How Integrated Product Marketing Drives More Leads for Companies
Product marketing needs creativity. It is a way to connect your product to its potential customers. However, discrete product marketing efforts rarely lead to high quality leads. The product marketing is now an integral part of the SaaS development efforts. The product marketing campaigns and its ROI are embedded into the super admin interface of the product.
Here we look at the ways your product marketing can be integrated into your product development cycle:
1. Understanding Users & Campaigns
Product marketing begins with the users. Before integrating the product marketing development efforts, a good understanding of the product efforts will assess things like:
Who is likely to use your product?
Where are your users, which locations and preferred times to reach them?
Where do your potential customers hang out?
What are the channels used by your customers?
What type of content will your users typically consume? For e.g. short videos, articles, images etc.?
How frequently do you want to engage with your users?
What do you want your customers to know about the product when they sign up?
Do you measure the time spent by the users on your product and the features they use?
By evaluating the questions above, your product marketing efforts can use a data driven approach to reaching potential customers. Your product marketing funnel can be developed inline with your user preferences.
2. Types of Campaigns
Product marketing involves running different types of campaigns. For e.g. email outreach, social media campaigns, videos, Google/FB/Twitter ads, and outdoor campaigns etc. All these campaigns can be run and managed from your product admin interface. The marketing efforts can be directly linked to the results of the campaigns and analysed for effectiveness.
The different campaign results could be measured in brand awareness, brand recognition, overall traffic on your site, sign-ups and conversions into paid customers. Brands can invest more capital on campaigns that are bringing in the revenue and results.
Some campaigns can result in viral promotion of your brand. Puma asked Pele to tie his shoe laces at the Football World Cup kickoff event. It resulted in the cameras focusing on his shoes and the whole world noticed the brand Puma.
AirBnB using Craigslist emails to get the users to post on AirBnB, PayPal users getting money to invite other users on the platform and manoeuvring itself to be the default payment choice on eBay are some creative ways brands grabbed the attention of their users.
3. Data for Outreach Campaigns
The product admin interface can have simple ways to upload data for running campaigns. This data can then be used to run the campaigns like emails, social campaigns, sharing newsletters etc.
The online web crawler could also parse the web for the specific keywords that show buying intent. These mentions could focus on buying intent on users exclusively resulting in higher quality leads. The filters can be used for rejecting users who don’t fall into the target group for the company.
Campaigns can be improved using technology to search the best leads for your product. The marketing campaigns only lead to focus on onboarding the right target group and ignore the noise. It can create and build result oriented digital campaigns without involving too many marketing people or resources.
4. Communicate to Differentiate
When you fail to communicate, it results in noise. But when you communicate with authenticity, you are able to differentiate. Communication is at the core of product marketing efforts. All automated messages to the customers should have a checklist and scores to ensure messages sent to the users are relevant to them. Consider addressing the questions like:
How do you differentiate yourself?
Do you have an authentic voice?
Why are you building your product?
What does your product do for the user?
Why should they care to spend time on it?
When brands communicate with authenticity, purpose and interest of their users, they connect with them. They attract more leads and convert these users into customers. The SaaS product communication shouldn’t become transactional and machine like, but address the human on the other side who is using your product.
5. Fancy Technology Vs Reaching Right People
Most products are built for a few users, others will simply not care about them. So, it is extremely important to use the right levers for reaching your target audience. A marketing plan that tries to reach everyone ends up reaching no one.
There is a cost involved in reaching customers, wasting money in targeting the wrong users can be costly. Simply put, not all fancy technologies and social media channels will work for you. For e.g. Instagram or Snapchat may not have the right audience for your B2B product. It doesn’t make sense to use them.
The demand generation for your product is best done by reaching the right target group. Using technology, right segmentation and methods, the cost to reach the right people is reduced considerably.
It impacts your overall cost to acquire a customer as well. If you are targeting the government companies for your enterprise solutions, spending marketing dollars on social media wouldn’t be advisable. You could do well to meet them at the right events and conferences.
You can list out all potential ways to reach your target customers and assess the most effective ones that work for your business. Overtime experimentation will lead you to discover your best fit customers and you can use technology to navigate to your customers without tipping off detractors.
6. New Product Development Announcements
Your company’s ability to measure the pulse of your customers helps your brand. You don’t need to spam your customers into submission. But you need to communicate with clarity on how they can find more value with new developments.
When the developments are in synch with the customer needs and provide them tangible value, your customers will be more loyal. Your company can send emails, interactive videos, articles and media coverage for communicating new developments to your customers.
By communicating regularly with the customers, you can stay connected and relevant to them. The product support team is also a way to market your company. The features that solve the problems of your customers in new improved ways and none of your competitors have them, need to be communicated to customers. Your product analytics and usage can be analyzed to see the impact of the announcements on the usage patterns.
Microsoft conducted a survey on the features needed by the MS Office customers. They were shocked to learn that 90% of the features requested by the customers were already present in MS Office. But the customers didn’t knew about it. New product features and developments can aid your product usage and retention levels too.
7. Product Marketing ROI
Your company’s product marketing efforts need to be measured with real time data. The product experience, support and marketing need to be aligned with product development. Companies that engage with their users proactively generate more traction, word of mouth publicity and retain users longer on their products as well.
The product marketing efforts analyse the types of campaigns with key metrics like users reached, product enquiries, leads, sign-ups, conversions, & revenue generated etc. This can be compared against the cost of running the campaign. Companies can generally focus on the top channels that lead to lower cost of acquisition for customers, but higher revenues and retention periods.
The focus on quality of leads is the key driver for companies revenue growth. This is even more relevant for companies targeting the enterprise customers. The marketing effectiveness can measure the most meaningful metrics for your brands and cut through all the noise.
When campaigns are tracked, measured and analysed closely, it can also lead to new product improvements. Overall, it makes developers, marketers and sales team aligned to grow customers for a company.
Companies that measure product marketing using different tools like CRM, email marketing software etc. should be able to create an integrated dashboard. The integrated dashboard can be used for comparing and measuring the efforts of the marketing teams.
Kreyon Systems provides SaaS Product Development & integrated marketing campaigns for clients globally. If you have any queries or need help in building your SaaS products, please reach out to us.