7 BIG MISTAKES MADE IN PRODUCT MARKETING · 7 BIG MISTAKES MADE IN PRODUCT MARKETING Product...

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7 BIG MISTAKES MADE IN PRODUCT MARKETING Product Marketing is essential to marketing your product effectively and ensuring that your message of your product’s unique value proposition reaches the right target market. We’ve seen many mistakes made by Product Marketers as they attempt to connect with their market. Here are the…

Transcript of 7 BIG MISTAKES MADE IN PRODUCT MARKETING · 7 BIG MISTAKES MADE IN PRODUCT MARKETING Product...

Page 1: 7 BIG MISTAKES MADE IN PRODUCT MARKETING · 7 BIG MISTAKES MADE IN PRODUCT MARKETING Product Marketing is essential to marketing your product effectively and ensuring that your message

7 BIG MISTAKES MADE IN PRODUCT MARKETING

Product Marketing is essential tomarketing your product effectively

and ensuring that your message of yourproduct’s unique value proposition reaches

the right target market.

We’ve seen many mistakes made by Product Marketers as they attempt to

connect with their market. Here are the…

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CHASING THE WRONG “LOW HANGING FRUIT”

MISTAKE #1

We’ve all sat in management meetings where the discussion centered around which markets our new product or service to best target for initial market entry.

So, as you’re discussing the pros and cons, trading ideas and putting together spreadsheets, an executive suddenly chimes in, “I think the manufacturing and supply chain segment is the perfect place to gain some traction because our solution will reduce their order fulfillment costs while at the same time measure daily volume for better reporting . Let’s focus on this market first. This segment is the perfect ‘low hanging fruit.’ It’s a slam dunk!”

The rest of the room nods their collective heads. It completely makes sense.

Or does it?

Sound familiar? It should. Almost every marketing strategy session revolves around going after that easy target market - that so-called perfect low hanging fruit.

Going after the “low hanging fruit” markets, in and of themselves is not a bad strategy. In fact, often, because they can often be reached fast and with the least amount of effort, attacking those markets and setting up beachheads in order to go after bigger markets could be a smart move.

The important aspect to understand here is that just because a particular market has a need your product or solution can easily solve, it doesn’t mean it will actually be profitable to chase it. In fact, those low hanging markets may actually be detrimental to your business by delaying entry into your most strategic markets; losing focus for your organization. In other words, as you chase deals in this quick and easy market, it may end up translating into lost profits down the road.

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CHASING THE WRONG “LOW HANGING FRUIT”

MISTAKE #1

What organizations need to figure out, if this “low hanging fruit” is a stepping stone to bigger and better markets or if it is a diversion that will make your company end up in dead-end drive, is to ask this fundamental question:

What is our distinctive competency?

This means two things: What do we do better than our competitors and how can we incorporate this competitive advantage in our product strategy and positioning?”

Once you are clear about your own distinctive competency, outline that markets you believe will most benefit from the solution you have to offer. How big is this market? Will it pay for your proposed solution?

Successful long-term positioning requires that you honestly assess whether your target market is both accessible and a stepping-stone to bigger and better markets, thereby allowing you to leverage profitable follow-up market initiatives.

So as you start planning your first product launch of your “low hanging fruit”, pause for a moment, and ask yourselves whether it’s the right “low hanging fruit” or simply the easiest one?

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TOO MUCH PRODUCT MARKETING “BLAH BLAH”

MISTAKE #2

How does the following sound to you?

“With personalized and flexible web integration options, our best-of-breed technology can help you dramatically reduce the cost of operations and allow for greater scalability

towards meeting your customer’s self-service needs”.

Are you confused? I sure am.

I’m sure at some point some Product Marketing person looked at their product and thought to themselves, “hmmm I think our product does allow you to pick your own style… so that’s personalization. And it definitely gives you choice on how you want to embed it into our website, so that means its pretty flexible… and…if you measure things correctly the way we say, it does help reduce your operation costs, so let’s leave that in there… and…”

I think you get the picture.

We’ve all used and heard of these terms before. Some call it “throw-away” terms. We call it “blah blah”, because to your buyer, that’s what they hear and read, “blah blah blah…” similar to what Charlie Brown’s teacher sounded like in those old Peanuts cartoons.

Here’s another example (borrowing from a well-known computer company):

“A lightweight, compact and portable audio device with large storage capacity. Perfect for all lifestyles.”

How well did this product sell? Well, so far, over sold 350 million units. So glad you asked. Pretty well.

But we cheated here. This device wasn’t first introduced to the world with the above description line, though, all elements of the product description itself are factually true. The device was indeed a high storage audio device; it was light and small and it did appeal to many consumers’ men and women, young and old of all races and lifestyles.

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TO0 MUCH PRODUCT MARKETING “BLAH BLAH”

MISTAKE #2

This product was introduced in 2001 and it was introduced with this delightful tagline:

“1000 songs in your pocket.”

We all know the company and product. The company was Apple and the product was the iPod.

Instantly those words meant something to us, it allowed use to imagine what the product could do and how it might look in our hands and the enjoyment and benefit that we could get from it. It was brilliant, yet so simple. It was brilliant because it was simple.

True simplicity is the ability to remove all the noise and the clutter, the unimportant and leave only what matters.

Your buyer is tired of reading the same Product Marketing “blah blah” that is pervasive in sales collateral. Reach out to them with real words that mean something.

Something simple… and brilliant.

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FORGETTING TO DEFINE THE PERSONAS

MISTAKE #3

So you’ve sat down with your key internal stakeholders, senior managers and decision makers. You’ve thought about the most appropriate target market for your solution and you’ve decided on ….web designers and application developers!

Your new SaaS-based Web Site Builder (WSB) is revolutionary. It’s going to turn the entire web design and development vertical on its head and with some top-down analysis, it looks like this is a billion-dollar industry and the addressable market early on looks huge. OK – start building. Let’s get launch plans ready. Let’s get some targeted messaging aimed at web designers and developers created.

Go!

Stop!

Many product marketers, companies and organizations make the critical mistake of doing some rudimentary analysis on target markets – comparing one market to another and deciding that one or a couple target markets (or vertical industries) look more amenable to consuming our product than others. While this may be true, there is a crucial next step that many organizations forget to do.

And the next step is further identifying and creating personas of the end user, the economic buyers, the influencers and other users who will be involved in the Buy Cycle. Collateral, communication and sales tools created and written absent these personas tend to be written too broadly rather than targeted for a specific audience.

Your identification and knowledge of the user persona is going to help you build your product to razor sharp requirements and with targeted and succinct messaging.

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FORGETTING TO DEFINE THE PERSONAS

MISTAKE #3

As you ask yourself such questions as: is this user technical or not? What is it that they do on an hour-to-hour, day-to-day basis that your solution will help with? What are their job duties and pains that they typically experience in their work setting? What limitations do these users have? What are their attitudes towards new solutions?

Your economic buyer has a deep and integral set of characteristics that you’d need to fully understand in order to help them become aware of your product and compel them through the sales cycle. Understand their behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. And get detailed into the job profile, their tasks, their job duties, and their pains.

It will help you come up with new features. For instance if your user is risk-adverse, it will make sense to provide some sort of freemium version of your product.

It will help you focus your time and energy on social networks. Male, and loves sports? Probably not Pinterest. Busy executive? Maybe LinkedIn.

By taking the time to drill down to the persona level in a detailed way, your ability to come up with great copy and clear messaging, and razor sharp positioning is greatly enhanced resulting in more sales, more happy customers and more success in your markets.

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GETTING CAUGHT UP IN FEATURES, AND COMPLETELY OVERLOOKING THE BENEFITS AND “STORY”

MISTAKE #4

As you’re working through trying to figure out the messaging for your product, it’s easy to get trapped in what we call “feature-land”.

Yes, you’re product is comprised of features and these features provide a bunch of functionality and when you compare your features to your competition’s features, you get all excited because your features are better than their features and so when it comes down to crafting the message, creating the collateral and formulating the positioning, its hard not to include a feature or two in your sales tools.

This is where it takes discipline to stop and take a few steps back and look at your messaging to your target market. Are you engaging a feature-war with your competitor and trying to “out-feature” them? Is that thought process permeating itself into your collateral? Or are you selling the benefit? How about the bigger story? What they can achieve through using your solution and how it impacts their daily lives?

Don’t get us wrong. There is a place for a list of features in a piece of collateral. It’s a called a Data Sheet and it’s an appropriate piece of collateral for a particular buyer at specific point in the sales buy cycle.

Other than that, features are just a means to an end.

We encourage you to do something that we call: “take your solution away from your prospect”.

If your solution was at one point in the hands of your customer, but it was taken away, how would their lives be impacted?

What is it that your solution allows your customer to do most efficiently or cost effectively or more profitably, that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do?

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GETTING CAUGHT UP IN FEATURES, AND COMPLETELY OVERLOOKING THE BENEFITS AND “STORY”

MISTAKE #4

Here is an example:

• Feature: Our product can automatically sync multiple devices over the network.• Benefit: Not having to sync your data on both your tablet and mobile in order

to have the most up to date information on each device saves you time and hassle.

But here is what your marketing message could be, the real story, so to speak:

“Just another thing that you don’t have to do at the end of a long business trip”

Or

“30 more minutes playtime with your kids”

Once you’ve identified the real value and story, then, this is what you market and sell.

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NOT KNOWING HOW TO LEVERAGE AND MEASURE THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

MISTAKE #5

Most Product Marketers don’t use Social Media in their daily professional activities. And if you asked how Product Marketing should and could leverage Social Media, they’ll often give you a blank stare as if you’re talking nonsense.

Parts of this blame lies with companies themselves as many companies have plunked Social Media responsibilities into a corporate marketing function. So this results in Product Marketing continuing to use the old and tired tools in order to communicate their message, build the product awareness and build customer community. It means Product Marketing still tends to rely on the same limited sales channels, beta programs and user groups that they’ve always used. And the bad news is that these channels and groups are becoming more and more irrelevant to influence buyer behavior.

Even for B2B corporate buyers peer-to-peer influence and word-of-mouth is the single-most important piece of “information” that will help them in the purchase decision.

It’s why prospects often ask for customer references right before they are about to make the purchase. A recent study by Forrester showed that 90% of the buyer’s journey is completed even before a sales person is contacted!

And there is more than just one kind of peer. There are their peers in their vertical (say health care vs. technology vs. finance), their peers by profession (a fellow marketing research analyst or a business process consultant) and their peers by shared business pains (I want to be able to sync customer data from my customer relationship management system to my accounts receivable system and I want to know how others do it).

Social Media is just another tool, but it is and should be the single-most powerful communication tool in the daily activity of any product marketer. Whether it’s Twitter or Facebook for

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NOT KNOWING HOW TO LEVERAGE AND MEASURE THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

MISTAKE #5

building customer communities and fostering the growth of customer advocates, whether it’s YouTube channels to create viral excitement of new branding and product development, Social Media is the perfect customer response/customer community-building channel.

According to a study from Pew Research (2011): “nearly 60% of Americans research a product or service online prior to purchasing and almost 25% of them will leave some kind of online comment regarding the purchase”.

Another challenge for Product Marketers is that they often fail miserably at measuring the success of their posts and comments, their content and their programs. Simply getting Followers or getting Likes is not good enough and in it of themselves, not the end goal.

Product Marketers need to be measuring the captivation and evangelism levels of their programs, namely, measuring things like the number of comments or replies they get on their posts or tweets, counting the number of shares and re-tweets they receive, and the number of likes, +1s, and favorites they receive on individual posts*.

These are the metrics that matter. These are the metrics that measure your community engagement such as:

Conversation Rate = # of Audience Comments (or Replies) Per PostAmplification Rate = # of Retweets/Shares Per Tweet/Post/VideoApplause Rate = # of Favorite/+1s/ Likes/Clicks Per Tweet/Post/Video

And Social Media, done correctly, adds to your organization’s bottom line. So this also means measuring conversions.

It is crucial that Product Marketers, the owner of the message and the positioning of the product or service in a typical company, master Social Media in order to leverage this new channel, measure its effective and ultimately drive sales and conversions leading to success. It’s not easy and it takes a lot of effort. But if you do this right, your customers will be your best sales evangelist that money can’t buy.

*Credit to Occam’s Razor for the use of these metrics.

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NOT FULLY UNDERSTANDING THE SALES BUY CYCLE

MISTAKE #6

I think at some point all Product Marketers need to try Sales. Because if they did, they would appreciate how difficult sales truly is and most importantly, be able to understand their prospect’s Buy Cycle – how it is that a prospect becomes aware of your solution and how are they funneled through the process to eventually make a purchase.

Knowing this will allow Product Marketers to be in a position to pro-actively deliver the marketing programs, and produce the sales collateral and tools that match the needs of what the prospect needs to hear at each stage of the cycle to keep them engaged.

Depending on whom you ask, most sales and channel practitioners will agree that there is four distinct stages in the customer buy cycle.

These are the following:

1. Awareness. Most prospects don’t even realize that they have a need or a pain until somebody or some business points it out to them. For example, you don’t realize you have a need for an email marketing campaigns tool until your business colleague tells you about how easy it is to send out scheduled formatted targeted emails to your base, something that always takes you hours and hours to do manually. Info-graphics, topical webinars, SEO, SEM and engagement in social media channels are perfect for building the awareness needed to draw prospects to your business. Social media and Content Marketing in particular should be leveraged to build the awareness and establish your company as a thought leader in your space.

2. Research and Evaluation. Prospects start evaluating your solution versus those others in the market. And through conversations with peers and colleagues that happen both online and offline, and through their own independent research, they eventually figure out what they think they need in a potential solution. And then they’ll map it back to their business, identifying budget, constraints, and features to start ranking the solutions.

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NOT FULLY UNDERSTANDING THE SALES BUY CYCLE

MISTAKE #6

Your prospect is looking for product guides and in-depth content like whitepapers. With attention spans decreasing everyday it seems, product videos or setting up YouTube channels with short 30 second to 2 minute videos can help your prospect in the evaluation process. Micro-sites, offer another way to share focused content to your prospect, while also helping you rank better in Google.

3. Purchase. The prospect has made the decision to purchase but is constantly looking for information that re-enforces the decision to buy. Unless you’re dealing with the bleeding edge buyer, most buyers want to know that others like them, with similar needs and goals, have bought your solution or a solution like yours. And even the bleeding edge buyer wants to belong to a community – a community of bleeding edges. Regardless, set up customer forums in Facebook, post great content about customer success stories, create customer case studies, and encourage conversation and engagement. Your prospect will feel that they are joining a “family”. It’s crucial that you make your new customer feel like they’re joining a warm and friendly community, one that shares valuable information and helps each other grow.

4. Post-purchase. We’ve all heard of Buyer’s Remorse. The customer now is looking to be supported and looking to build strong long-term relationships with your company. They need more help here to strengthen the perception that they’ve made the right decision. Help them get through this period with strong customer sales support collateral, helpful training videos, and more case studies of implementation successes and options. And regardless of whether you win or lose the deal, following up with a Win-Loss report will help you understand what worked (or did not).

Your relationship with your customer starts when they first read a tweet or see one of your blog postings. But it is now when they truly become of your greatest advocates – they’ll pass on and recommend you to all of their friends and colleagues – if, you treat them well. So do that.

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NOT FULLY UNDERSTANDING THE SALES BUY CYCLE

MISTAKE #6

Keep involved and engaged with your community, keep producing loads of great content and keep doing whatever you can you to make them successful.

Ultimately, you’re never going to have the perfect piece of collateral, blog content, video, or sales support tool to cover off all of your buyers that come down the pipe. And you can use whatever form of content that you think works for your industry or market.

But it is essential that Product Marketer’s understand your buyer’s cycle to create the program and processes to quickly build something that your prospect can consume with the right call-to-action to get them moving to the next stage.

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NOT CONTINUALLY TESTING AND REFINING YOUR MESSAGE

MISTAKE #7

If you’re not guilty of any the mistakes listed above, then congratulations! You’ve done a fantastic job of zeroing in on your buyer and user in your target market. You are fast on your way to developing a long-term product strategy. It’s now a matter of executing and creating that simple, yet succinct message that will resonate with all your key audience members along the buy cycle.

Done! Your job is finished and now you can put your feet up and see the deals start coming in watch as your product gets used by thousands, if not millions of users worldwide!

If product marketing were this easy, then there wouldn’t ever be such a thing called a “product failure”.

In most organizations, Product Marketing is responsible for creating the messaging that is associated with any product or solution. This includes and is not limited to the tagline, the elevator pitch, the message on the differentiators, the main features and benefits and the positioning of the unique selling positioning.

And as more applications move to the web in a SaaS or cloud model, it’s a no-brainer to keep testing, testing and testing.

For instance, test your landing page for your offers; see which landing pages generate the most downloads of your latest white paper or your product video. Test your headlines, your content and even the special offer itself.

Many organizations use Google PPC (Pay Per Click) as a way to generate leads. PPC is the perfect avenue to A/B (split test) your message, your value proposition and any other data point by teasing out and testing solution benefit #1 vs. solution benefit #2 to see which solution benefits resonates more with your target audience.

If you are adopting a messaging used by a previously regime, all the more reason to test and do your own analysis – don’t let it become a matter of opinion.

Make it a matter of fact, data and reporting!

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REALLY BAD POWERPOINT

BONUS: MISTAKE #8

We’ve added this one in as a bonus because we all know that as Product Marketers, creating PowerPoint decks are part of our DNA, whether it be for our own presentations or for making sales decks to be used by our sales channel.

Whatever you do, do NOT create a 30-slide, bullet-point-laden slide deck for a 30-minute presentation. It’s the ultimate sleeping pill that only a poor insomniac can appreciate.

Studies show that the average human only has an attention span of about 10 minutes for presentations. After that their minds will start wavering. They’ll be thinking of what restaurant to get take-out from for tonight’s dinner or the amount of laundry that’s piled up at home.

In order to keep their attention, follow these golden rules for PowerPoint presentations:

First off, no bullet points. I’ll say it again, this time in caps: NO BULLET POINTS. Unless it’s meant to be a “throw-away” slide that lists a whole bunch of stuff that is not meant to be actually read but more meant to be just a laundry list of…”stuff”, do not use bullet points. Instead, use thoughtful, creative and zippy language and limit yourself to about 5 or 6 words per phrase, and keep the number of phrases to no more than three per slide. Three is the magic number.

Secondly, use vivid images, photographs, and visuals. Talk about the benefits and talk about the value while capturing your audience’s attention with a visual that encapsulates the message you are trying to convey. Is a picture worth a thousand words? On a PowerPoint slide it sure is.

Thirdly, as a rule, use a 2:1 ratio for presentation time to the number of slides. If you are on for a 30-minute segment, the maximum number of slides you should have is 15. For a thirty-minute presentation, 10 slides will work just fine. Instead

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REALLY BAD POWERPOINT

BONUS: MISTAKE #8

of rifling through a slide a minute, take time to show your visual, make your audience think and reflect on your key phrase and most importantly, talk and create a story and meaning behind your slide. Insert a short video, do a quick demo and keep your presentation hopping along.

And finally, keep your language simple. As we’ve mentioned before in this paper, keeping things simple is not easy. In fact, it’s very, very difficult. Often we have to restrain ourselves and look at ways of reducing the amount we want to say. And in the end, we use a lot of meaningless jargon that just bores our audience leaves them thinking of a million other things, none of which is what you happen to be talking about at that time.

Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electrics once said, “Insecure managers create complexity”. Product Marketers should look to exude confidence and security: speak and write simply.

We hope you enjoyed reading this! If you have any questions about Product Marketing or if you have questions about how Total Product Marketing can your organization, please contact us at [email protected]

Copyright property of Total Product Marketing, 2013