Many small tech firms don’t have a dedicated marketing employee in the company. Instead, company leaders or founders have to find the time to plan marketing, and as a result it often becomes an afterthought.
If this describes your company, here are some easy steps you can take to make sure you make strategic marketing decisions that align with your business goals.
1. First, you must really understand your market ecosystem
This includes:
- your competitors,
- potential customers,
- potential partners,
- influencers, thought leaders, media.
2. Second, identify the different segments within your market
Think about how you can group the market players, and what are the different sub-niches of potential customers or problems.
3. Third, write down detailed profiles for each segment
Consider the key descriptors of the various customer segments that you wrote down above. Really get into the shoes of each customer, and write down as detailed a description as you can: demographics, needs/wants, challenges, etc.
4. Fourth, narrow down to your ideal customer targets
Once you have a really detailed picture of each customer sub-segment, you should be able to identify which of the customer segments are most profitable and which are the segments for which you deliver the most unique value.
5. Understand the pain points & sales needs of your ideal target customer
Now that you have a really detailed picture of your ideal customer, you need to think about what are their main pain points – what keeps them awake at night? How does your software or service address one of their top pain points?
Then consider sales needs: in order to purchase your product, what information or material do they need? Also consider who else is involved in or influences the purchase decision (stakeholders and influencers).
6. Perfect elevator pitch & messages
You need to think about the messages and elevator pitch to each of your target audiences above:
- Ideal customer
- Stakeholders
- Influencers
What is the CTA (call to action – what you want them to do)? What are the key talking points?
7. Finally, define your communications strategy
Basically, your communication strategy is just the key steps above written out in a document or slideset: Who is your audience? What do you want them to do? How will you communicate that to them? The answers to those questions are your marketing communications strategies.
Keep reading here to learn more and start planning your software product marketing.
