Product Marketing Guide 2021

This article deals with the Concept, Research, and Creation of a Strategy for marketing your Product/Service and it covers all the latest aspects of marketing. It continues further discussing the essence and key aspects of Digital Marketing.

This article will be useful for bloggers, professionals, freelancers, mentors, and entrepreneurs.

Basics of Marketing-

The way you define the term “marketing”, is all about perspectives. If we go by the definition of marketing, Marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product or service.

Marketing includes advertising, selling, and delivering products to consumers or other businesses.

Marketing makes use of the 4P’s-Product, Price, Place & Promotion.

Everyone knows the core reason for marketing, ie. to take a product or service, identify its ideal customers, and draw the customers’ attention to the product or service available.

While everyone knows the basic stuff about marketing, why is everyone not able to market their product.

Understanding Marketing-

“Marketing starts before creating the product”.This is a major point which many people fail to implement or are unaware of. It also is an important step in understanding the customer response and interaction. It all starts with understanding the customer & customer’s needs that lead to the creation of a right product.

“Marketing is all about sending the right message,to the right person,at the right time”.The time factor in this is one of the important aspects which is being neglected by people.

You need to market your product even before its launch.Actually,the best way is to start marketing about your service/product,is to start it in the very early stages of creation or before the creation of product.If you are letting the people know that something is coming in the market,you are preparing them to hook to your product and stay connected to it for all its further updates.For this,you need to target the right audience.

The purpose of marketing is to build a brand & capture a position in the minds of the consumers.So it becomes very important that you start telling people about your product before its launch.Many people dont do it and the problem they suffer is that they don’t get enough leads after the launch of the product and they feel that the product is not the right choice of audience.But at this point of time, they have already invested huge time and money into it,and regrets are of no use.But at the same time, if marketing would have started early,it would have prepared the people for the product and you would have got enough leads.This would have helped capture people to your product if the product is one of its kind and you dont have an existing audience.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.“ (The Essential Drucker)

Well, many people misinterpret the meaning of the above two sections and start focusing too much on marketing and forget about the product which they are trying to create.This is due to a lack of focus and not understanding the right fit of everything.Just marketing,would not help,it would help you out in the very initial stages of the launch,and later you would strive to get a customer.“A great product sells itself”,this thing is too be kept in mind,if you are planning for long term success.

Digital marketing v/s Traditional marketing

In the contemporary business environment, entrepreneurs must implement simple and effortless marketing strategies.

But, the ultimate question that hovers around their minds is:

Which marketing strategy should be adopted to drive business growth?

You may be well accustomed with the traditional methods of marketing. On the other hand, digital marketing is making a real buzz in the contemporary market.

Thinking what’s so SPECIAL about digital marketing?

Well, before you get to know this, first let’s shed some light on the following thing:

You can certainly choose the better medium between the two if you are aware of the following factors:

• Choosing the cheaper medium
• Picking a strategy that has better reach
• Using a platform that provides you quick response

What exactly is the difference between these two?

Traditional marketing includes any type of promotion through several conventional forms, such as –

• Print media (newspaper and magazine ads, billboard ads, newsletters, brochures, leaflets, etc.)
• Broadcast media (TV and radio ads)
• Direct mail (flyers, postcards, catalogs)
• Telemarketing

In traditional marketing, there is less chance of interaction between the medium used and the customers. Moreover, it’s also not that easy to measure results through traditional marketing strategies.

Traditional marketing is incapable of showing real-time results, which contributes to its irrelevance.

Also,its a one-directional way! It’s more like throwing information in front of people and hoping that they will take action.A two-way communication is very important to keep the consumers engaged more intensely.

So, what’s the solution?

And digital marketing does that: it empowers INTERACTION!

Luckily, there has its counterpart which is going to melt the ice for you!

Known as digital marketing, it refers to the promotion of services via various forms of electronic media, such as –

• Website contents
• Social media
• Banner ads
• Google ads
• Video marketing

Digital platforms provide you the idea of the most suited strategies for your business.

With Google Analytics, you can track crucial information such as –

• the number of people visiting your business page
• the sex, age, and interests of the visitors
• how much time they are spending on your site
• their geographic location
• the source of traffic from various gadgets
• website bounce rates
• how the traffic has changed over time

Additionally, you’ll get to know about peak trading times, conversion rates and much more just with a click.

How Digital Marketing Crushes Traditional Marketing?

• Cost-Effective
• Better Communication
• Real-Time Results
• Higher Visibility
• Greater Competitive Edge
• Higher ROI(Return of Investment)
• Improved Accessibility
• Brand Development
• Tracking Vistors Interests
• Non-Intrusive Nature
• Global Exposure
• Extended Shelf Life

Here’s the bottom line:

The tried and tested approach of traditional marketing has its fan following, but in today’s fast paced world, there is a huge preference for digital marketing as well.

By taking advantage of digitization, its wider opportunities and far-reaching strategies, you should get started with your foolproof marketing game plan right now!

Organizations, who have understood this digital essentiality, are getting ahead of their competitors in the business market.

CATT Marketing Funnel-

• [n] Niche: Your success & wealth depends on the niche you choose
• [C] Content: Create useful content that attracts people from your niche. Blogs,posts,webinars,videos,etc.
• [A] Attention: Drive attention (traffic) to your content using SEO, Social Media,Ads.
• [T] Trust: Build trust with your audience with tripwires, marketing automation and retargeting
• [T] Transaction: Convert your leads into customers with natural sales methods.

Consider this to be your ultimate marketing framework,as it covers all the important aspects of marketing and once you are able to master every step of it,success is guaranteed to you.

Integrated Digital Marketing

A lot of people approach Digital Marketing in such a way that they try to gain leads from different segments differently.Generally people select one segment of marketing and just continue with it,then after few days, again select a different segement and work on it.Well,this approach to is too bad to generate more leads.

Marketing Components like Paid Advertising,Email Marketing,Content Marketing,SEO,Social Media,etc should not be used separately and should be integrated to generate more effective leads.

The best approach to use all these components at its full potential is as follows:

Never run paid ads to your product at the first instance.Instead run paid ads to your free content(blogs,social media).If people find value in your content they would execute the CTA(call to action of your content),and get them added to your email list.First you ask for attention rather than a payment.So now you have people in your email list ,next time you publish a piece of content,send it to your email list.Now that people have started following you because of the value you are providing,you can market your product to these people and the conversion rate with this audience would be much more than putting paid advertisements directly to your product.Trust is important in marketing,by putting value in content,you are gaining the trust of the people and the same people would help you get more leads for your product.

Now the topic coming up next is very important.If you are still reading this,thanks you have come a long way and I feel that you are really interested in marketing.

“Take a sip of coffee for the next section.”

Personal Branding

This is one of the most important points from the whole article and I have deliberately kept it at the end so that only dedicated people would go through it and have patience.If you lack patience,you can skip this part,because Personal Branding is not an easy task,it is the result of years of hardwork and its for people looking for long term success and not falling for the trap of short term success.

“People communicate with people and not with brands”.The company needs to have a CEO to handle important tasks of the company,but he also becomes the face of the company.People follow the CEO,because they can connect with him.

We all know Tesla,SpaceX,but what everyone knows better is “Elon Musk”.He has a better following than a total of all his companies and he is the face of all these companies.Well a point to keep in mind here is that,once you establish a good following a have a brand established,you can give rise to many more brands from your influence,and similar is the case with Elon Musk.

Similarly,you need to have your personal brand if you want to build your audience and cater to them for the long term and in turn you would get customers for your product/service.

You need to deliver value to the people,to make them a part of your audience.The more and better value you provide,the more people would follow you.Building the auidience that would pay you,also has a different approach.First acquire people at less price by not making any profits.Then provide these people with more value based content and then convert a portion of them for your premium product.

“A personal brand works for itself”.Once your personal brand is established, you dont need to market your serivices,people would automatically come to and the one thing you have to do deliver the best you have.

Trust is a very important factor of a personal brand,and in no way you can afford to lose the trust people have on you.Keep up to the expectations of the people and strive everyday ahead for delivering something better than yesterday.

Evolution of a Personal Brand

•Learn: Learn a new skill through Concepts, Facts and Procedures. Understand the concepts. Remember the facts and practice the Procedures.

• Work: Put your new found skills to work. Go from practice to implementation. Implementing it in the real world will give you a better understanding. (Wok =Job / Freelancing / Own Projects)

•Blog: Write about what you have learned and experienced through your work. When you writ, you understand it better, but you will aka start building your personal brand.

•Consult: Now that you have a personal brand through your blog, have work experience and have learned the fundamentals, start consulting other businesses instead of working for them.

•Mentor: Mentor others who want to become like you. Mentoring will help you scale your understanding to a whole new level.

• Startup: Stan your own product or service business with the understanding that you have developed about the market, the problem and your own skills.

This should be a never ending cycle and you should keep on evolving and improving everyday.

Well, I can talk a lot about personal branding,would keep that for my next article,as this article is not just about personal branding.

You can read more of my tech related blogs here.

Thank you for the time you invested in reading this article in its entirety. It keeps me grounded and focused on delivering value to you as my reader.

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