The Founder’s Product Marketing Guide: Part II
Part 2: Define Your Target Persona
Part 4: Launch it! — Test, Analyze, Rinse and Repeat (TARR)
Now, that you’ve done the nitty-gritty work of reading product reviews and interviewing with 5–10 potential prospective customers, it’s time to put your data and insights to use. Ideally, you’ve taken the appropriate steps to talk with a diverse group of potential customers to give your data and research more external validity.
For clarification, a target persona is the archetype of your ideal customer who will be using your product or service. I’m a big fan of using Linkedin social profiles and Sales Navigator tool to build “real” target and buyer profiles. It’s a quick, easy, and low-cost way of building a collection of realistic personas to target.
For these sample target personas and buyer profiles, I’m assuming that I will be creating a marketing automation tool.
Sample Target Personas:
Buyer’s Profile
A buyer profile is the type of companies who would be ideal for your product.
If you’d like to go further with your target persona creation, check out Hubspot’s “Make My Persona” website. I am a big fan of keeping things simple and leveraging LinkedIn’s massive database of users to build realistic profiles that can be handed off to an Account Executive to help them set appointments, track common objections and closing deals. Typically, you will be dealing with multiple stakeholders during the purchasing process of your product. I’ve seen upwards of 2–5 people involved in the sales process for a company.
PPC & SEO Competitive Analysis:
I would emphasize writing down your top 3 potential competitors and then reviewing their marketing collateral, landing pages, keyword strategy, and use their product if possible. Let’s start with the basics and review your competitors SEO and PPC strategy.
Spyfu:
Data Provided:
- PPC Budget — How much are they spending per keyword or phrase?
- Top Keywords (Organic and Paid)
- Ad Copy
- Advertising History
- Top Backlinks
- Top Keyword Competitors
- Organic Ranking History
From here, you will be able to determine the highest performing keywords in your industry (or product category), then backdoor your way into finding their best-performing landing pages-product messaging and positioning. This will give you deeper insights into how your potential customers are searching for your product.
Similar Web:
Data Provided:
- Traffic Volume
- Bounce Rate
- Traffic Sources
- Organic Vs. Paid Traffic Percentage
In their analysis, they found that most keywords are specific and unpopular-long tail keywords. This means that most people who are using Google or any search engine may not know exactly what they are looking for. For content marketers, this means, creating content geared around helping your target persona solve specific issues or provide them with how-to-guides is a great way to stay top of mind of your potential customers and grow the top of your marketing funnel. I will not be discussing in depth how to create a content marketing strategy, but just wanted to bring this to your attention.
With Similar Web, you will be able to get a “Google Analytics” type of view of your competitors’ website traffic. The key thing to pay attention to is determining which sites are driving the most traffic to your sites. This will add more color to your analysis for determining which websites (or channels) will be best for you to promote your product.
Usually, for early analysis, the free versions of Spyfu and Similar Web would suffice, however, if you want to get more data and insights I’d suggest upgrading to premium accounts. Also, keep in mind that Similar Web’s data is not always 100% accurate as most website owners have not connected their site to Similar Web’s API. Generally, I have found it to be a good starting point in analyzing competitors.
Come back next week for “Know Your Position” as I’ll discuss developing your product messaging and positioning strategy.
For a consultation, contact me directly blackchaingroup@gmail.com.
