Based on https://cxl.com/blog/product-life-cycle-marketing/ by Tom Whatley.
Business benefits
Decide on a balance between focusing on enticing customers away from your competitors and building brand equity.
Enticing customers away from the competition is a popular tactic with mobile phone providers like Verizon.
Example
Slite does a similar thing in the B2B space, positioning its solution as an alternative for weary Slack users.
However, such tactics often rely on offering customers a better deal, lower price, or added incentives.
Nurture your community with valuable content and reward customers for their loyalty.
Appealing to your customer’s emotions and making them feel valued will go a long way to retaining and turning them into advocates.
According to research by InMoment, when their needs are satisfied, 77% of customers have maintained loyal relationships with their preferred companies for ten or more years. During this time, they purchase more frequently and spend more money.
In other words, by creating loyal customers around your current product, you’re growing an audience for years to come.
Research your customers to find out what they want the most.
Develop your product, site, and offers based on existing customer feedback.
Evaluate whether a loyalty or rewards program will drive repeat business.
Make your retention strategy personal to create brand attachment.
Invest in research to extend product profitability.
A key question you need to answer in the maturity phase is: where is the market headed? Investing in third-party market research will give you an understanding of what market segments drop off first and which customers stick around longest. It will also help identify late adopters.
Combine this research with data from sales teams to find out:
- What product features are sticking;
- What prices, upgrades, or experiences customers use to choose your product over a competitor’s.
This will help you target marketing campaigns towards your most profitable demographics to improve ROI. Data will also help shape your next steps.
Research on how customers are using your product can also unearth insights for potential new uses that prolong its lifespan.
Example
Mailchimp, for example, used customer insight to evolve its product and shift marketing from email to business growth.
Its website and marketing campaigns now push people towards its all-in-one marketing platform.
Mailchimp’s founder Ben Chestnut explained the company’s evolution in a blog post:
Our email marketing product has helped millions of businesses grow, but our customers have been asking for years for us to build something that would enable them to do all of their marketing in one place.
Small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t have time to manage three, four, or five different platforms that each serve one specific purpose, and they don’t want their data all over the place: They need a tool powered by data and expertise that will help them know where to invest their marketing dollars.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T10:40:33Z