Marketing strategy. Product management for everyone!

A marketing strategy?is a comprehensive plan of action that is developed to increase a company’s profits. This document may cover the activities of the enterprise as a whole or individual areas of its work, for example, production, promotion of goods and the construction of processes within the company.

What should a marketing strategy look like?

A marketing strategy is a guide to what needs to be done to move from the “we have a product and first customers” stage to scaling. The strategy answers the questions:

• WHY are we doing this?
• WHO are we selling it to?
• WHAT do we sell?
• HOW do we sell?
• WHERE do we sell, in what channels?

If you don’t have a marketing strategy, then chances are your marketing is happening in the dark. You test many, many hypotheses and the lion’s share of the marketing budget is wasted on an infinite number of hypotheses.

A strategy is the kind of analytical work that makes all your advertising activities (such as Facebook ads) super-targeted. Before you start spending money on hypothesis testing, you understand:

• Who are you doing this for?
• In what channels will you talk about it;
• how you differ from your competitors.

A strategy as a document consists of two parts: an analytical part and a product marketing kit.

The analytical part includes:

• market analysis,
• competitor analysis,
• audience analysis, that is, breaking down the audience into key segments.

The product marketing kit signs:

Positioning — information about how we differ from competitors, what customer problem we solve and how we talk about it.

The final part of the strategy is marketing instructions. It should be a super detailed plan on how to launch advertising campaigns, what we say in them, to whom we address them so that anyone can implement it.

Inside the marketing strategy, the structure of the group of performers must be spelled out: who will implement the strategy, who is responsible for what, and who has what KPIs.

Where to get market data?

Market analysis is necessary in order to understand whether this product is needed at all, whether there is a need for it, what places competitors occupy, and in which direction the market as a whole is moving.

Here, articles and interviews in the media help us a lot. Interviews with the founders of various startups are often published on the medium in Secret of the Firm, where they share information about their results. It is better to multiply this information by 0.8 at once, because everyone likes to lie in interviews and in press releases. On average, people lie by 15–20%. Nevertheless, this gives a general understanding — growth rates, number of orders, etc.

The second tool that helps to probe the market is networking. People who work in investment funds, or in those companies that you want to know about. It’s cool if you find friends who work in platforms like google, airbnb, etc. Information can be extracted from them. Over a glass of beer, a person will tell you as much valuable information as you will never find either in focus groups or in sources, simply because he has access to this information.

Audience Analysis

The main sources for audience analysis are social networks, forums and blogs, comments on YouTube, comments on articles.

There is a wonderful tool YouScan — this is a parser that looks at what is written about it in social networks by the name of the brand. In it, you can configure notifications for the support service so that it responds promptly to negative reviews, etc.

YouScan can also be used as a parser for keywords related to your business. For example, “food delivery”, “cleaning”, “repair”, “taxi”. You can just watch what people write on this topic. You can find a lot of cool insights there.

Insights are completely different. For example, someone is dissatisfied with competitors. As a rule, if you take about 50 people who are dissatisfied with competitors, most likely you will find about two main pains that people are not satisfied with. So in food delivery, it’s usually a long delivery and an insufficiently varied menu. Therefore, in the strategy that we did for food delivery, the emphasis was placed on the fact that we have combo dishes from different restaurants and super-fast delivery of up to 30 minutes. If 30 minutes have passed and the courier has not arrived, we will refund the money.

It is very useful sometimes to read comments on YouTube and articles (throwing aside, of course, any trash). Sometimes people share their pains in the comments. Comments from living people are the most useful thing you can get from posting promo from bloggers. People write about why they would never buy your product. They directly put weapons in the hands of marketers when they say what fears prevent them from using your product. Having worked out these fears normally, you can change your marketing communication very abruptly.

Ideally, if the information is verified through focus groups or in-depth interviews, when people gather, they are asked questions, different situations are prototyped. But the most accurate information will appear when you test hypotheses and understand from the advertising cabinets who your target audience really is.

The marketing strategy allows you to focus already at the beginning, absolutely not to go to those who do not need your product, and not to invest in a platform that does not have your target audience.

Competitor analysis

Competitors can be direct and indirect. The straight ones are those who do the same. Indirect competitors, for example, for food delivery are cooking at home. In our “knee-jerk strategy” we will not be able to reach indirect competitors. This is an assumption that needs to be analyzed separately.

To compare direct competitors, you need to study their business metrics (they can be taken from the first part of our strategy) and marketing strategies.

To understand how marketing works for your competitors, you need to look at which sites they take traffic from and what its volume is. To do this, you can use various insights that you have found in the process of market research. Or you can just watch split channels via Alexa or SimilarWeb. It is clear that there are small assumptions there. A more detailed breakdown by source can be obtained if you use SimilarWeb PRO. But even the free version of SimilarWeb can seriously help in analyzing competitors: you will understand what sources of traffic your competitors have. For example, if you look at “PapaJones” in SimilarWeb, it turns out that there is a lot of traffic coming from e-mail newsletters. This means that their overall retention rate is quite high. Absolutely, if you are their competitor, you need to make an e-mail newsletter.

There is another trick. Some E-commerce stores allow you to do the following: try to order the cheapest product from them, after which you will see the “Thank you for your purchase” screen. Skip the URL of this screen through SimilarWeb. If SimilarWeb finds it, you will have information about how many online orders per day come to this competitor.

In general, a deep analysis of sources is very useful, because it allows you to see a lot. For example, if a company has a large number of direct visits, it means that this brand is known in the market. Competition in the market is quite low if one player accounts for a large share of direct requests. Accordingly, you can attack it in the same social networks to sow knowledge about your business.

It will be useful to analyze loyalty programs, to see how different brands are engaged in returning users.

Decide on positioning

At this stage, we collect everything that we did before into one document: the market, competitors, audience. At the junction of all the insights that we received, the product is born. You can draw a positioning map to understand where your product is in relation to competitors.

Next, it is important to think about how you describe the product in one sentence, that is, how one person will talk about your product to another person in the evening at the bar. Just one phrase, which will then be associated with the product. In marketing, this is called a USP — a unique selling proposition.

We first distribute the USP into key segments, and then we use it in creatives. Select a customer segment, describe it, understand the needs of this segment in your product and the barriers that it may have, and then broadcast the message.

Promotion strategy

It is useful to map all possible sources where it is potentially possible to advertise our product.

Here, as an example, the channels from which you can start are simply marked. It is ideal for yourself to keep a calendar of activity in an Excel spreadsheet, conditionally dividing advertising by channels: special projects, promotions, Facebook, bloggers, reputation management, YouTube. At any given time, you will have an indicator that allows you to understand what is happening in the campaign.

When choosing channels, it is useful to imagine how a person will interact with the product. This is called prototyping human-product interaction. You have done market research and understand when a person has a problem that your product is designed to solve. Prototyping will help you understand at what time to show the client an advertisement.

For example, why not show food delivery ads in the subway to lonely, tired men who are going home after work, so that a person can quickly make an online order, and a courier with a burger would already be waiting for him at home. Or showing ads in TV shows before going to bed. So the representative of Netflix said that “our main enemy is not TV channels, but sleep.”

Method 4P

Product place price promotion?are the key points that ensure the successful sale of the product. The 4P (4p) concept is suitable for both a large company and a freelancer working alone.

Product

A product is what a company is opened for. She offers a service or a product to a potential buyer and receives a profit for it. In the 4P marketing concept, special attention should be paid to the product.

Any product, both a physical object and a service, must have value for the consumer and be of high quality. To determine the value, the target audience is studied beforehand to identify its needs.

Qualities that a valuable product should possess:

• original design — appearance, shape, packaging, coloring;
• brand — name, logo, original style;
• a variety of assortment that meets the requirements of different categories of consumers;
• high quality and functionality.

Price place promotion are additional elements that cannot exist without the product.

Price

The price of the goods is responsible for the final profit of the company. It consists of production costs and expected profit. The price is influenced by the price of competitors, the perception of the product by consumers, the place of the product on the market.

The 4P concept should take into account:

• the minimum price that should be set for the initial entry into the market;
• the price that can be set after the product is fixed on the market;
• retail cost, including extra charge, cost of delivery to the place of sale;
• the range of prices for different places of sale — online, shops, wholesale buyers;
• cost when buying a package of goods and services;
• discounts, promotions.

A survey of buyers is important for price formation. Based on the survey, the average cost at which the majority of customers are ready to purchase the product is displayed.

Place

A very important aspect in the 4P marketing mix model is the availability of the product to the consumer. A potential buyer should immediately see the product and be interested. So, you need to think about the place where and how to place it.

Solutions for the “place — place” moment in the 4p strategy:

• suitable markets for sale;
• sales channels;
• types of sales — exclusive, mass market or specific categories of consumers;
• terms of sale — volume discounts, constant cooperation;
• features of product placement — display on the shelf, design, banners, leaflets;
• product inventory control.

There are many implementation options — small and large stores, shopping centers, home delivery. Now the Internet direction is actively promoted. Stores that sell their products and deliver them by mail are registered in social networks.

Promotion

Product promotion in the 4P marketing model is such events that attract the attention of a potential buyer. The promotion technique is aimed at familiarizing the consumer with the product, its benefits, properties, characteristics. This helps to create a complete image of the product and form a person’s need to buy it.

The activity of promoting a new product on the market begins with drawing up a portrait of the target audience. It is necessary to determine the needs of potential buyers and, based on this data, create an advertisement for the product.

Advertising is carried out via the Internet, mass media, directly at the points of sale. Types of advertising — video, audio, flyers, banners, articles. It is useful to organize product tasting at points of sale.

Books to read:

1) The Psychology of Influence, Robert Cialdini

2) Marketing warfare, Jack Trout

3) differentiate or die, Jack Trout

4) customers for life , Carl Sewell and Paul Brown

Conclusion

To create a working marketing strategy, you need:

1. Explore the market. Expand your network of contacts, look for insiders from large companies and investment funds. Go to meetups and conferences, read articles and annual report. Study competitors and the behavior of your target audience.

2. Create a positioning map (to determine your place among competitors) and a promotion map (to determine the channels in which messages will be broadcast). A USP is created for each audience segment and advertising channel (one sentence that can describe your product).

3. Create a document where the requirements for performers and their KPIs will be written.

And then we check the hypotheses, adjust the positioning and promotion maps, and finish the UTP. Scaled.

A marketing strategy is needed when there is already a product, there are first customers and it’s time to scale

Thank you for your attention ??