Yesterday I had the mixed pleasure of getting up at the crack of dawn to head to Aberdeen for my third NESTA Starter for 6 workshop. S46, as it’s affectionately known, is a scheme whereby aspiring creative and technology entrepreneurs get some solid hands-on training in the various skills needed to run a successful business.
This month’s session was on marketing, run by two seasoned professionals from The Value Innovators. Obviously defining and then approaching your target market in the right way is crucial to a young business’s success, as startups rarely have the cash or even the time to absorb wasted marketing efforts.
The session focused on four key aspects of marketing: product, customers, promotion and PR.
Product
It’s important to consider your product from a customer’s point of view. Being immersed in the fantastic technology you’ve developed is all too easy, but if you can’t explain exactly what a customer gets out of using it, you won’t find it easy to convince people to buy.
Features and Benefits
We broke into groups and defined three key features and benefits for one of the group members’ products. A feature is an attribute of your product, such as a touch screen interface, voice activation, or the fact that it uses repurposed materials. A benefit is the customer gain, focusing on what makes your product unique; for example, the benefit of any mobile phone is the ability to make calls, but the benefit of the iPhone is the ability to access a variety of third-party applications for pretty much any imaginable task.
This ran on into our next consideration, the unique selling point (USP). Related to the ‘secret sauce’ oft-mentioned in the tech startup scene, what makes your product truly different?
Customers
Between the USP and other benefits, we were led to consider target customer segments. Firstly we looked at who we currently thought our main customers would be, then broadened that with the help of the group to consider new, previously-overlooked segments that might be interested.
For example, if one were developing an ethical banking product, our main customers are not just ‘anyone who wants a bank account’ but ‘people who care about ethical trading’, which in turn can break down into e.g. ’25-40 year old professionals who drive hybrid cars, drink fair-trade coffee and recycle’.
By looking at specific customer segments, it’s then possible to think about the competition. Who else is addressing these segments? How does your USP differ from theirs? Effectively, how can you convince customers to switch to you?
In the banking example, there may be multiple competitors offering banking products, but nobody offering a specific ethical product. If there is an ethical competitor, maybe you can compete on rates or features; maybe one of your USPs is that part of your monthly account fee sponsors a child in a developing country, and you get letters from that child, something your competitor doesn’t do. It’s useful to do this analysis before the product is set in stone so that random ideas like this one get their chance to surface (and be squashed, if they are truly silly — but sometimes offbeat thinking brings new issues to light).
Promotion
There are multiple channels for promoting your product, from direct (tele)sales to online and print ads. It’s important when thinking about promotion to concentrate your efforts, rather than making a half-hearted and vague attempt at publicity; the questions we were asked to consider were:
- What is the message you want to send out?
- To whom do you want to send it?
- How will you communicate it?
- How much will this cost?
We broke into groups again and individually came up with an idea for a free (or nearly free) strategy to promote our business or product. Upon discussion, many people suggested getting PR — i.e. written up in an editorial — as a good vehicle for promoting their business.
Other suggestions included social media, link exchange, loaning goods, giving away freebies to gain endorsement, and bundling the product with other services as a loss leader but profiting from consumables.
It’s interesting to see the variety, and obviously very product-specific as to what will work or not. Giving stuff away for free, whether for mutual benefit (exchanging fashion items for press) or to gain a future revenue stream (consumables, freemium) is a particularly fun strategy to plot. What do you give away? To whom? How do you encourage them to pay? It’s been said you should never give a software product away for free if you later intend to charge, and for good reason — one recurring theme during today’s session was all about image and loyalty, something an abrupt U-turn on pricing severely damages.
PR
The day concluded with a look at press releases. As an ex-journalist I’ve seen a fair few of these, and yes, many of them are dull as ditchwater. We had the following issues to address:
- What will get a journalist interested in your product?
- What publications are likely to cover this story?
- How do you target (reach) them?
Journalists love stories. The classic example of “man bites dog” sums this up in a nutshell; we need news! Journalists write on behalf of their readers, and readers crave interesting stories, so it’s important to understand two things: what will make a journalist read your press release and then follow up on it, and what the journalist’s readers want to see. The latter feeds into the former — even if I’m personally very interested in dressage, if I’m writing for Golf Monthly your story about a dancing horse won’t fly with me.
This also ties into the second question; where are your potential customers in terms of readership? If your market is stockbrokers in London, getting coverage in the Glasgow Herald is largely going to be a waste of time. (I say largely, as even the most obscure coverage does give you quotes to put on your website and perhaps a chance reader who would be interested.)
As a startup your resources are limited, so find out what your customers read and target those publications. You might also want to look at wider properties of your customers beyond ‘they have a need my product serves’; what else do they have in common? Do they all have similar hobbies? Buy certain products? Fit into a particular socio-economic class that a specific newspaper targets? (Do you get covered in Closer and The Sun, or in Vogue and The Times?)
We then had an exercise to go off and write the first few paragraphs of a press release about our product. This was surprisingly productive, and I suggest if you don’t have one written, go and think about it now. What hook can you use to get journalists interested? Which publications would you send it to? Thinking about this stuff now rather than later really helps you set up a solid foundation for your future marketing strategy.
A final couple of pieces of advice about press releases: don’t lie, and have an attention-grabbing subject line. “Press release: new product launched” won’t grab a journalist’s attention. On the other hand, your release has to live up to the hype of the headling, so “Google-killer cures cancer” might not be the right way forward.
In conclusion
Whatever stage you’re at, defining what makes you unique, how that relates to your customers and competitors, and how you will get people aware of your product are all crucial steps to take. Developing a product with customer needs in mind from an early stage is far better than second-guessing in the dark, and with today’s online tools it’s easy to give your potential customers a voice.
One thing that came out of the workshop was to do with the web and social media; when researching a new product, how does one find out what the key online communities are? This is potentially something our engine could do, so I’m officially gauging interest here — would a feature, or even standalone product, that identifies key influential and high-traffic (high-emotion) hubs online, be appealing to anyone? Get in touch!