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Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz | @randfish | [email protected]
The Art of Product MarketingHow to attract, entice, and convert the right audience
for the product(s) and company you’re creating.
Why Do Startups(and new products) Fail?
CB Insights compiled an analysis from startup post-mortems.
I’d argue these 5 are mostly “couldn’t find enough
customers” or “couldn’t affordably find customers”
“Lean Startup” methodology teaches us to build a product people actually want and will use:
From Eric Ries’ slide deck on The Lean Startup
But it misses how to market and grow an audience of right customersso our product can scale…
From Eric Ries’ slide deck on The Lean Startup
What’s after the MVP?
Identifyingthe Right Customers
Who wants this product and isalready seeking it out?
What else is our audience searching for?And what else do they use to describe this problem?
Note: AdWords’ numbers should be viewed as ranges, not absolutes (e.g.
880 might mean 300-1,200 actual searches/month)
AdWords hides many searches that Google thinks are non-commercial, so use Suggest + Related, too.
Search queries can often lead to great sources of audience and customer discovery
And, next year, 10K’ should be on this list!
This can help tell us what matters to reviewers & customers
Once you have real people signing up for
your product, you can learn more about them
Now we just need to find out where people like
this guy hang out
Have a community & can find/recruit folks excited about your
product?Do that!
Then you can survey this
audience to identify their
clones
Targeting the Right Audiencein the Right Places
SEO & PPC for relevant keywords
are obvious starting points
On average, paid results get ~18% of search clicks
Organic gets ~82%
Smart marketers invest throughout the funnel, to
maximize opportunity
Facebook’s ad creator can give some sense of audience size for many fields/interests
SimilarWeb Pro can show you where other sites get their traffic (relatively accurate except for the long tail)
Via SimilarWeb Pro
SimilarWeb can also show search keywords:
Via SimilarWeb Pro
The KWs sites pay for are most often those
that convert best
And referring/social media traffic:
Via SimilarWeb Pro
These sites can lead you to potential press
opportunities, content ideas, partnerships, etc.
Don’t be too biased to invest only in Google or Facebook – there are tons of opportunities
Many products’ entire, very successful, strategies fit into channels w/ <0.1% of global
web traffic.
Attracting an Audienceto Your Platform
The 5 Paths to Audience Attraction:
The Product Itself
Network & Viral/WoM
Paid Advertising
Influencers, Press, & PR
Content + Search, Social, Email, et al.
Using the Product Itself:
How’d they do that?!
Using the Product Itself:
The product is naturally appealing to Reddit’s
audience, and the visuals fit squarely into the current
zeitgeist.
Using the Product Itself:
Using the Product Itself:
Unless you can envision headlines like this about your
product, don’t rely solely on the product to sell itself.
Network & Viral / Word-of-Mouth
Everyone who takes a SurveyMonkey survey is a potential future customer
Network & Viral / Word-of-Mouth
Via First Round Capital’s Article on Slack
Slack is a product where 1 or 2 people can convince an entire organization to use it.
Network & Viral / Word-of-Mouth
Via Skarp’s Kickstarter page
Kickstarter is an inherently WoM & viral-driven marketing Launchpad. Products only get
made if people who want them share & amplify.
Paid Advertising
Thanks to retargeting, RLSA, browser-ID’ing, and social logins, paid ads are more
intelligent than ever.
Paid Advertising
Via Recode on DraftKings & FanDuel
Influencers, Press, & PR
Via Techcrunch on Quora’s Growth
Quora has intentionally foregone some forms of
growth (SEO notably) to focus on influencers, press, & PR-
style partnerships.
Influencers, Press, & PR
Via YouAreAwesome’s Blog Post
Urbanspoon needed to compete w/ Yelp’s domination in restaurant reviews, so targeted bloggers who felt left out of
Yelp’s ecosystem.
Influencers, Press, & PR
BeardBrand continues to generate great press and has started their own beard-focused magazine.
Content + Search, Social, Email, et al.
Moz invests relentlessly in content strategy & distribution.
Publish
Amplify
Grow network Rank for slightly more competitive terms & phrases
Get links Grow authority
Earn search traffic
Content + Search, Social, Email, et al.
Free tools (& freemium) can be great forms of content marketing.
Via Crew.co’s App vs. Website and VoilaNorbert
Nearly every startup & new product uses a combination of these:
The Product Itself
Network & Viral/WoM
Paid Advertising
Influencers, Press, & PR
Content + Search, Social, Email, et al.
Convertingthe Right Customers
Remember those people who signed up
for your product & loved it?
We need to identify the traits that separate customers who’ll use & love our product from those who won’t.
My Favorite Process:
From Conversion Rate Experts’ case study
Boom.
And Shakalaka.
Didn’t try the product
Tried, but didn’t love it
Tried & loved the product
What do you think the product does?
What made you try it? What made you try it?
What would make you more likely to try it?
What are your biggest objections to signup?
What objections did you have and how did you
overcome them?
What caused you to stop using the product?
What would have made you stay a customer?
What objections did you have and how did you
overcome them?
What’s been most valuable to you?
If you’ve loved it, can we share your story?
Retaining, Delighting, & Growing Amplification
ID usage & profile characteristics shared by your most loyal users.
Encourage & message both in the product, & via external marketing, those traits in the rest of your
audience.
Recognize & reward, as personally as possible,
users that exhibit behaviors that trend
toward loyalty & amplification.
Don’t be fooled by my oversimplification; this process is even harder than acquisition marketing.
Which marketing channels & tactics should you invest in?
The Biggest Mistake Companies Make When Investing in Marketing?
Assuming non-paid mediachannels work like paid media:
People
Pour more dollars & people in
+ Dollars =
IF:
ELSE:
Positive ROI
THEN:
Find new channel/tactic
Organic channels, like products themselves, need time to experiment, fail, learn, & iterate
The 1st WB Fridays were some of our worst performing
content.
But, after years of experimenting, we found a formula & an audience, & now
they’re some of our best.
