get your message to the right audience through strategic promotions. To do so though, you’ll need to be able to easily identify the right audience, which is only doable if you have done enough research and have a foundation for your buyer personas. Make sure you communicate with your target market through the right channels by looking where they spend most of their time. Channels for communicating include email, website, social media, freebies, pay per click advertising, and brochures.
6 Analysis
Your product marketing strategy will not have perfect results immediately. Therefore, you need to track results to know which promotion plans are successful. Focusing on marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics such as website form submissions, email clicks, and conversions is essential. This will be helpful to determine the strategies that worked well and what you went wrong. You can then adjust your strategy using the lessons you have learned to better guide your product marketing plans in the future.
