Marketing a new product is always challenging. I bet it’s your most exciting task, especially if you’re a passionate product owner. 

The creation of an outstanding startup is only the first step to success. Without proper promotion, your product may never reach the intended audience and won’t get the level of recognition it was created for. According to statistics, poor marketing and ignoring the wishes of potential users are the reasons for 14% of startup failures. 

That’s why, in this article, I’m going to tell you how to market a product effectively. You’ll know what basic steps to take to get started and what promotional methods to use thereafter. 

How to Market a Product  – 5 Steps To Getting Started

Before proceeding to the direct ways to promote your product or service, you should make sure it is ready to meet the customers and satisfy the market demand. 

Thus, at this stage, you have a lot of prep work to be done:

Step 1 – Research your target audience one more time

This is quite hackneyed advice you probably have heard a lot, but it still deserves to be repeated. Remember, the failure to match buyer personas with your product/service always leads to a lack of market demand which is the top reason why startups fail (mentioned above). 

Thus, you should take a fresh look at your target users and carefully segment them into logical groups (for example, by age, gender, location, occupation, or specific problem). A deep analysis will help you create an MVP relevant to your target audience, understand each segment’s specifics and develop actionable b2c or b2b marketing strategies. 

Your final goal is to make sure that your product’s competitive features solve users’ problems in an expected and intuitive way. 

Step 2 – Work on your brand style guide

The next step you should take toward your new product launch is to develop your unique brand style guide. This is one of the core documents that will guide your marketing during the promotion. I’ve already explained how to create a brand style guide for your business.

In a nutshell, this guide defines your brand identity, visual and writing style, tone of voice, and other elements that compose a holistic marketing strategy. 

Step 3 – Enhance your product positioning on the market

At this stage, you should focus on your project differentiation. To put it simply, you define unique product/service features that make your value proposition even more valuable and help distinguish your business from the competitors.

For example, after conducting market research, you may find out that your competitors invest a lot in the functionality of their product but actually it lacks good customer support or deeply researched content to educate their users. 

Fill this gap to better meet your users’ expectations, improve your competitiveness, and strengthen the market position of your new product on the whole. 

Step 4 – Come up with reasonable pricing

Development of a reasonable pricing strategy will help make your product affordable to your target audience, justify your unique value proposition with your price, and avoid dishonest ways like damping to promote a product/service. 

To find the perfect balance, analyze these factors:

• price of your competitors’ set, 
• the economic feasibility that’s needed for your business growth, 
• the level of your users’ solvency, 
• users’ readiness to part with their money in exchange for your product or service.  

Also, don’t neglect the opportunity to use price optimization tools that may help you with cost adjustments and prediction. They’re especially useful in case you’re going to enter the dynamic market. 

You can also refer to tools for dynamic pricing strategy development such as Omnia Retail or Minderest designed to personalize the price for each customer based on the collected user data. 

Step 5 – Stay ready for changes

Now you are almost done with the fundamental steps to promote a product or service. However, keep going and always stay ready for changes. 

The majority of markets are quite dynamic. Customers’ preferences can also change instantly. The recent pandemic has already shown how dramatically the business environment may transform in a tick. 

So, yes, flexibility should be one of your core business skills. Spend some time on the preparation of a backup plan just in case.

How to Promote Your Product/Service – Promotional Methods that Will Help You Reach the Masses

So, let’s suggest you’ve just launched a completely new product or service. Here are the most efficient promotional methods you can use to create significant buzz around it on the market:

1. Search engine marketing (SEM)

At the very beginning, when quite a few users know about your startup, it makes sense to start attracting qualified traffic to your website using search engine marketing. We’ve already shared the tutorial to SEM strategy development – learn about SEM in detail. 

Basically, search engine marketing is the opportunity to promote your product or service in Google (or other search engines) using paid advertising. 

The main advantage of this approach is the possibility to get leads from day 1!  You set your ad campaign very flexibly, specifying the accurate targeting options, and attract interested customers. Your ads will be shown appropriately in response to their search query. 

Here is how it may look:

What’s more, PPC (pay per click) or PPI (pay per impression) advertising types are quite affordable since you can rapidly pay off the investments. You get a live audience you may work with, gradually moving them to the button of your sales funnel.

By the way, feel free to check our guide to building a profitable sales & marketing funnel to better catch the essence of each promotional method I list here. 

2.  Lead capturing forms

Talking about the customer journey throughout your sales funnel, I can’t help but mention lead capturing methods. 

After your potential customer switches to your website and gets the first impression of your business, it’s time to capture them with the help of a lead magnet (a free item or service you offer to users in exchange for their content data). 

There are a lot of approaches to apply lead magnets. For example, a user may see a catchy pop-up when leaving a site. You can offer a piece of valuable content (such as an eBook) or a discount for the first purchase in exchange for their email address.

Let’s take a look at how HubSpot does it. They invite the users to get to know each other better through corporate newsletters. The subscription form is displayed in the form of a lead magnet in the center of the page. Plus, at the right corner, they suggest visitors download a free guide that will be delivered to the user’s inbox. 

3. Email marketing

With some amount of your potential users’ emails in your pocket, it’s time to continue nurturing your relationship with the help of email marketing.

How to market a product using email marketing techniques? Each brand develops its unique newsletter strategy that is built on automated mailing chains. You should also consider crafting compelling product launch emails that grab attention, generate excitement, and drive conversions.

For instance, here is an excellent welcome letter example from Starbucks. Look how vivid, catchy, and engaging it is. Everything you need for the first positive communication with the client!

Email marketing is quite tricky, however, it is still an important channel to grow your business. At this step, you should do everything possible to kindly address the users’ pain points, promote some trust and make the users switch to your website again to have a more attentive look at your product or services. 

Create a targeted email marketing strategy with mailing list segmentation and personalized messages to make the most out of this perspective channel and get the highest ROI possible.

4. SEO-based content marketing

Now, it’s time for content marketing to come into action. Before making the first purchase, most users want to be sure that they are in a reliable place and they expect competent support and service. 

Well-written, well-researched and pain-point-specific content placed on your website and your blog may serve as a powerful tool for proving your expertise and ability to solve users’ problems. 

There are a lot of amazing content marketing examples. You can also explore our blog to inspire and get a clear understanding of how to educate users, addressing their specific needs with professional and practice-proven pieces of advice. 

However, even the most brilliantly written materials can be left unnoticed without SEO (search engine optimization). You should primarily write for people but keep the search engine robots in mind. In case you’re not familiar with SEO yet or want to improve your SEO results, jump on our guide to efficient SEO writing first.

5. Social media marketing

The next step in marketing a new product is connecting with your already quite loyal users and attracting new members in social networks. Social media space is great for providing users with fresh and insightful content, company updates, and hot offers. 

How to promote your product/service using social media platforms? Let’s find out how other brands, including the non-competitive ones, do it.

For example, Yazio, a diet and nutrition app approaches Instagram marketing wisely, keeping the perfect balance between different types of content they post. They share success stories of their users (which work as a great social proof and motivation), users’ testimonials, balanced meal preparations tips, and the way to use their app in the most effective way. This mix of different but still valuable content improves user engagement and motivates users to purchase a subscription. 

How do you get started with social media marketing, select networks to register on, and decide what content types to use for your business? We’ve already revealed all these answers in our SMM guide for dummies.

6. Influencer marketing

At this stage, most likely, many users are already acquainted with your brand, and perhaps they have tried some of your products or services. But how do you attract new client opportunities? 

Well, it’s time to get a recommendation from a highly-authoritative person that your potential customers listen to. It’s all about influencer marketing — a promotional service provided by a well-known industry expert for a fee. 

Influencer marketing, when used right, is a powerful way to promote your business within social media since it allows for reaching out to a huge share of new users who tend to believe the opinion of a favorite influencer.

This channel opens up a lot of creative opportunities that may be utilized by global brands and small businesses as well. That’s how Prada partnered with Lil Miquela, a computer-generated influencer to promote its new collection using GIFs and Insta Stories. 

Getting started with influencer marketing isn’t as complicated as it may seem! There are a lot of tools designed to help you streamline this process. 

For example, you can get in touch with influencers from different niches using Trendhero or Upfluence, an AI-driven tool that finds influencers based on keywords and dozens of filters. Or use BuzzSumo to generate content and video marketing strategies that you’ll use in the influencer marketing campaigns. Here are more tools that can come in handy.

7. Video marketing

Video marketing is one more way to promote a product or service which is extremely versatile. 

You may use your different types of branded videos at each stage of your product promotion based on the goals. These can be demo videos, video testimonials, explainer videos, tutorials, and much more. 

Reuse your videos across different marketing channels to go viral and significantly increase your brand recognition. And surely, don’t forget to create a powerful YouTube marketing strategy.

For example, with the help of the video below, Airbnb talks about their core values, inspires trust and emotions, and makes each user feel they really care. 

Conclusion

Marketing a new product is a challenging task that requires careful market research and always has room for new discoveries. There are a lot of ways to promote a product or service, and each business combines different methods to come up with its unique marketing strategy. 

One efficient way to figure out how to market a product is to partner with an experienced marketing company that already has a lot of actionable and practice-proven insights to use for your business promotion. You are welcome to get in touch with ReVerb for a free consultation on your product marketing and exclusive marketing strategy development!