Use product marketing to improve brand awareness
Use product marketing to improve brand awareness
1. Do a market analysis that states the market problem your offering addresses and quantifies the market opportunity. Include total addressable market, service addressable market, and share of market for your company.
Quantifying the market opportunity will help identify opportunities for brand awareness. The service addressable market is much larger than your company’s share of market, yet many potential customers do not yet recognize the market problem. Product marketing can create awareness of the problem with content like blog posts, calculators, and webinars. For example, a calculator might help an ecommerce retailer quantify the revenue they are losing to abandoned carts and realize the need for an abandoned cart recovery solution.
2. Complete a competitive analysis that provides a comprehensive picture of alternatives to your solution, pricing, customers, qualitative comparisons, and messaging. Use this to understand where in the competitive landscape you fall and identify opportunities.
From the competitive analysis, product marketing can: Start leveraging new platforms your competitors use, for example new social Reach new or adjacent audiences they may be targeting Enhance the product messaging framework with updated messaging or new use cases
3. Conduct a customer analysis to identify the primary social media platforms your ideal customer commonly uses, and build communities within these platforms for your product.
Include input from areas besides product marketing – for example, insights from sales teams – to get a full quantitative and qualitative picture. Then: Build a community on the platforms most relevant to your customer. For example, if your product is fitness attire, build a Facebook fitness community. Or, if you sell B2B marketing automation, create a LinkedIn group. Search for companies that look like your best customers or aspire to be like your best customers. These companies can be targeted through advertising, email marketing, or outbound calling and invited to participate in your community. Center your community around its brands and members, not your product. Identify the keywords your customers use when trying to solve their problems, and optimize your community to appear in search results for those problems.
4. Make partners part of your go-to-market channel strategy, considering other brands, opinion leaders, industry experts, bloggers, and social media influencers.
Product marketing can help identify and prioritize which partners are best for building brand awareness by helping you: Pick partners that may already be part of your customers’ ecosystem or with whom you would like to be associated. Avoid any brand that is, or has the potential to be, a direct competitor of your brand, unless that competitor has much greater brand awareness or primarily serves a different customer segment. Select partners that align with your brand values. For example, a clean energy company may not want to partner with businesses with petroleum-derived products. Alternately, a water filtration company could be a great fit.
5. Use the communities you established to identify new product opportunities, promote your product, and launch new products.
Participate regularly in the community to hear new market problems, and highlight how your product and brand help solve those problems. Further, product marketing can leverage these communities to: Provide free samples for feedback and reviews. Solicit participants for early product access, including alphas, betas, and prototypes. Create a pool of active participants for market, customer, and user research.
6. Include influencer marketing and affiliate marketing as part of your new product development and go-to-market strategy to gain promotional opportunities, and add credibility and familiarity to your product and brand.
Influencers and affiliates are an addition to your product marketing strategy that can boost brand awareness. Leverage them by: Offering free products to give away to their audiences. Creating co-marketing content that encourages their followers to check out your website.
7. Monitor and follow up promptly to customer social media posts and social mentions of your brand, and publicly deliver strong customer service.
Social posts about your brand, positive or negative, are opportunities to create brand awareness. Your public interactions show your customers and who you are, as a company, and introduce observers to your brand.
8. Analyze your website traffic regularly to spot new or unexpected sources that can be proactively pursued to create brand awareness.
Use services like Google Analytics to monitor and track where your traffic originates, and make sure your product marketing messaging is correct for those sources, as well as assessing if you can drive more traffic from those sources.