On more occasions than I can count, I’ve always heard people say, “if you have a good product, it will sell.” While having a good product is very important, several things go into making your product successful.
One of which is marketing – product marketing.
As a Nigerian business owner, having the best quality product available in the market doesn’t guarantee success for your business. The fact is that other products with less quality and good product marketing will dominate the market, and yours are buried under the rubble.
This is not to say that you should neglect quality and pursue marketing. No. The quality of your product is still a vital part of your marketing strategy.
Now, the question you should be asking is, what is product marketing? How do I successfully market my product? What are the product marketing strategies I should apply?
This article is a simple guide to successful product marketing for Nigerian businesses. This guide aims to answer any question on product marketing and its importance to your business.
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
What is Product Marketing?
Product marketing is the process in which a product is brought to the market with the understanding of who the target customer is. It is a link between the product and the target market. It covers everything from how a product is positioned, advertised, and sold.
As a product marketer, you need to understand the buyer persona, market research, competitor analysis, and means of promotion.
Why is Product Marketing Important for Business?
Product marketing is an essential part of your marketing approach. With good product marketing, you don’t have to worry about getting your products to the right people. It ensures that your product meets the needs of its target audience.
Product marketing also guarantees the long-term success of your products. You cannot overemphasize the important role a product marketer plays in business.
What are the Roles of a Product Marketer?
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Know your target audience
Every product has a target audience. As a Nigerian business owner, trying to replicate a product model of a US market will likely flop. Before launching your product, you need to know if it is ideal for the Nigerian market. You don’t want to launch a product, and nobody buy it. This is where a product marketer comes in. They’ll help you study the market to determine what product type is in demand and the target audience for those products.
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Craft a buyer persona
What makes your product marketing successful is targeting a specific group of people with a greater need for your product rather than running a marketing campaign that targets everyone.
A product marketer helps you discover that specific group or groups of people that need the solutions your product solves. They do this by creating a buyer persona. This way, you can centre your campaign on your buyer persona, which translates to higher conversion and ROI.
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Research your competitors
Every product has a competition that the target audience already trusts.
Your product might be better than your competitors. Are you reliable enough for customers to switch to using your products? What new ideas can you bring to the table, and what does your product offer that your competitors don’t? A Product Marketer helps you do this research and determine how to convince your clients, validate competitive advantages, and better position your products.
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Work in hand with your marketing, product, and sales team
Your Product marketing team is the focal point of your product, marketing, and sales team. Hand in hand, these teams work together to launch, execute product releases and market the product. Therefore these teams need to be on the same page for their marketing efforts to be much more effective.
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Appropriately position your product
There’s a reason some brands or products stick to the minds of customers. They recognize the product wherever due to product positioning. A product marketer’s responsibility is to create a consistent tone, image, and product through storytelling that evokes certain emotions in your customers.
As a Product marketer, you need to answer these critical WH questions
- Who was this product made for?
- Why was the product made?
- What problem can the product solve?
- Why should customers use the product?
- What makes the product stand out from that of competitors
Answering these questions will help the product marketer know how to position the product appropriately for the market.
Read Also: How to Become a Product Manager in Nigeria
Product Marketing Strategies
You’ll need to depend on certain product marketing strategies to get the best product positioning, promotion, and sale results. From development to distribution, you need these strategies.
Let’s discuss some that’ll help you improve your product marketing strategies.
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Define your product’s target audience and message
Defining your target audience is the first and most important step in product marketing. Everyone buys something because they want to solve a problem or overcome a particular challenge. If someone buys a supplement for weight loss, they did not buy it for the sake of it. They likely want to lose weight.
By understanding your product’s target audience, their needs, struggles, and pain points, you will know how to highlight how your product solves these difficulties for your customers. One way to begin is by creating a buyer persona.
Your product’s message should reflect how your customer’s struggles would be solved using your product or services. It should tell them what makes the product stand out from others. Set SMART (Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound) goals and keep this message consistent in your content and information distribution.
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Widen your reach
Now you know your target audience and the message you want to convey. The next thing is to figure out how to pass your product message to them. Multiple marketing channels can help you connect, communicate and reach your target audience. They majorly fall under free, paid, digital, and traditional marketing channels.
- Free marketing channels are free to use. They involve time, not money, e.g. social media apps like LinkedIn and Q&A platforms like Quora.
- Paid marketing channels include paid ads, influencer marketing, and commercials.
- Digital marketing channels include Blogs, Social media (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Whatsapp, etc.), Paid Search, Organic Search, and email marketing.
- Traditional marketing channel includes direct mail, word of mouth, broadcast, and advertising with fliers, posters, and billboards.
Other channels are hosting or participating in events, podcasts, affiliate marketing, etc.
Use a channel your target audience uses and where they spend most of their time. If you sell clothes for ladies, your target audience is probably on Instagram.
Sponsor your business on Insight.ng to have a wider reach of your target audience.
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Product pricing
When it comes to Putting a price on your products, it takes more than just setting any figure you want. There are several things to consider. You need to consider what type of product you are selling.
Products that are not easily, commonly obtained or “value-based” products are often purchased by people who want to match a particular lifestyle. For example, people buy iPhones to fit into a certain lifestyle, irrespective of the price. The product’s price is based on their value to the customer rather than what the industry trend or your competitors’ say.
However, suppose you’re selling an easily obtainable product, that is, a product with a crowded market and many competitors. Your price should be based on similar products your competitors sell, financial reports, and industry trends. The price of this type of product serves as a competitive advantage.
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Launching your product
After your marketing plan has been made, it’s time to launch your product. Make it go live. At this stage, all the marketing teams – the product marketer, the sales team, and the marketing team need to play their part to ensure a successful launch.
The timing of your launch is another important factor to consider. It’s risky to schedule your launch around the same time your competitor does. On the other hand, it could help you understand the customer’s response to their product and how you can improve yours. On the other hand, it can affect their response to your product. If the market is already saturated with products like yours, it might be difficult to find your ground in the market.
You now know how to create a product marketing strategy. Now, how can you market your product? Let’s find out.
Read Also: An Insightful Guide on How to Advertise a Product (Digital and Physical)
How to Market a Product?
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Create a product marketing strategy for other teams
The product marketing team only sometimes takes up everything relating to marketing the product. The sales team, content team, social media team, and marketing team have a role to play in the execution of marketing campaigns and content marketing.
For successful product marketing, every member of your product and the non-product team should understand your marketing strategy well. This way, they’ll know how to play their part effectively.
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Take advantage of special offers
You could announce your new product outright and wait for customers to buy immediately. You could also take a different product marketing approach and introduce a special deal offer after announcing your new product.
Contrary to the belief that if the price of a product is low, the quality is also low, price reduction is one strategy that works when marketing your products. There’s a reason why Jumia has flash sales and slashes the price of some of its products on Black Fridays. It’s to take advantage of the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).
Creating the impression that a product is more valuable than the price tag you attach to it and putting that price on for a limited time prompts Nigerians to buy the product because they fear such an opportunity won’t come again. Always accentuate that the price won’t last forever and increase their chances of purchasing the product.
Other ways you could take advantage of limited special offers are
- Buy one get one free offer
- The use of coupons with purchase
- Gift for every referral
- Add on/ exclusive feature for loyal customers
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Create compelling product videos
Visuals! Visuals! Visuals!
On more than one occasion, you’ve bought something you probably wouldn’t have bought in the first place because of how stunning the product video was. Product videos are one of those product ways to give you a way out of your problems visually.
Create a compelling product video that tells your target audience what the product is about, what it looks like, and what problem it solves for them. Your product video could also be a guide that shows your customers how to use the product.
Video marketing is one effective part of your product marketing strategy. Product videos are more likely to be shared on social media than texts and Images; therefore, they should be utilized well for successful product marketing.
You can use many video editing software if you don’t have a professional video editor, such as Inshot, Capcut, Adobe Premier, Invideo, etc. You could also leverage video platforms like Youtube, Tiktok, and Instagram.
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Utilize blog posts
The importance of blog posts to product marketing must be addressed. Writing a blog post on your newly launched product can help you not just get engagement on that product, it can help you attract inbound leads.
Create a blog post with a CTA that leads them to purchase your product. For example, you could write a blog post on “How to Rock Palazzo Trousers in Nigeria” and add a call-to-action to your Palazzo Trouser Collection.
Read Also: Why You Should Employ A Content Marketer For Your Business
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Market your product on social media
Your social media account is great for reaching your target audience, building a loyal following and getting valuable feedback through polls. Marketing your product on social media puts it in front of many eyes and helps you answer your audience’s questions about your product.
Another thing that works well is using product hashtags in your post. Back to our palazzo example, a nice hashtag could be #Palazzorockers.
You could also run a social media contest to attract more customers to your business through giveaways, discounts, and vouchers. This creates excitement and increases buyers for your new product.
Other ways you could market your product include;
- Running Paid ads
- Running an email marketing campaign
- Collaboration with other businesses
- Hosting an event
- Sharing customer reviews
Conclusion
Successful product marketing starts with your audience. As a product marketer, it’s your responsibility to cooperate with other marketing teams to implement these strategies and get the result you want for your next product.
I hope you put this guide into practice so that your business can experience the acceleration in growth you’ve always hoped for.
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About Author
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Esther Onyeije is a freelance content writer who specializes in writing Blog posts, Articles, and social media posts for blogs and websites.
She uses her background in writing to provide solutions to the pain points of your target audience and create clear and accessible content that makes challenging topics easy for any reader.
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