When Marketing is ‘Baked Into’ the Product
The importance of Growth Hacking for developers
The concept of ‘baking marketing into the product’ is absolutely fascinating to me. There are essentially two popular ways to think about what it means to have marketing ‘baked into’ a digital product.
First is the idea that your product, whether it be an app, website, email, whatever, should be designed in such a way that it engineers and encourages a conversion-oriented UX. For instance if you are an ecommerce product, a method of purchase should always be clear and visible, the checkout process should be crystal clear while involving the least number of steps, companion products should be easy to find, etc. Essentially the interface of your product should be responsible for much of the heavy-lifting in moving customers through the buy process, from wherever they may be in that process. Of course a conversion-oriented design process encompasses much more than copywriting and user flows; there is plenty of opportunity for developers to shine by being creative and developing ways to shorten checkout with autofilled forms and card scanning, using camera technology to super-impose products on your body or in your home, send notifications when products in an abandoned cart go on sale, or building video faqs.
Of course you don’t have to be a developer to come up with these types of concepts, but it sure helps to know from a business sense how much work can be done in how much time for how much money, and in many cases performance can make or break how efficient and swift an experience customers receive. In addition to making smart technology decisions that will greatly affect a budget and timeline, a developer who understands the business or marketing reason behind a product or feature request can better evaluate a solution and come up with divergent options that may better fit the technology or business constraints while still achieving the product’s goal.
The key to building marketing into a product is the ability to see people as both users and consumers
Another way to think about baked in marketing is in the connectivity of your product, both in a digital and analogue sense. Whether your product directly integrates with social media or other 3rd party software, or simply exists within an eco-system of other apps users may use to complete a task, understanding these relationships will greatly help identify opportunities to build and leverage those relationships between apps and open your eyes to opportunities to build features that you otherwise may not have realized. These opportunities are more often in the form of integrating your product from other platforms rather then to them, allowing you to leverage the marketing and user base of other apps. AirBnB driving users from Craigslist is the classic example of this type of thinking.
It’s easy for developers to fall into the trap of seeing a product with tunnel vision. So much of a developer’s job is thinking about and writing code, but as people who are building something intended to interact with other people, it’s important to set aside time (whether formally or informally) to look at the work from a marketer’s perspective and understand where your product (and interface) exists within the context of a user and of a consumer. Understanding the relationships that the the user has to your product, as well as to other products, will help identify opportunities to create and build deeper relationships and create new ones.
