How to market your product and prepare a wining product marketing plan

We’re in the business of helping companies how to market your product or service.

One of the most commonly asked questions we hear is “what’s the best way to market new software or technology products” and my answer to that question is… well it depends.

What works for one organization may not work for another. And further more, what worked at one time for one organization may even not work at a later time. You simply can’t draw a linear line in marketing and draw conclusions. You’ve got try a bunch of stuff, try to be everywhere, test and refine, be agile, and work smart.

And so, we thought we’d share a little insight into what we at Total Product Marketing did to market our service and in the few weeks that we’ve gone live, the results have been tremendously positive.

First, we spent a lot of time analyzing our buyers and the audience members who would potentially visit our site and be interested in our business.

– What problems were they trying to solve?
– What biases did they have?
– What were some constraints they may be facing?
– What are the top priorities of the visitors to the site?

Initially in our design mocks, our main banner defined Total Product Marketing in terms of what we did and what we offered. It also was somewhat wordy talking about we would do to help your companies sales channels get more customers.

Frankly, it had too many “blah blah” words (note: if you don’t know what I mean by “blah blah” words, download our free report!).

So here was our initial home page banner mock:

The more we thought about it, the more we realized that our visitors didn’t care about how we saw the world.

What they saw were a lot of words that were really meaningless to them, especially 3.6 seconds after landing on our home page.

We realized that what they cared about was whether this company that they were reading on was going to help them get to market faster, make more money and get more customers. The message needed to be about them, not us. So that is what you see below and now is live on our site.

We then did some quick “flow through” testing imagining how a visitor got to our site and then how they could potentially navigate the site consuming information that was most pertinent to them. The content was strategically designed in order to reduce any “friction” points that would distract or confuse the visitor and prompt them to leave the site.

The Google Analytics that we implemented bears out our work. According to Google, the average bounce rate for most sites falls in the range of 40-60%. We’re currently slightly below that 40% mark and we stay in the lower half of that range, we’ve probably done a good job.

As part of our initial Content Marketing strategy, we created the free report on some of the big mistakes made in product marketing with multiple goals a) lead generation b) build credibility in our service c) provide valuable information to our buyer. This piece has especially been valuable in our lead generation efforts – we’ve received compliments on it directly and some of the prospects in our funnel came to us after downloading this free report.

Another point worth mentioning regarding our website, we really wanted to make the look and feel simple and inviting, and put another way, Google-friendly. You see, Google aims to be our friend. It wants us to trust its results by bringing up the most relevant sites pertinent to our search. So that means finding good sites with great content and also sites that are user-friendly.

On that note, we did SEO work to figure out what long-tail key words we should be trying to hit. We decided on two key word phrases based on the search volume, competition and our potential to eventually get on Page 1 of Google. So we did the basic foundational work to optimize our site (i.e. tags, titles, descriptions, site maps etc.). Like anything done the right way, it takes time and effort so we’ll hopefully see that fruits of that in the coming weeks and months.

We reached out to a friend in the industry, Firecracker PR, for whom we had done some work for in the past and asked if we could do a guest blog post. He was very cool with it (thank you Edward!) and that gives us not only some good link building, but also keeps that content marketing flow going.

We set up Social Media (except Youtube/Vimeo – it was just a time crunch thing – definitely our next wave of content marketing efforts will focus on video marketing, and we’ll be doing a lot with SlideShare) and finally we set up some paid advertising channels through PPC.

We decided to try them all initially Display and Search Networks for Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yahoo/Bing. Each campaign has two ads that we’re testing with two different headlines, messages and links. We’re especially pleased right now with the Google PPC campaign as we’re hitting around a 2% click through rate and the conversions are high. We’ll revisit the campaigns in 30 to 45 days and tweak and re-launch.

Finally, we’ll be looking to do a press release of some sort (we just have to come up with something interesting to say!) as press releases are a great way to get some good exposure and cement your place in Page 1 of Google. More than anything right now, we want to be everywhere, we want to maintain a respected and positive online reputation and generate leads through our blogging, content sharing and social.