Based on https://cxl.com/blog/product-life-cycle-marketing/ by Tom Whatley.
Business benefits
Gather qualitative user data from customer reviews, customer service calls, user interviews, live chat transcripts, and surveys.
Find out how your product is helping customers solve problems, what they like and dislike about it, and what more it can do.
Update customer personas, refine marketing copy to target pain points, make UX changes to increase conversions, and prioritize product updates by demand.
Start establishing authority by showing your customers how your product fills gaps in the market that no one else’s does.
Refine positioning to stamp your authority on the market
At this stage, you’ll know where your product sits in the market. This makes you well-positioned to start establishing authority.
If you boast a more advanced product than competitors, lean into its benefits. Show your customers how you fill gaps in the market that nobody else has. To do this, you’ll need to put more budget behind current campaigns on successful channels.
Use social proof to drive home the authority of your product.
Ask customers to review your product. Incentivize them to recommend you to others. Use their feedback as a marketing tool to elevate yourself above new competitors.
Product reviews can increase conversion rates by 270%. Utilizing them helped the likes of Slack and Canva achieve rapid growth.
Example
Take customer data platform Segment. It built its homepage around social proof.
The second you land on the website, you’re immediately informed that this is a product with authority. The headline and supporting copy position Segment as a market leader, used by big-name brands. This positioning is hammered home further down with page with a case study.
That Segment can show it’s trusted by startups and the world’s largest companies instills confidence in customers.
If your product development lags behind the competition, focus on brand building by working on your marketing fit, focus, and consistency.
- Fit: Target your marketing at the right audience, in the right tone of voice, where they hang out online.
- Focus: Talk about the issues and topics that are important to your audience.
- Consistency: Show up regularly to develop familiarity. Post consistently on social media and engage often with your audience across all marketing channels.
Developing a strong brand now will help grow a community that carries you through the maturity stage.
Example
Insurance company Lemonade is able to thrive in a market populated by institutions like State Farm and Prudential by building a fun, lovable brand.
Its founder Daniel Schreiber explains the company’s approach in a blog post:
Insurance brands are some of the least loved and least trusted, and we came to understand that the cause is structural: every dollar your insurer pays you is a dollar less for their profits. Their interests, in other words, are profoundly conflicted with yours.
Brands that make money by delighting their customers deserve to be loved; those that make money by disappointing customers are destined not to be. With Lemonade, we’re hoping to deliver an insurance experience that is instantaneous, un-conflicted, and downright lovable.
Its imagery, tone of voice, and social content push Lemonade as a people-first brand—a world away from its corporate rivals.
Map out how your team will market new product updates. Consider frequency, audience, and budget for the updates.
- Frequency: Regular smaller updates may only require a tweak to messaging and documentation, whereas infrequent larger updates may need a big marketing push.
- Audience: Do you need to create new customer personas?
- Budget: Will updates require new content, PR, and landing pages?
Example
In 2020, Drift launched Audiences to help marketers quantify their marketing efforts.
The platform talks about this new feature update as a unique product. Audiences gets its own messaging, its own strategy.
Update all sales documentation with information on new audiences.
Give this to sales reps to stay consistent with marketing messaging.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T10:13:43Z