The next best product won’t make a dent in this world unless people find out about it. If you have a product that you want to release to a worldwide audience, you need to use strategic marketing. This is a step-by-step process that ensures that all bases are covered and that your marketing message is being sent out efficiently and to the right targeted people.
Identify Your Target Market
The first step in strategic product marketing is identifying your target audience. These are the people who will be most interested in buying your product. You have to find out who those people are. To find these individuals, you might want to ask a series of questions.
· What types of people will most likely buy my product?
· What are these individuals interested in?
· What other products are they likely to buy to compliment your product, or to substitute your product completely?
· Where do these individuals spend most of their time online?
· And finally, where do these individuals shop, both online and off?
Research the Competition
If you want your product marketing to be successful, you must learn to keep an eye on the competition. A strategic marketing plan is never created in a vacuum. It requires market testing and competitor product marketing testing in order to come up with a solid plan that will rock your target audiences’ socks off. Take what your competition is doing and make it better, and try to resonate with your audience just as your competitors are. That’s how strategic product marketing is done.
Once you know who you’re marketing to and why, and you’re sure you have a better plan than your competitors could ever dream to come up with, you’re ready to blast your strategic marketing message far and wide.
Email Marketing
Strategic product marketing focuses on maximum exposure using incredibly efficient means, and that describes email marketing perfectly. Using targeted product marketing messages, you can build a highly-targeted email marketing list that is comprised of people who are interested in and who hopefully want to buy your product.
If you already have a website, create a separate landing page (or develop a stand-alone landing page) and start driving traffic to that page via paid online marketing and by using a few of the techniques we’ll discuss in depth below.
It’s recommended that you segment your product marketing list according to where they’re at in the buying cycle. For instance, you might have a segment of your list that didn’t buy, one that did buy, one that bought in the past and one that’s likely to buy in the future. Then, send targeted messages to those individuals, always keeping to the theme of your strategic marketing message.
Forums and Review Sites
No matter what type of product you’re selling, your strategic product marketing plan should include one or more forums and/or review sites in your product’s niche. Even the most obscure products likely have someone talking about them on an online forum or review site somewhere on the Internet. The search engines are your friend. Find those discussions and start prodding those individuals to see if they’d be interested in your product. Then, if possible, steer those that may be interested in your product marketing idea towards your email marketing list for added exposure.
Social Marketing and Blogs
For strategic product marketing to be truly effective on social networks and blogs, it needs to be incredibly subtle. You can’t blatantly sell on social networks, nor can you get away with it on your blog – not if you hope to gather a loyal following.
The idea with product marketing on social networks and blogs is to be helpful, offer valuable content and engage in the conversations. Listen to the concerns of your audience and go above and beyond to solve those concerns. Don’t sell, be helpful. Don’t blatantly engage in product marketing, but instead become a part of the community.
Banner Ads and Paid Marketing
The best product marketing utilizes all forms of marketing, including the paid kind. Don’t think of paid strategic product marketing as costing a lot of money. The idea is to earn a return on your investment. If you follow the rules, pay attention to your product market and competitors and if you conduct the proper keyword research, paid strategic product marketing can truly pay off.
Putting it All Together – Coming Up With a Strategic Product Marketing Schedule
Your strategic marketing plan should include a schedule whereby you advance your campaigns at various steps. For instance, you might choose one day a week to write new product marketing emails or blogs. You might set a particular day of the week aside to engage in social marketing and forum posting. And you might choose one day a month to review your strategic marketing plan to ensure you’re always staying on track.
The thing is, many times you’ll feel like quitting. When you come up with a brand new product and you put all this time and energy into developing a strategic product marketing plan that you’re sure is going to work, and then only to find limited success, you can oftentimes feel like quitting.
Make sure that you press on. Stick to your strategic marketing plan and don’t give up. The old adage is, the moment you feel like giving up, that’s usually when you’re ‘this close’ to meeting your goal. If you come up with a strategic product marketing plan that is developed based on your target market and your competition, you won’t fail as long as you keep on keeping on. Never stop tailoring your plan to meet your ever-changing goals and never stop trying to bond with your target audience. The sales will come secondary if you focus on your audience and their primary problems that you’re confident you can help them solve. This is how product marketing is conducted. It may take time, and it will definitely take a lot of patience, but the rewards can be huge if you simply follow the product marketing plan you establish for yourself.
