4 Steps to MVP Marketing
🧚🏻‍♀️ simple advice for non-marketers
Minimum viable product (MVP) is the first version of your app that contains only the core features to solve a big problem your customers have. MVP facilitates attracting investors and getting accurate feedback from a target audience to understand if your idea works.
Even though your MVP isn’t a full-featured product, it’s better to contemplate a high-level marketing strategy at the very beginning.
Even though you’re no marketer, nobody knows your business strategy better than you. Therefore, it’s possible to turn your product knowledge into a digital marketing strategy without hiring a marketer (but you’ll probably need someone to execute the strategy later on).
Without further interruption, let’s focus on the 4 stages of crafting a digital marketing strategy for an MVP.
1. Analyze the background✍️
Goal: fill in business/lean canvas.
Defining the background is a starting point for any strategy.
This is where business model/lean canvas comes into play, helping you get together data points and capture your business model on one page. Unlike a bulky business plan, this canvas template can be filled in about 30 minutes and quickly adjusted as the project evolves or market conditions change.
Here is an example of a business model canvas:
2. Analyze your customers🕵️‍♀️
Goal: create customer personas.
A customer persona is an abstract ideal representation of your target audience.
Understanding your customers is crucial when delivering a solution for them. Learning their routine, pain points, and their way of selecting a product/service helps you meet their demand.
You’ll be doing customer personas to validate your business idea, so adding marketing questions to customer development interviews will be a double kill.
1. Define which information is must-know to fill in “customer profile” and prepare your list of questions.
For example, we need to know how prospects could discover our solution on the web. For that purpose, typical questions could be:
- “How do you get updated about the latest news in *your sphere*?”
- “What are the top online platforms/forums/professional networks you check regularly?”
- “What does the process of choosing a solution look like?”
- “Are there any influencers in the *sphere* you follow?”
- “What job-related content do you consume?”
- “What do you like/dislike the most about the job-related content you consume?”
- “Are there any blank spaces in *your sphere* you want to be covered”?
- “Which online events in *your sphere* do you attend/would like to attend?”
- “Which types of content do you prefer: infographics, video, images, graphs, articles…”
A list of questions could be adjusted to your industry and a type of product/service you offer. A rule of thumb here is to dive into the research and be where your customers are to come up with a number of hypotheses that you’ll approve/disprove during the next step.
2. Go and ask your target audience directly.
Surveys and interviews are everything for a founder. Using them, you can directly reach out to your prospects and collect valuable information firsthand (and do a little pre-sale as well:).
- Online surveys. Currently, online surveys are a top pick method since they can be held in any form that is convenient for both prospect and founder:
- Face-to-face meetings (or video calls) are a good option if you want to see a person’s non-verbal reactions as well;
- Phone interviews;
- E-mails or messengers;
- Statistics posts on social networks.
Why do you need to get all this job done?
Clearly defined customer personas give you multiple perks, allowing you to:
- Align your product vision and customer demand with marketing & sales strategies.
- Polish your unique value proposition and, as a result, a marketing campaign for every customer type.
- Base your marketing strategy on data, not only your hypotheses.
- Focus your efforts on solving a specific pain point of a specific person instead of “selling everything to everyone”.
That’s why I recommend that you start crafting a customer persona doc asap and get back to it regularly to make sure it stays up-to-date.
3. Analyze your competitors 🔎
Goal: create a customer analysis report.
Competitor analysis is the next step to crafting a killer marketing strategy since it’s the easiest way to find out:
- Market trends & tendencies;
- Main performance indicators to define KPIs for your marketing plan;
- Tricks your competitors’ use and the best practices they follow;
- Competitor’s weaknesses and blind spots to cover.
Here, you have two options: you can either do everything manually or use special tools.
In the first case, use Google/Bing search (depending on what your customers use) to find your competitors and output them into google sheets or a template for competitor analysis.
Search criteria will vary based on your requirements, and, for example, may include the following:
- company name;
- motto and brand logo;
- foundation date;
- company size and location;
- target customers;
- web presence (including social media);
- pricing strategy;
- top product features.
Once that doc is ready, try to find common patterns (e.g. more than half of your competitors manage large Facebook communities) and gaps (e.g. none of the competitors use an environment-friendly approach).
If you want to proceed with competitor analysis quicker, you may try one of the paid tools. Below, I’ve listed some examples of tools I use for Jellyfish.tech marketing.
4. Shape your digital marketing strategy🎯
Goal: document a high-level marketing strategy.
Start small: make a high-level draft of a marketing funnel from awareness to purchase, where you list the channels your customers use and the types of content you may offer.
Then, break your strategy down to specific and measurable steps or tasks, creating a marketing backlog.
Usually, you’ll have a few areas to focus on here:
At this stage, you may also use a google sheet, our MVP strategy templates, or some tools for keeping your developments handy:
Trello. This is an excellent solution for effective communication between the members of your team during building a marketing strategy. The whole process is displayed on the board.
Even if you don’t have a team as of yet, it’s still easy to add/edit/delete the tasks shaping the marketing backlog and track the progress.
Jira. The task tracker, similar to Jira, is a complex solution for those who have some experience in project management. Hundreds of highly customizable options allow you to set up the marketing project with great precision.
Evernote. This tool also has a separate and fully-customizable template to work on your marketing strategy. It can help set up goals, identify marketing tactics, and keep your team members in sync.
Every tool also supports uploading documents, pictures, videos, PDF files to store all the necessary information in one place.
Kindly reminder. Your strategy shouldn’t cover everything, this is just a good starting point for your brand that can be pivoted, adjusted, or scaled at any moment based on the results you get and market demand. Don’t try to do everything perfectly in one move, it won’t work out (I’ve learned this from my own experience:).
The main goal here is to understand how marketing works in general and in your niche. The essential is to obtain and develop a vision of where to move further.
Why marketing is important
I often encounter an outlook: “A great product will market itself”.
I wish it was true! But in reality, the market for digital products and services is overwhelmed — delivering a good product may not be enough to stand out.
This leads us to a simple yet important development: the main task of a good marketing strategy is to help the “right” people discover how awesome your product is. Not annoy them with a bunch of emails, messages, and calls, but balance technical implementation, business strategy, sales, & marketing.
Building on my own experience, it’s worth thinking through all details and strategies before investing in MVP creation, as even a perfectly-designed MVP won’t work without a proper marketing strategy.
