B2B Product Marketing 101: How to plan product (platform) development and marketing effectively.

Product An effective plan is when you bucket it into various phases with set objectives and timelines. This helps all teams involved collaborate and work towards their goals effectively with a full-fledged roadmap.?

Phase 1:?The critical one.

This is the most important phase! Why? This is where you identify the product fitment, why is it relevant, how is it unique, buyer persona, influencer persona, market fitment, and competitive assessment. Further, this phase helps plan the subsequent phases.

a.??Product Fitment and Persona Mapping: Assess the need of the product and who is it relevant for.

• What problem is your product solving? Is it a genuine problem?
• Are there any other competitor products and how is your platform unique?
• For whom is it relevant?
• The user persona – This is generally also the influencer persona.
• Decision-maker persona – Map your buyer persona and can they be influenced by the user persona?
• Understand the wider applicability of your product – Can it have a wider application to make it a single platform for multiple users? This generally is extremely beneficial as organizations always intend to invest in a lesser number of platforms due to various reasons.

b.??Market Fitment and Competitor Assessment: This needs to be a continuous activity.

• Understand the markets that have a genuine need for your product, or else your product will end up becoming another me-too. For this do not shy away from doing solid market research.
• Competitor Assessment: Start analyzing the best competitor products and develop features and capabilities that are better and unique; which gives an edge to your product.

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c.??Product Development Roadmap: First of all, let me highlight this in bold – This is a Continuous Process. Plan a roadmap for keeping the product relevant in the market. For this, you need to,

• Assess your competitor products that are from brands that are bigger than your brand (if any) and products from smaller brands.
• Never ignore the new entrants. They are generally the dangerous ones which often are ignored but later take away your market share.
• Align the aforementioned with your product marketing roadmap. Build a process to feed the info to your various teams –
• Product development and Technology teams to plan which features and functionalities to build and better.
• Marketing and Sales teams to build their counter-marketing and sales tactics, if needed. More importantly, helps product teams prioritize and de-prioritize the capabilities that need to be built.

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Phase 2:?The Next Important Phase.

Here you refine personas, decide your pricing strategy, build product positioning and brand identity.

a.??Refine Buyer and Influencer Personas: With all the data and insights, it is always best to reassess and refine the personas at the beginning of Phase 2.

• Target Groups
• Target Markets
• Niche
• Behavioural?attributes
• Demographics

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b.??Pricing Strategy:?Next up is the pricing strategy for your product. Assessing various factors, such as, how premium is your brand and product, brand recognition, product differentiation, market niche, competitors, and capabilities, is vital to decide on the type of pricing you want for your product.

• Value-based product pricing [Premium pricing], Or
• Competitive pricing

c.??Product Positioning and Identity: Once the pricing strategy is decided, the next step for marketers is to build an impactful story for the product that connects with your brand purpose and how it solves the potential clients’ problems. For this, the marketing teams should go deep into understanding the following.

• Who is this product for?
• How is it solving problems for the intended audience?
• How is your product different from its competitors and its USP?
• LTV and ROI for the potential customer – Why should the potential target audience choose it?
• And, of course, what’s the pricing strategy

This stage is pivotal as the product gets it identity –

• Name
• Tagline
• Logo designing
• Positioning statement
• Product story

Always keep the client at the heart of everything while shaping your product's brand identity.

Phase 3: Build-up for Go-to-Market

a.??Build a Marketing Program Tracker: To list down the activities, assets to be built, taskmasters and stakeholders, timelines, etc.?

b.? Build marketing assets for the platforms:?

• Content assets: Product videos, articles, webinars, podcasts, case studies, e-books, guides, FAQs, knowledge base material, website content, etc.
• Promotional and Sales assets: Pitch decks, press releases, ads, emailers, social media posts, battle cards, etc.

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c.??Beta-test with clients: It’s best to beta-test the product with clients as they help champion your product in any way, such as –

• Market testing and acceptability understanding
• User acceptance and improvement areas
• Help refine messaging

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d.??Microsites:?This is one of the most important marketing channels for lead gen and product visibility. What it should include –?

• About the product (Description) that also reflects brand legacy and capability of building and managing platforms
• Product Positioning – What, Why, How –?
• What’s the product about?
• Why does it exist and what problem does it solve for the TG?
• How is it different?
• How can it help a business/ brand grow?
• Capabilities and Features
• Product video (if possible)
• FAQs
• Pricing and Rate cards – Depending on strategy to show the pricing strategy and if there is merit in showcasing the pricing.
• Demo and Trial options with detailed forms and workflows integrated
• Trusted By (Client logos) – If the product has been beta-tested with a few clients
• Client stories – If the product has been beta-tested with a few clients
• Knowledge base for clients
• Resources (Content section)
• Cross-sell Opportunities – Other modules, bespoke solutions, reports,?etc.

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Phase 4: Market Launch and Execution

Make use of multiple channels for visibility and demand generation.

a.? Content Marketing: This will do the heavy lifting in the long run and help in SEO and other marketing channels to drive discovery and demand generation.

b. Paid Media: Drive visibility and demand generation through paid media using social, search, video, display, programmatic, re-marketing, contextual and native ads

c.??Organic:

• Email Marketing: Reach your audience list with drip emailers
• Start early with SEO
• Use social media brand pages and relevant social media groups
• Make use of smart tools and platforms for scaling and tracking

d.??Press Release: Paid and Organic

e.??Influencers: Reach out to brand-relevant influencers to help spread the word

f.???Make use of relevant product listings and directories

g.??Leverage SAAS review sites

h.? Start running your webinar and demo sessions!

i.??Account Based Marketing:

• Platform Updates
• Engagement
• Exclusive access to reports, events, webinars, offers,?etc

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Phase 5: Post-launch Activities

a.??Analyze the effectiveness of your content, ads, and organic marketing to refine, course correct and scale. aid, and Organic Marketing

b.??Create an effective affiliate program: To let influencers and affiliates market our product to their community/ followers and get a commission for every lead/ demo request/?conversions

·??????? To drive a continuous stream of influencer traffic?

·??????? Quality referral traffic

·??????? Model and payment system to make payouts to influencers

[Use a tool/ platform instead of creating the entire wheel again]

c.???Increase LTV (Life Time Value) of users by using engagement and gamification tactics

d. Co-marketing:?Collaborate by running a co-marketing campaign with other companies that either complement their product offering or share a?similar point of view or approach to business

e.??Social giveback:?Create a brand story of how we are giving back to society. Example – How a percentage of sales is used for betterment of?the society.

f.??Measure CSAT/ NPS Scores

g.??Continuously improve the product and experience. Use it to your marketing advantage.

A product is successful not just because it’s great; a lot depends on the effectiveness of the marketing plan, how detailed the plan is, how far-fetched is the thinking and of course the collaborative execution.