This is simply one of the most un-used marketing strategies in the crazy world of marketing today. A lot of businesses still think that marketing is all shouting about who you are, telling everyone to like you on social media and creating a fancy website, although those are things that should be considered, they are not as important as creating a great product in the first place.
The importance and power of having a great product is far more impactful than you may initially realise. To make this simple to understand, imagine your marketing efforts successfully completed the goal of getting signups to your platform, only to learn that 90%+ decided to magically disappear straight after. The product may have not fit in with the users needs, it may have errors when trying to perform one of the most basic tasks or better yet, just took too long to perform an easy task like navigating to another screen or page.
We are going to look into three key areas of a product from a marketing point of view, that, done well, go a long way in creating a successful marketing strategy and campaign.
We are going to talk about the absolute basics here and we will follow up this article with more advanced ideas and concepts in the following weeks to come.
User Experience
- How easy is it for a user to signup to your platform or service?
You’d be surprised how many digital platforms make mistakes right from the get go. Keep your initial signup process really simple and as friction free as possible. This means things like not asking for to much information up front, make the call to action as clear and obvious as possible and make the experience human centric, your customers are all human after all, tell them they are awesome and congratulate them for completing basic tasks.
Performance
- Does it take longer than 1 second to do anything?
Humans are spoilt. We are impatient, lack gratitude and we really don’t mind moaning when it comes to slow software. Depending on the complexity of your product, it may sometimes be difficult to make it quick but there are fewer and fewer excuses now that technology has improved so much. If it is taking your users too long to perform basic tasks in your software, you might as well just say goodbye. Optimise each step of the product to complete tasks in under 1 second, retain your customer base, re-market to them and enable the growth you are looking for with your business.
Customer Service
- Are you available?
It goes without saying that quick, smart and efficient customer service goes a long way in on-boarding new customers and retaining your current user base. Taking the time to setup an effective ticketing system, setting realistic expectations of response times, are just a few things you can do to build a great reputation. No matter how you are feeling, no matter the issue, always remain friendly, remember that your users are what pays you to be where you are, whether you are the owner or the support team member, that user you are talking to makes sure you get paid to do what you do.
So, in summary, keep it simple. Make the first few steps of coming into contact with your platform really easy, make it quick, we do not hang around, and be helpful.
Your marketing starts with you, your marketing is your product.