9 Questions to Help Turn Your Product into A Marketing Tool
In my experience providing marketing and communications services for startups and larger organisations, I have found that a majority of product builders/owners do not consider marketing as a process to integrate when they build products. Many products are developed in a silo excluding marketing professionals. Marketing professionals are typically hired to join teams after the product already exists.
“Hey we’ve built this, please get us a million users”. In this article, I will explain how marketing and growth concepts should be included in product ideation and development processes from conception to finish. I’ll do this by listing questions product owners should ask while products are developed. I will also provide examples of products that have taken advantage of these growth channels.
But first, what is a growth engine?
A growth engine is essentially a system, embedded in your product, that allows you to keep growing customers. Francis Birod defines it well:
“An engine of growth is a mechanism embedded in your product and linked to your user behaviours that will unlock exponential growth”
Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup says
“An engine of growth is the mechanism that startups use to achieve sustainable growth. The word sustainable excluding all one-time activities that generate a surge of customers but have no long-term impact, such as a single advertisement or a publicity stunt […].
Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: new customers come from the actions of pasts customers.”
To integrate a growth engine into your product you need to answer these questions:
1. Where are your customers?
Travel sites like Hotels.ng, booking.com and Tripadvisor rely on search engines as one of their primary customer acquisition channels. This is because travellers typically start out their holiday or business journey by researching their destination. Whether they’re looking for tourist sites, great restaurants or just flight tickets, online travel aggregators know they need to be present at the point of the customer’s search.
To see how they translate this idea into their product, study the websites of these sites and look into their URL and content structure. The product is built from the ground up on discovery from Search Engines.
Another service that placed itself in front of its users was Vine. Upon launch, Vine simply integrated its videos with Twitter via Twitter’s API service. This meant videos from Vine were embedded in Tweets and as users shared them, the service grew more popular and eventually got acquired by Twitter. Vine knew its users were on Twitter and took advantage of this fact while building the product.
2. How is your product different?
Last year I spoke to Justin Irabor(former Head of Growth at Hotels.ng and Head of Marketing at Jumia Food). In that interview for Devcenter’s Resource, Justin spoke extensively about remarkable products being a strong driver for growth. Part of a marketer’s job is not just to sell the competitive advantage of a product but to ensure competitive advantage is being baked into the product from inception. You essentially want to develop a product that’s so remarkable, people WILL talk about it. Here’s some of what Justin said:
“It is basic human nature to recommend a product they like, so if you assume; 1) that the product is good 2) that it is just okay. People tend not to recommend a product that is just okay. Products that work as they are intended do not have a wow factor. So including a wow factor into a product and building a product that solves a big problem will get people talking”
Being the first to launch an app or web service for Nigerians(when Nigerians can access global alternatives) is not a sustainable competitive advantage.
3. How long it would take to convince a prospect to be your customer?
Certain businesses take a very long time to turn prospects into customers. Think about how long it’ll take to convince government officials to adopt software you’ve built. You’ll need to get talking with government, convince them they need your product and then prove you can sustain the product while also training staff to use it effectively. It’s important to estimate how long(on average) it’ll take to convert a prospect to your customer.
The length of time it takes to acquire a customer is called a Sales Cycle. The longer your sales cycle, the more money you need to have in the bank to keep running other aspects of your business.
4. What do customers do while using your product?
When individuals took the ALS Ice bucket challenge in 2014 and donated money to the charity, they were encouraged to post a video of the challenge and tag their friends on social media who would, in turn, take part in the challenge. This is a very simple but effective way to grow a product or in this case, charitable donations.
The campaign was designed to be viral from the onset and it’s not surprising that the ALS Association raised $115 million at the end of the challenge.
5. What do customers do after they use your product?
Can you make it cool for customers to announce that they used your product? Word of mouth is one of the most effective marketing mediums. It simply works because people trust their friends and associates more than they trust advertising. You should think about the ‘WOW’ factor that would make your customers immediately want to share your product with others.
You should also encourage people to talk about your product. After people use your product, can you encourage them to follow you on social media or post a picture? Many vendors who have built businesses with services like Instagram and Twitter, take advantage of this channel by encouraging customers to share pictures of their products as soon as they’re purchased.
Here’s a quote from PWC’s Global Consumer Insights Survey 2018:
“These findings suggest that opinions and suggestions on social media sites — posted by friends and strangers alike — have more influence on specific purchase decisions than factors that retailers can control, such as advertising, promotions, and pricing. Recognising the importance of social media, many retailers have sought to use these sites as channels not just for getting their mass marketing messages out to consumers, but also to participate in ongoing conversations that are relevant to the brand. Consumers trust opinions on social media because they regard these as authentic and helpful.”
Mobile games typically reward users with in-app points if they share achievements on social media. Points can then be used to make in-app purchases and upgrades. This is to take advantage of the user’s social media following and generate word of mouth.
Foursquare, a search and discovery app for places, awarded users with mayorship badges when they checked-in at a location more often than another user. It also awarded users with shareable badges when they discovered new places or cover new territory.
6. What benefits can customers gain if they use your products with other people?
After signing up for LinkedIn, a user is asked to import and invite their entire email contact list. Although this is annoying, it remains a brilliant growth tactic from LinkedIn. LinkedIn is only valuable as a network if other people you already know are using it. LinkedIn encourages you to invite people you already interact with via email. Facebook, Twitter and a lot of social networking products take advantage of this. The pyramid scheme MMM is also, only valuable if you get more people to sign up under you.
Ride-hailing companies also take advantage of this sharing tactic. When a new user signs up for Uber, they are given a unique referral code. This referral code earns them more Uber credit when they invite their friends to use Uber. This promo code encourages people to talk to their friends about Uber and get more users to sign up.
Another usage trigger can be designing the product to be used by multiple people. Board games easily come to mind here. Also, digital games like Words with Friends, QuizUp, Clash of Clans and Ruzzle take advantage of this trigger. They are best enjoyed when users play with friends and can brag about their skills.
Money transfer service, Venmo is another product that’s designed to be social by default. There’s no point to using Venmo alone.
Cloud services like Slack, Asana, Dropbox and Google Docs are more valuable when used with others. This creates what is called a ‘viral loop’ for the product. Many cloud services for work are only useful when teams of people are involved.
7. How often do customers need to use your product?
For your company to survive, how often do you need customers to keep purchasing your product? Adventure camera company GoPro ran into a surprise hitch a few years ago when it realised its existing customers didn’t need to buy new GoPro cameras. Turns out its users already had good enough cameras to record and share their adventures. If your product is a for-life product, you’ll need to keep creating new use cases for your product and acquiring new users all the time. Many smartphone manufacturers are also realising this.
8. How can you get customers to keep using your product?
The term for this is retention marketing. You need to think about getting your customers to return for more purchases. If your product is for life, you might have a problem doing this like GoPro, but if your product is perishable, you need to figure out how those customers will make future purchases.
This could be as easy as making your product so useful that the customer can’t live without it or engaging customers via social media and email newsletters. You could also offer discounts to customers on repeat purchases.
For technology products, you can include subtle reminders in your app, send email notifications or solve this problem by building a product around a recurring(and already existing) usage pattern like social media(news and keeping up with friends), payment(money transfer and paying bills) and taxi-hailing apps.
9. How do I grow my customers?
Many small businesses simply fail to grow customers. I placed this last because it is a crucial part of marketing. It’s a question that can be answered by integrating growth engines when you answer the questions above. If you’re selling an enterprise service or product, then you might grow at a slower rate than a consumer product.
Whatever growth speed is fine for you, one thing is clear. You should always think of growing your customer base.
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Recommended Reading:
Why Founders Fail to Market Their Product — David Bailey
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