NOTE: The following is a guest post by Lior Levin. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

Every business and individual with personal ambition today can now create an E-book or other digital product and give it away for free with the hope that customers will avail themselves of another service that will convert into a profit.

It’s an old business model that Chris Anderson explains in his book Free: The future of a radical price and is notably embodied by razor companies who give away the body of the razor and sell razor blades for profit.

Should businesses and individuals use “free” as a marketing strategy for their digital or physical products? Hard and fast rules may be hard to come by, but here are a few disadvantages and advantages to consider if you’re considering a “free” campaign.

The Minuses of Free as a Marketing Strategy

Decreasing the Perceived Value of a Product
Effective free promotions have to communicate the value of a product and convince customers that they are getting a great bargain that they’d be a fool to pass up. In fact, they the offers have to be significant enough that the buyers will tell their friends about it. Ironically, you still need to “sell” a free campaign to customers so they realize the value of your offer.

Limited Sales Potential without an Effective Campaign
A free giveaway in and of itself will not be effective. It has to lead to sales conversions at a certain point. If a giveaway fails to attract new customers and sales, then it is a significant loss in time if not materials for a business. Malcolm Gladwell’s critique of Chris Anderson’s book Free, points out the uncomfortable truth that free as a promotional strategy can have mixed, if not tragic results.

Can a Free Product Stick?
One of the great advantages of asking customers to pay for a product is they have to engage with it and decide what they really think of it. The idea of investing money into anything makes us more critical and ultimately more appreciative if it meets our needs and expectations.

The article Better Than Free states that the Internet is fundamentally a copy machine, but there are many things such as trust, loyalty, personalization or accessibility that can’t be easily copied, and this is where customer value can be created.

Take for example the strategy of Apple. Their loyal customers pay top dollar for their computers because they believe they are purchasing the best product on the market. Free may be a solid marketing hook, but marketers will need to think about how well their products will stick with new customers.

The Pluses of Free as a Marketing Strategy

A Wide Reach
Anyone who has seen the way a free product promotion spreads through Facebook or how a brilliantly counter-intuitive blog post is retweeted across Twitter knows that a free item or piece of information can spread widely with incredible speed.

Serve Your Tribe
Effectively using free as a marketing tool has everything to do with serving your tribe of colleagues and customers. By tapping into a network that already values your work and content, to say nothing of trusting you, you can effectively reach a wider segment of customers.

Author and speaker Michael Hyatt suggests that free could be used as a way to serve your network without shouting at them like old marketing techniques. In fact, Hyatt asserts that marketing as we knew it is dead. He writes:

Tribe-building is the new marketing.

• Marketing is no longer about shouting in a crowded marketplace. It is about participating in a dialogue with fellow travelers.
• Marketing is no longer about generating transactions. It is about building relationships
• Marketing is no longer about exploiting a market for your own benefit. It is about serving those who share your passion—for your mutual benefit.

Reach New Audiences
Giveaways and free promotions maximize your visibility before a large segment of the market. In fact, that’s what they do best. This is especially helpful if you’re launching a new business or product that could wallow in obscurity without boost of publicity.

Expand Your Influence and Levels of Engagement
By giving away products or services for free, you can expand the reach of your business to your customers. Author Michael Hyatt has expanded his reach as a speaker by using free promotions on his blog, especially promotions that have connected him with leading experts in his field.

Free promotions can be as simple as an E-book download and as complicated as a product giveaway. Companies have given away cars to bloggers, publishers rely on book giveaways for reviews, and companies are constantly experimenting with free shipping and other perks for their customers. Free as a strategy has been around for quite some time and will continue to evolve.

If anything has been proven for certain, it’s that marketing is costly. In the past, marketing required a hefty cheque to an advertising agency. Today, network marketing on social media consumes time and resources. While a free campaign doesn’t cost anything for a customer, a business must weigh the costs and benefits before launching it.

Tweet this: The Pluses and Minuses of Using FREE as a Marketing Strategy http://wp.me/pXBON-37B #marketing #freemium #prodmgmt

—–

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing advisor for a neon sign store that offers commercial neon and LED signs such as a neon pie sign; and who also works for a company that offers a psd to xhtml service.

Related posts:

1. Check out LiteMind for a free eBook
2. Guest Post: Google Pluses and Minuses – What Works, What’s Missing & What’s to Come with Google+
3. Guest Post: 8 Important Points about Marketing Strategy
4. Guest Post – Remember, Product Marketing Comes First

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Veronica Figgarella. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

In a recent post entitled Open Question: Product Management Challenges at a Startup, Saeed asked for community input to three questions posed by a startup founder. Looking to scale his company, the founder asked for input on the following three questions.

1. What metrics should be instrumented into the product to see if implemented features are effective in solving customer/user problems?
2. What are the right collateral pieces for the sales people? What is/are the right pricing models?
3. How to have marketing work with Product Management to create compelling stories to identify and target new customer segments?

I want to address question #1 and share a few thoughts about developing the right metrics for measuring product success. I hope to address the topic in a broader sense, and not limit my answer to the B2B software industry.

Measurement is necessary to monitor progress in all areas of the business. We measure sales to track progress towards quota; measure bug counts and bugs fixed as a quality indicator. Product Management needs measurements to identify value creation and product improvement. And especially in a startup company, Product Managers are most worried about measuring how much cash flow their product generates thus working hard to solve customers’ problems.

Measure Cashflow

If you want to learn how your products are helping your customers solve their problems, your first metric should be how much cash flow your product is generating? If your product is not producing the expected earnings it is most likely not generating value for the customer either.

Proper metrics need to be:

• precise and sensitive to change,
• reliable,
• relevant
• and cost/effective to implement.

The amount of cash flow your product generates depends on multiple factors (i.e. channel supply, vendor supply, sales effectiveness, etc) which can be tracked through market performance metrics. Although metrics vary from one industry to the other, market performance needs to be linked to cash flow especially for a startup where initial revenue is vital for company survival.

Some of the most relevant market performance metrics are:

• Sales effectiveness (acquisition):
  • # of trials vs. purchase,
  • # of referrals vs. actual adoption
  • Wallet share: How much of the customer spend is in my product?
  • Price Premium: Are my customers willing to pay a premium for my product?

As money comes in, you can start thinking about your second biggest worry:

How do you generate future cash flow?

Your metrics need to be linked to your strategy, mission and vision statements so you can monitor how your products contribute to your corporate strategy. They will also help you deliver continuous value to both customers and shareholders.

Some helpful long-term value delivery metrics are:

• Return on product and marketing investment: a simple way of calculating it is (return – investment)/(return), the tricky part is defining what return means for your product. Return can be total revenue or, gross profit or net profit.
• Customer satisfaction: it is a measure of the value your product gives to customers, so define satisfaction in a way that is simple yet relevant to them.
• Market share in targeted segments and
• Loyalty (are my customers willing to buy from me again?) Satisfied customers are more likely to repeat a purchase therefore loyalty impacts long term business profitability. Identifying which components of your product/services drive loyalty and monitoring them, is key in generating future cash flows.

Several academic studies show that future cash flow is related to customer satisfaction. This is because a satisfied customer is more likely to repeat a purchase and a loyal customer is cheaper to maintain than acquiring a new one. Let’s dive a litter deeper into measuring Customer Satisfaction.  After all, if your products are solving customer problems, it is very likely they are satisfied customers.

So… How to measure customer satisfaction?

There is no right or wrong metric to measure customer satisfaction, but the following considerations are pretty much what many experts and best practice reports agree on:

1. Identify what service/product dimensions are relevant to your customers

For example, If you are in B2B arena and each sale is different, then you need to be able to identify a common driver for purchase among your customers: i.e. how fast your RFI was answered, or the inclusion of a clause that allows discounts when the product fails, or if a specific option is included with no additional charge. It works pretty much the same for B2C; you still have to investigate what does your customer value from your product/service? Identifying these relevant dimensions will help you define the important metrics to monitor.

According to Leonard Berry in his book Competing Through Quality, there are 5 areas customers’ weigh as important in order to achieve satisfaction (and this is mostly for services):

• Reliability
• Responsiveness
• Assurance (related to how the company and its employees convey trust and confidence),
• Empathy (to customers’ problems)
• Tangibles elements of the service are primordial in providing satisfaction because they are the evidence of the service, for example: appearance of physical facilities, of service personnel, tools or equipment used, etc.

Customers will be satisfied if they believe the received what they expected in these areas.

2. Encourage complaints to understand dissatisfaction

Sometimes customers are not clear about what satisfies them before they try a product, but when they return it or call to complain they are pretty clear about what’s not working for them. In Berry’s book, he explains some of the gaps where managers need to look to find sources of dissatisfaction:

• Misunderstanding of customer requirements
• Poor specification of standards;
  • management may not have instructed staff properly on how to implement desired standards
• Capability gaps
  • staff might not be properly trained
• Creating over-expectations
  • advertising and sales people can promise too much leading customers to have inflated expectations

The importance of these dimensions needs to be clear especially to sales representatives, front line staff and marketing people as they promote your products/services and interact directly with the customer.

3. Not all communication channels are equal

Be careful about the channels you use to encourage complaints and be true about embracing customer dissatisfaction. According to a recent study by Maritz Research most customers expect the company to read their Twitter complaints but only a third received a response. Jay Baer comments on this topic on his blog Convince and Convert.

Social media doesn’t create negativity, it puts a magnifying glass to it.

So companies need to be aware of this and respond. Secondly he points out the following:

…social media doesn’t close at 5pm, and in fact many customers use social media during the night and on weekends, when it may be inconvenient for you to monitor and reply. But your corporate convenience is not the prism through which you should be gazing upon social business.

So in short, not only is responding to these public complaints important, but the responses should be done in a timeframe that is convenient for the customer.

social media will put a magnifying glass on dissatisfaction and you will need to expand your “complaining hours” after 5 pm.

4. Customer satisfaction needs to be linked to financial reports to be taken seriously

Unfortunately, financial reports and product line incomes often dominate the thinking of a business that lacks of customer orientation.  However market-based assets such as: size of customer base, quality of supplier relationships and customer satisfaction needs to be tracked and linked to earnings in order to make it everybody’s business (finance, customer support, engineering, etc).

5. Keep customer feedback mechanisms simple

When collecting information from customers, make the questions simple to answer. This has additional benefits as short surveys tend to reduce user fatigue and return more reliable information.

Here is an example of a good satisfaction survey Amazon sent me recently. I was really happy with how they handled my problem; especially because it was my fault that the item I bought had not arrived on time (I entered a wrong address ooops!)

_____________________________________________________________________
Thank you for your recent inquiry. Did I solve your problem?
If yes, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A1CSAT0DV4C6JL&k=hy
If no, please click here:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/survey?p=A1CSAT0DV4C6JL&k=hn

When I pressed the YES link I was directed to here:

It was really simple, all I had to do was rate each questions with stars, it did not take a minute and the answer was very true to my feelings.

________________________________________________________________________

If you want to read more about the links between market orientation, customer satisfaction and profitability I recommend reading: Chapter 1 (it’s a free pdf) from the book Market-Based Management byRobert J Best.

6. Understand how to manage your data.

If data collected is not managed properly and acted upon timely, measuring customer satisfaction will be a wasted effort. This links back to defining the quality of what is being measured and stabilising a relevant score card to assure company’s commitment to customer satisfaction.

So next time you decide to measure satisfaction, think backward and establish what data will help you make decisions so you can create the questions that will accurately yield the information needed.

References

Why Customer Satisfaction Matters – article on cvent.com

Marketing Management by Gregory Whitwell

Tweet this: A value-based approach to Customer Satisfaction and Product Metrics http://wp.me/pXBON-35B #prodmgmt

Related posts:

1. (How) do you measure customer satisfaction?
2. Go-to-Market and Organizational Metrics for Product Success
3. Product Management Metrics (part 2a)
4. A Model and Metrics for Tracking Product Success

Note: This is  a guest post by Mike Smart. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

During a recent conversation with a VP of product management — let’s call him Kelly — he confided that his team was struggling with “the whole Go-to-Market (GTM) area.”

The company doesn’t have a dedicated product marketing resource; the workload is shared between product management, marketing communication and sales. The CEO has refused to authorize additional headcount in the short term.

Everyone hates this process! There are too many competing launch events and activities. The dilemma is that no one really owns the go-t0-market, yet everyone is involved.

By default Kelly owns the problem and needs to find a solution.

Here is an approach I shared with him on how to improve this situation while dealing with headcount constraints. It is straightforward and I have seen companies get meaningful benefit in a matter of weeks.

Who Owns GTM?

The answer to this question will vary from company to company, but if a product launch doesn’t go well or the Go-to-Market has problems, most companies will look to Product Management or Product Marketing to solve it.

If there are too many people proclaiming ownership or too many checkpoints, go through a roles and responsibility exercise. I find it is well worth the time required, because it flushes out all the spectators who might be exerting influence over the product launch or GTM.

Another benefit is the roles responsibility exercise will separate “chickens” from “pigs”.

In a perfect world, this area is owned my Product Marketing with support and contribution from Product Management and marketing communications. A large company might be closer to this ideal state than a small company. My experience is that both small and large companies struggle with the hand off between functions. There is always a need to look at the specific ownership of deliverables regardless of company size.

A classic RASIC diagram can be a great tool to use for this exercise. Unless your company is unique this exercise will highlight areas of duplication, gaps and potential confusion.

Share the results of this exercise with members of your senior team. Use it as a way to illustrate disconnects in the whole GTM process. Show a little initiative and highlight areas where adjustments and changes may improve the outcome. Who knows; they might become receptive to dedicated resources.

Not All GTM’s Are Equal

All of your products are not equal. Therefore, the scope of each GTM or launch project should fit the product. This needs to be set up in advance, preferably during the annual business planning effort.

Take a look at the product portfolio. Using an objective criteria assess the level of investment and effort that is appropriate for each product in the portfolio. This is a great use of the Boston Consulting Grid (BCG) or the GE strategy matrix.

Combine input from key stakeholders in the organization that helps separate products that deserve more GTM investment from those that get less.

The questions you should be able to answer are:

• What is the market potential for this new add-on or this completely new product?
• What is the near-term sales potential for this add-on or a new product?

These answers must be quantitative and should be plotted on a matrix.

Product management is the final authority on identifying market potential. The sales team is the final authority on identifying sales opportunity.

Classify Investment and Resources (Example)

Go-to-Market Requirements

No product manager would begin a new product concept without user stories, problem statements or requirements. The same is true with the go-to-market for a new product or a major add-on. The best practice in this area is to set several objective measurements for the go-to-market. The obvious ones are demand generation and web metrics. I would encourage the GTM team agree on one or two stretch goals that have value to one of the strategic business initiatives.

For our VP I suggested his GTM team focus on a sales enablement objective. This was in direct response to one of the criticism from the VP of Sales.

Interlock the sales process

The biggest benefit to mapping the GTM to your company’s sales methodology is to predefine the deliverables and establish their value to sales organization. This is a great way to begin to weed out unnecessary steps, tasks and work products that may not be useful.

If your company has a formal sales methodology this will be straightforward. If not, you will need to have a dialogue with sales or channel management to define the most valuable tools and where they fit in the sales sequence. This activity alone will have a positive effect on your relationship with sales.
The tie off with your company’s sales methodology and actual campaigns will also make it easier to quantify the results of the GTM project and track to the ultimate business results.

The following process diagram illustrates how GTM content and tools should feed and support the sales tools.

(click image to enlarge)

Begin with the End in Mind

GTM activities are expensive; they consume a lot of time and precious resources. This is the primary reason for developing metrics to continuously monitor and manage the effectiveness and efficiency of the overall GTM. As I mentioned earlier the obvious measurements are impact on lead generation, web metrics and sales funnel impact.

I urge teams to avoid the trap of pegging the ultimate success of a launch or GTM on the number of leads and percentage increase in sales funnel; at least initially. In the beginning better measurements would be process effectiveness, cycle time and quality of execution. As the team gains experience
business outcomes and hard metrics must become a component of the evaluation criteria.

Alignment at the top

Revamping the go-to-market disconnect in a company is an execution play. Which means that committed managers and team leaders can reduce the number of disconnects and improve overall effectiveness without permission.

Buy-in among the executive team will lead to the most dramatic change in your company’s GTM impact. With executive sponsorship the GTM process can become a strategic asset. It has the potential to provide a measurable return on investment just like other strategic initiatives such as branding, innovation and quality.

—

Mike Smart is Principal Consultant at Egress Solutions, a technology product management and marketing consulting firm that specializes in solving the critical product and market problems companies face.

Tweet this: How to Structure an Effective Go-to-Market Process by @Mike_Smart http://wp.me/pXBON-30p #prodmktg #prodmgmt #productlaunch

Related posts:

1. Screw the Sales Process. Study the Buying Process
2. Go-to-Market and Organizational Metrics for Product Success
3. Guest Post: Know thy Customer – How to Segment your Market
4. On measuring product/market fit

by Saeed Khan

I’m going to try something a bit different this time. Here’s your chance to help a startup founder with some common startup challenges.

Max Cameron is a cofounder of Big Bang Technology, the makers of Woople, a hosted eLearning platform for enterprises.

Max’s company has grown from 2 founders to 10 people and while they’ve hired a full-time Product Manager there are several hurdles they still need to overcome.

Max has 3 current challenges that he’s facing and I’d like to enlist all of you to collectively help Max address them, buy watching the video of Max talking about his company, and then leaving comments at the bottom of the blog post.

If you are shy but still want to give some advice, you can use the Contact Us form. I’ll keep your identity secret but share your advice with Max.

While the challenges are listed below, I strongly urge you to watch the YouTube video of Max — it’s only 6 minutes in length — to get all the details before answering. You can click the image below to launch the video. Unfortunately it cannot be embedded directly in this page.

click image to launch video

The 3 challenges Max needs advice on are:

1. Metrics in the software. What metrics should be instrumented into the product to see if implemented features are effective in solving customer/user problems.
2. Optimizing the onboarding process for new clients. What are the right collateral pieces for the sales people? What is/are the right pricing models? How to best get in front of the business people — i.e. the buyers? How to work with technical/IT teams to perform integrations?
3. How to take the collateral that is built and have Marketing work with Product Management to create compelling stories to identify and target new customer segments.

So there it is. What advice do you have for Max and his company?

Saeed

Tweet this: Open Question: Product Management Challenges at a Startup http://wp.me/pXBON-30F #prodmgmt #startup #marketing

Related posts:

1. Open Question: How did you get your first Product Management or Product Marketing position?
2. Open Question: Why doesn’t Engineering report to Product Management?
3. Open Question: Your current biggest challenge in Product Management/Marketing?
4. Open Question: How can Product Managers and Product Marketers work better together?

I posted this originally back in 2009. I used to watch the show Pitchmen on television. Unfortunately one of the two main characters — infomercial star extraordinaire Billy Mays — passed away suddenly that year. The show lasted one more season but I don’t think it’s on TV any more. Regardless, it was an interesting show while it lasted and after watching a number of episodes there were clearly some lessons for product success that we can all learn (or remember ).

—–

You know you’re a Products Geek, when you find a show like Pitchmen appealing.

Pitchmen, on the Discovery Channel, is a behind the scenes docudrama about infomerical marketers and how they identify products to promote, develop the pitch and then take the products to market.

The show stars the late Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan, two very successful and well known television direct marketers.

While it’s very easy to brush these guys off as selling gimmicky items to uninformed consumers, there are lessons to be learned from watching these guys operate.

And that’s what I like about the show. It presents some of the discipline and process they follow for the products they market and sell. Here’s a list of some of the behind the scenes work they do.

1. They look for problems that a lot of people have.

• Stain or smell remover: Yes
• An acoustic shark repellent: No

2. They test out the products and validate they actually live up to their claims.

• Can the odor remover get rid of foul smells from hockey equipment?
• Can a vertical grill actually cook as well as a traditional horizontal grill?

3. They listen to others carefully, getting feedback from potential users of the product.

• For a self-rotating pool side lounge chair, aimed at removing the need to manually rotate a chair to get optimal exposure of the sun, they enlisted some swimsuit models to test them out. After the trial, they not only asked what they thought of the product, but asked how could the chair be improved. One of the testers suggested cup holders. Not a bad suggestion.

4. The benefits of the product have to be clearly demonstrable with a number of use cases.

• For a food grater, they grate garlic, chocolate, cheese, citrus zest and other foods. The objective is to present a broad number of real use cases to show utility and value. This is clearly an area where technology companies need to improve when thinking about how they demo their own products.

5. They always try to find at least one “Wow!” aspect for each product.

• For a shoe insert product that claims to eliminate impact from running or other sports, they put their hand under a pad made of the same material as the insert, and then hit the pad with a hammer. Then they took their hand out and wiggled all their fingers to show they were undamaged. Can you say “Wow!”?

6. They craft the messaging and the pitch, being very particular to the words they choose.

• Whether via rhymes or alliterations or carefully crafted wording, the right word at the right time can make a big difference in how a product is perceived. For example, with a product for grating food, the lines “grate cheese with ease” and “for zest it’s the best” are used. Don’t think these stick in people’s memories? Remember that line from the OJ Simpson trial? “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must…”

7. They ensure price points that will be appealing for their audience.

• With a vertical grill product (think of a big single slice toaster that grills burgers, steaks etc. vertically) they went to one of their partner companies who tried to source a manufacturing partner that could build product cost-effectively enough that they could sell it for $50. The partner couldn’t bring the price point low enough and so they said “No” to the product, even though it met all their other criteria.

8. They are data driven business people.

• While they may come across as shady marketers, they are clearly rather sophisticated (and successful) in what they do. They test out their pitches in local markets, measure the results, adjust their pitch, and test again. When they go national, they are very confident that they have something with mass appeal that people will buy.
• This is probably the most important lesson that Product Managers should remember. They definitely follow the “Nail it, then scale it” mantra.

Overall, I find Pitchmen to be a bit of a guilty pleasure. I’ve got it scheduled for recording on my PVR. Even so, it is educational and every episode reminds me of basic marketing principles that have broad applicability and value.

Saeed

Tweet this: Worth Repeating – 8 Lessons we can learn from Infomercials http://wp.me/pXBON-30i #prodmgmt #marketing #launch #innovation

Related posts:

1. 8 lessons we can learn from Infomercials
2. Worth Repeating: Innovation Lessons from Intuit’s Scott Cook
3. Worth Repeating: Devil’s Dictionary for High Tech
4. Worth Repeating: Do Product Managers need Domain Knowledge?

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Amy Swanson. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

Creating Brand Advocates Without a Special Formula

As someone who (at times) falls into the narcissistic Facebook user category, I regularly believe that my friends care about the brand of laundry detergent I use and the kind of coffee brand I love. I can’t help it; when I find a new product that I really love, I tell others about it. I blame part of this on my marketing degree—since I know that every brand impression helps grow a company—and on the fact that I do genuinely want to help others.

Highly-engaged consumers help your brand become adopted and advocated by others, and they will ultimately create more recognition for your brand and product. How you get them on your brand’s side, though, is the question.

What’s the Secret?
Adoption of your product can be tricky, but don’t make it any more complicated than what it is. People will only want to adopt your products if they exceed expectations, so you should aim to please. Your goal is to get to the point where consumers can’t even imagine not using your product every day!

To get there, remember the following:

• You need to properly identify the needs of your target market. What Consumer A wants may not be as important to Consumer B.
• Internal motivations (personal needs, aspirations, and ideal self) as well as external motivations (need for acceptance among peers) are major factors in whether or not a product is used. Be sure to address both motivators accordingly for the highest level of success.
• When your mom said “life won’t always be like high school,” she wasn’t being completely truthful. Popular and trusted endorsements can greatly influence adoption, since all that really matters to consumers is what the ‘cool kids’ think. Figuring out who exactly those cool kids are is different for each market, though.
• When a product improves the user’s life at every stage of interaction, emotional bonds are built and loyalty and a strong brand relationship are strengthened. Once those bonds are established, your brand will be easily adopted into your customers’ everyday routines.

Advocate, Don’t Annoy
When you hear the word ‘advocate,’ there’s probably an outdated image of a protester from 1960 burned into your mind. Brand advocates don’t quite fit that stereotype, however; an advocate of your company wants to share the discovery of a product or brand that improved their life and can help others do the same.

Just like the product adoption process, you need to completely shatter their expectations (not just meet or slightly surpass them) in order to gain an advocate. If it’s necessary, you’ll want to update your image before taking on such a task. To increase your brand advocates, understand that consumers want to feel understood, appreciated, and rewarded for their passion of sharing your brand with others.

Have you ever experienced that feeling of knowing something that nobody else around you seems to understand? That’s exactly what consumers love feeling, too! If you’re ready to get some advocates on your side, here are some tips to remember:

• Make them feel knowledgeable about your product by providing as much information as you can about it on your website. Give them all the facts and stats so that all potential questions can be accurately answered.
• Keep up on your Twitter account and Facebook account. Engage with your followers and fans on a regular—not on an excessive—basis. Try not to exceed two posts a day on your Facebook account, but more frequent posts on your Twitter will keep people checking back to see what you’ve posted.
• Make fans feel heroic for passing on your brand’s attributes and benefits to their friends and family. Sincerely thank them if they post on your Facebook wall or if they send a Tweet telling you they’ve introduced new people to your brand. Also, offering them a coupon or a discount can go further than you think!

Ask, Don’t Just Assume
Whether you consider yourself a narcissistic Facebook user or not, chances are you’re at least friends with a few of them. Embrace those advocates and find out why they’re adopting your product and how you can further that interaction by having them share with their friends. You may even find that they love your product for some other use you had never considered before, or you could even market to another group you didn’t initially think to target. You’ll find that the formula for success isn’t so secret, just maybe one you hadn’t thought of before!

——

Amy Swanson is a part of the marketing department at Quality Logo Products and regularly contributes to their promotional products blog. She is a self-professed newspaper and business nerd.

Tweet this: Guest Post: Creating Brand Advocates Without a Special Formula http://wp.me/pXBON-2Xz #prodmgmt #socmedia #innovation

Related posts:

1. Guest Post: 9 Ways NOT to Present Your Company or Product Via Social Media
2. Guest Post: 8 Important Points about Marketing Strategy
3. Guest Post: Know thy Customer – How to Segment your Market
4. Guest Post: Your Customer is Only Human – 7 Emotional Pricing Tactics

By Jennifer Doctor

In several online forums/blogs recently, there has been a lot of talk and discussion about “how often do I update this?” “Change that?” “Do this?”

There was a specific thread that was related to a question about a product roadmap, but I’ve also seen the same question about web content, marketing communication pieces, customer visits and other outward facing activities. Our product professional peers are looking for some schedule so they can plug the activity into their calendar and update x, y or z regularly.

But, a calendar appointment is not what is needed to address the challenge.

The only way you know how often product management and marketing artifacts should be updated, and how to share the information, is to know both your organizational culture and your market. You need to understand the beat and rhythm of your business.

Let me try and explain. Beat is part of rhythm. When you clap to music or tap your foot on the floor, you are following the beat. The beat is steady.  Rhythm is the pattern of the notes, which make up the melody. Rhythm is made up of patterns of sounds (notes) and silences (rests); it can vary throughout a melody.

To effectively develop and present a roadmap, it needs to be collaborative. But, how often do you update? How often do you share? The answer lies in the beat of your business.

So, you ask, how do I actually determine the beat of the business?

Try looking at some of these questions:

• When does your organization do strategic planning?
• When are goals developed and shared?
• Who looks at the product goals to ensure that they are aligned to the new business goals? When?
• Are goals periodically updated? When?
• Are there any patterns emerging?

This will be different in every organization and sometimes even by the different markets served by the products and business. By understanding when planning happens and when goals are set, you can then confidently check your existing roadmap, and other plans, against the updated information and goals.

Know that different stakeholders have different needs and views of the business. Sales might want the road map updated frequently and only really care about next quarter. Investors might be more interested in a 5 year view. Marketing may need to change their schedule for planned campaigns quarterly. It’s about knowing the beat of the stakeholder within the rhythm of
the business.

In the end, the key to successfully updating the information, in a way that meets the needs of each stakeholder, is to communicate the right what to right whom, at the right time to enable their beat so it works in the greater rhythm. Successfully done, this will have everyone playing the same tune.

(Please share this on Twitter, LinkedIn & even Google+: “Get Some Rhythm” by@jidoctor:  http://wp.me/pXBON-2WJ #prodmktg #prodmgmt #roadmap #process #communication”)

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Tweet this: 9 Ways NOT to Present Your Company or Product via Social Media http://wp.me/pXBON-2UW #socmedia #marketing #prodmktg #prodmgmt

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Natalie Hunter. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

There are nearly 150 million active Facebook users in the United States, and about 70 percent log in at least once a day. Social media are powerful business tools that can be extremely effective when used correctly. Social media use accounts for nearly 25 percent of all time spent online. 64 percent of Facebook users have “liked” a particular brand they encountered through the website.

It’s estimated that by 2012, half of the world’s population will use some form of social media. It is easy to see why social media are important in promoting a product, business, or even online college. However, using social media the wrong ways can deal a severe blow to a company’s image.

1. Ignore Feedback

Not all feedback is going to be positive or even valid, but choosing to ignore all feedback is counterproductive and gives the impression that a business is out of touch or simply doesn’t care about its customers. Responses can be simple messages just thanking people for their feedback or acknowledging an issue. Some recognition of input is necessary.

2. Ignore Statistics

It’s not enough to just create an online presence. Businesses should track incoming traffic from links and social networks. Keep track of the number of people in social media groups and fan pages. Businesses should consider how many people are following them on Twitter and Facebook to be vital marketing data.

3. Send Mixed Messages

A business should have the same basic identify online and offline. This doesn’t mean there can’t be special perks offered to online customers, but keep the overall message the same. In other words, if a business is serious, responsible, and reliable offline, don’t try to present is as fun, hip, and spontaneous online. A confusing or mixed message is an instant turnoff. Keep it consistent.

4. Have Multiple Social Personalities

This is related to #3 but different. Creating one identify for Facebook and another for Twitter and yet another for LinkedIn leads to confusion. Maintain the same basic profile information across the board. This helps create and reinforce brand identify. The same goes for company logos and images. These should follow a similar theme used in all business-related postings. While some products may sell better with different approaches, or some messages better on some networks vs. others, the corporate personality should remain consistent.

5. Try to Go It Alone

Groups and communities are core when engaging in social media.  An individual web page is great for personal use, but the goal of a business is to be a part of a group. Creating a group or fan page is an excellent way to engage existing customers and bring in new ones. Consider having some real employees be a part of the mix to add credibility.

6. Always Make Assumptions

Sometimes reality is different from perception. Before jumping into the world of social media, businesses should take time to see what others are saying about their brands. Some adjustments may be necessary to create a consistent message.

7. Sharing Everything You Can

While it is important to engage customers and communicate, not everything needs to be shared. Social media use for business is about return on engagement. It’s important to share information and address concerns, but some issues (such as lawsuits) are best left off the table.

8. Engage in Online Battles

It’s not wise to go after competitors by engaging in personal attacks through social media. Leave  tackling the competition directly to advertisers.

9. Jump Into Every Service

It’s tempting to just create a profile on every social media service, but doing so has a few drawbacks. First, it’s not realistic to keep up with everything on every separate service, especially for businesses. A better approach is to make a list of what social networks work best for a particular business. More time can be better devoted to each of these social websites rather than trying to keep up with everything everywhere. Social websites that are rarely updated quickly loose customer interest, and even some that start out hot quickly become flops.

Like any other form of communication, some approaches work and some don’t work when it comes to social media. Carefully selected strategies and a coherent, unified message and online persona are the way to make social media effective business assets.

–

Natalie Hunter grew up wanting to be a teacher, and is addicted to learning and research. As a result, she is grateful for the invention of the Internet because it allows her to spend some time outside, rather than just poring through books in a library. She is fascinated by the different methodologies for education at large today, and particularly by the advent of online education.

Tweet this: 9 Ways NOT to Present Your Company or Product via Social Media http://wp.me/pXBON-2UW #socmedia #marketing #prodmktg #prodmgmt

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Tweet this: Guest Post: 5 Innovation Lessons from Steve Jobs http://wp.me/pXBON-2UC #prodmgmt #innovation

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Adam Costa. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

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Steve Jobs has been at the forefront of innovation for well over 30 years. But how did he build one of the most successful companies in history starting with only about $1,000 and an idea?

Put simply: innovation.

I’ve outlined five key lessons – with quotes from the man himself – that product managers can use to cultivate inspiration in their development.

The first step is to…

Always Look For Connections

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were stuck. They had an idea for a personal computer, but didn’t have a brand people could relate to. It was a new idea, and new ideas are often difficult for people to understand.

Jobs wanted a simple name that was in stark contrast to the corporate standard of the time, IBM. Jobs had previously worked in an apple orchard and – in a later discussion with Wozniak – Jobs pulled from the experience and named the company Apple. The process of coming up with the Apple logo is also worth reading.

The combination of new product and familiar name was a huge success. It’s a prime example of meshing together two unrelated concepts to create something unique and memorable.

Jobs himself has said “Creativity is just connecting things.”

He also cited LSD as “one of the two or three most important things I’ve done in life” because it helped him see things differently.

Of course, you don’t need LSD to see connections. But you must train yourself to see them.

Or better still, you can leverage your employees knowledge and experiences. Lee-Clark Sellers, Executive Programs Director for NC State University, says companies need to encourage employees to explore new, seemingly unrelated activities.

As she mentions in this post, employers must “provide new experiences for your teams that will motivate them to continue to look beyond their current boundaries for new and profitable ideas.”

To encourage this, host a lunch-and-learn series where different disciplines are represented. For example, have your head of marketing speak to your engineers, or an accountant speak to your sales people. By exposing employees to different frameworks, you greatly increase the chance of breakthrough innovations.

The next lesson from Jobs is to…

Treat Failure For What It Is…

A lesson. Coming from a man who has lost more money than most companies make in a lifetime, Jobs’ take on failure remains optimistic. As he once famously said:

“I’m the only person I know that’s lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year…. It’s very character-building.”

Instead of lamenting setbacks (and losing a quarter of a billion dollars is a setback by any standard), Jobs learned from his mistakes. They must have paid off. Jobs quickly regained his losses and, after Disney bought Pixar, became the largest individual shareholder in Disney.

Failure – according to Jobs – is a way to build character. To learn what doesn’t work. Product managers often face issues with product development; embracing failure will help you improve your end design, make you a better manager and open your mind to new, previously unexplored possibilities.

Of course, the necessary ingredient to weather any storm is…

Be Passionate About What You Do

Steve Jobs has said:

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.”

With product management, your heart’s got to be either in the product and/or the process. If you don’t have passion, you’ll never do great work.

The truth is: passion shows. Plus, it helps you to…

Set High Standards… And Meet Them

Everyone has their own standards. Some are higher than others. This explains why many products never fully take off: either issues with research and development, product testing, price points or faulty relationships with suppliers can all lead to failure.

The solution to this, argues Jobs is to “be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

There are many ways to create a culture of greatness. For example, you could print a large poster like this and ask your employees to sign it. Or better still, ask them what they are “the best at” and incorporate those skills into their everyday routine.

This can work wonders. By branding yourself (or your company culture) as the best, your employees and business partners will act accordingly.

Customers on the other hand, may not. Which leads us to Jobs’ final lesson:

Don’t Create Products for People

This may seem contradictory at first. Isn’t the whole purpose of creating a product to serve a need?

As an end result… yes. But it’s far easier to show someone a finished product, rather than ask their opinion along the way. Or as Jobs points out…

“It’s hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show them.”

If you truly want innovation, you need to create things people aren’t aware of yet. You need to go beyond not just what they know, but what they think is possible.

Adam

—

Adam Costa is a business consultant who helps companies develop marketing materials, including sell sheets and product brochures. He can be reached via his website or on Twitter @ mradamcosta

Tweet this: Guest Post: 5 Innovation Lessons from Steve Jobs http://wp.me/pXBON-2UC #prodmgmt #innovation

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Tweet this: Know thy customer – How to segment your market http://wp.me/pXBON-2TF #prodmgmt #prodmktg

NOTE: The following is a guest post by Veronica Figgarella. If you want to submit your own guest post, click here for more information.

Market segmentation is a fundamental activity when analyzing potential targets for a product.  Proper segmentation ensures that a product roadmap and its respective marketing efforts are focused on a specific group, aligning customers’ needs and marketplace offerings.

But segmenting a market usually poses a challenge for Marketers and Product Managers alike since collecting the relevant data and understanding the critical segmentation variables are pivotal to gaining reliable insight to identify the ‘market opportunity’.  Jumping into quantitative segmentation can be overwhelming especially for products of mass consumption where millions of units are sold through multiple channels and in different consumption occasions (e.g. how do we segment the market of Diet Cola drinkers?). Thus, selecting relevant variables and proper segmentation methods are the first steps to defining a strategic segmentation that can drive refined quantitative research.

Deductive Logic Segmentation

A simple yet powerful segmentation method to identify relevant market segments is through “Deductive Logic”. Deductive logic is powerful as it results in a valid argument as long as the premises are true.

To apply deductive segmentation one can rely on segmentation trees. They function like a classification tree, but instead of using statistical criteria, they use deductive logic. Conclusions will follow a set of premises that are neither wrong nor right, as they are based on our own hypothesis. The quality of the tree depends on the validity of your assumptions. The trees can be compared to a mental map that will allow Product Managers to see all possible segments to better calculate the real market opportunity.

An Example

Let’s look into the case of finding segments for a Diet Cola.

Before drawing the tree we have to choose appropriate segmentation variables. It is recommended to start with variables that are relevant to the product supplier (Uncles and Bock 2002) e.g. customer profitability: frequency of consumption (number of units/time) or volume of consumption (size of product/time), and suppliers’ bargaining power (how many similar products can the customer obtain at a similar price and in a similar place).

These variables will help identify segments based on frequency and place of purchase and also consider the consumers’ choices against competitors. Remember that choosing other variables will also be valid but as deductive logic explains, the validity of the outcome will depend on the quality of variables.

Followed by supplier variables, you must choose consumer segmentation variables that are strictly related to the product we are analysing. Thus if you want to segment using age as a variable then you must ask  yourself “Is age a determinant variable in Diet Cola consumption?” It is probably not as relevant as knowing the product benefits, availability and the point of sale or awareness of the brand.

Building the Segmentation Tree

After choosing the relevant segmentation variables:  frequency of consumption, volume of consumption (size of product/time), knowing the product benefits, availability and the point of sale or awareness of the brand, you must rank them logically from most important to least important.

For example, frequency and volume of consumption should be placed high in the tree because they will show profitable segments of consumers directly related to the market opportunity. Brand awareness, although important, has less direct influence on the product’s consumption and is more difficult to quantify (although in the case of Diet Colas brand awareness and product availability are key for sales).

First, we have to ask the obvious question: Does the customer drink colas at all? And does the customer drink sugar-free colas? These logic basic questions raise at least 6 macro segments.  At this stage, a Product Manager can start discarding or reconsidering segments not relevant to the opportunity she is trying to evaluate.

Continuing with the logical variable ranking; the following order is suggested:

• Frequency of purchase
• Volume of purchase
• Brand awareness
• Product availability

A good and free tool to build segmentation trees (and mind maps) is www.mind42.com

Discovering Segments

Once all segmentation variables are displayed in a segmentation tree, relevant segments are consequently ‘discovered’.

The point of this exercise is to find the segment or segments that will deliver business return.

As shown in the tree above, consumer segments are identified by following the arrows and multiplying the number of options per segmentation variable. For example, Diet Cola drinkers that consume the product 3 times a week form 27 segments (3 options of product presentation (X) 3 options of brand awareness (X) 3 options of product availability). The same process is applied for all three frequency of purchase options, resulting in 27 additional segments (18 for one time a week diet cola drinkers and 9 for non cola drinkers).

All 54 segments are not necessarily valid or worthy of further investigation.

For example the ‘3 times a week’ diet cola drinker that has high brand awareness and access to the product is not a segment that the business should spend additional resources on. There is no point increasing the consumption of that particular segment given that their propensity to purchase is already high.

On the other hand, it is worth evaluating segments where diet cola is consumed only once a week and brand awareness and product availability is low.

Validating Segments

It is necessary to validate segments that have been ‘discovered’ through this process.

Here are some ways of validating the segments:

• Differential strategy development: do the differences between the segments suggest that different strategies should be developed for different segments?
• Accessibility: can the different strategies be targeted towards the different segments?
• Communicability: will the people responsible for implementing the segmentation be able to understand it?
• Technical validity: are the true differences between the segments known?

This simple yet comprehensive taxonomy can help us narrow the number of quantitative analysis needed to identify the true potential of a market.

Once the segments have been identified and validated, narrowing them to the valid ones will help Product Managers quantify the real market opportunity and support their product’s business case. Additionally its helps in prioritizing the number of product improvements needed since it brings deeper understanding of the customer group the product addresses.

Veronica

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Veronica Figarella is a Product Manager and Marketing Specialist with more than 9 years of experience in the Telecom industry. She has worked in both Latin America and Australia. Veronica is based in Venezuela and works as a Small Business Consultant and teaches an undergraduate course on developing entrepreneurial skills.  You can reach her on Twitter: @vfigatelix

Tweet this: Know thy customer – How to segment your market http://wp.me/pXBON-2TF #prodmgmt #prodmktg

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