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Best Practices

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Best Practices Overview

Product placement is commonly the backbone for product-based businesses. Placing your products in an online retail setting is the quickest way to take a new product to market, but in-store placement provides organic exposure and stability. These placement opportunities will all lead to your website, which will be the hub of your marketing and sales programs; this is why it’s important to closely integrate your product development, design, sales, and marketing efforts from the beginning.

Successful product-based marketing is all about resolving a pain point your audience is having, developing the product to address that pain point, and then positioning your product as the answer for your audience’s pain point. For this process, clear product images, matching visual branding, and defined messaging guidelines are critical for reaching your audience.

Even before your products are available for purchase, you can generate interest in your products through social media programs. Once your product has launched, you can generate further interest through digital advertising and social media influencer partnerships. Building a referral program can take your advertising efforts even further by encouraging your current customers to advertise on their own behalf, providing mutually beneficial value. Once the referral program is established, it’s important to monitor your online reputation.

Continuing the conversation with your customers after they purchase your products can be partially automated with email marketing and ramping up your social media program. These communications programs may help improve the customer experience after the sale and help encourage repeat sales. One tactic you can use to encourage sales, instead of or in addition to discounts, is to utilize scarcity marketing, which is ideal for high-end and luxury products, but it also works for new and established products of all kinds.

Marketing Foundation

The foundation of your marketing efforts lies in first having a product that serves a specific need in the marketplace. Without a quality product that solves a clear problem that a specific group of people is having, marketing efforts will fail. To ensure you have a solid product before its launch, seek to understand the purpose of your product for the audience segments you will serve. Who needs your product? How will they use your product and why? Is it a necessity or a want? How often will they use it?

Once you know you have a quality product that serves a need in the marketplace, you need to determine how you will market that product. This is based on whether you have one product or multiple products that you are selling. If you are selling one product, you will obviously market that unique product. If you are selling multiple products, you may market your brand instead of each product individually; this works best once your brand is well-known. The number of products will help you determine this, too. If you have two or three products, you may still be able to market each one individually, but if you are selling 10 products, it’s best to market the brand.

To market your brand means to primarily focus on promoting the brand story, the brand promise, and why your prospects can trust your brand as a whole. To market your product narrows the focus to promoting the unique benefits of that one product and how it provides a specific solution.

Foundation Sections

Audience Targeting

Targeting your ideal audience happens through a variety of advertising channels. To begin advertising, you must create a strategic account structure based on your goals. Keep in mind that you can easily control the performance of the account as much as possible. Ensure that you have high-intent and relevant keywords per ad group.

For small businesses, you will want to increase brand awareness to sell products and maximize visibility in front of your ideal customer. Using social media (organic posts and paid advertising) is going to be great for brand awareness as social media platforms offer a robust collection of data on user demographics.

Depending on the product, you may want to use a sales funnel approach on social media after building your brand awareness. Remarketing is always going to be a tactic that needs to be implemented. You’ll be building that custom audience for remarketing from the start. Revise demographic targeting to zoom in on the high-converting audience group.

As campaigns progress, don’t be afraid to experiment because every business is unique and requires a slightly different tactic to achieve success. Most importantly, you’ll want to identify website performance optimizations as well because, ultimately, your conversions likely happen on your website, which requires optimal website performance.

Audience Targeting Sections

Optimization Strategy

team in office collaborating using documents and sticky notes

Lead Nurturing

You can begin your lead nurturing effort even before your product launches as a way to test the waters before manufacturing your products on a large scale. This helps create buzz around your product before it launches as well as determine if you have the right market fit (audience) to sell your products. While some agencies recommend advertising at this phase, we only recommend organic communications efforts before you launch to mitigate costs while testing the waters.

After your product launches, you should already have a refined audience base to promote on multiple platforms. Continue nurturing your email list and social media followers. Provide quality content adjacent to and about your product to keep your audience interested.

While growing your email list and social media following can help business growth, first focus on your current subscribers and followers. By focusing on them, you will encourage like-minded friends to join them while serving your customers well first. After all, most purchases are repeat purchases, so focus on your first customers more than gaining new customers.

Lead Nurturing Sections

Other Communication Efforts

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