3 Surefire Ways To Market Your Product

There is some similarity in the way the most successful products acquired their first ten thousand customers. Although there are numerous pieces of advice shelled out on user acquisition and marketing, instead of venturing into the unknown, why not take a few leaves out from the brands who’ve chiseled these marketing channels to perfection!

Here I tread upon those surefire strategies that will help you kick-start the marketing efforts and scale up the number of users. Focus your efforts on these channels as they bring in new users and help in predicting the progress and customer acquisition arc.

The foremost point, these strategies will add the number of users only if your product solves a particular problem. The baseline is that the users should want to use your product.

#1. Content marketing to establish credibility and thought leadership

Content marketing consists of content creation and curation.

The first part includes creating actionable and useful posts on your blog and guest posting on the websites where your target audience resides. This leads to creating credibility and thought leadership in your industry. Moreover it brings people to your blog thereby increases the click-throughs to the product and improves the search engine rankings as more people will share the content.

The aim of content curation is to continuously keep the existing users and potential customers engaged with the product. Content can be shared either via social platforms or emails. Often this converts the audience from the other side of the fence to your court over a period of time.

#2. Paid acquisition to gain new users

The most likely way to gain new users is by paid advertising on search engines (Google and Bing) and social networks (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn). Retargetting and banner advertisements are also used to acquire new users.

You can get better results spending a large amount in a single day rather than using a small amount over a period of days and weeks. In case of apps, when such huge amounts are spent in a day, it leads to an upward arc causing the apps to get featured in Apple and Google’s featured list. This results in a notable increase in the number of users in case of products and downloads in case of apps.

Since paid acquisition of users is an expensive technique, the customer lifetime value should exceed the cost of acquisition of a customer. The ideal ration should be 3:1.

#3. Viral loops leading to word-of-mouth

Explaining Viral Loops in Andrew Chen’s words, who carved this term “Viral loops are defined as steps a user goes through between entering a site to inviting the new set of users.”

Viral loops are directly related to word-of-mouth which is the result of a brilliant product and a great campaign. If it is solely attributed to a great campaign, there is a short term spike in the number of users and then you witness a downward trajectory in the long run.

The existing users become brand advocates through word of mouth which leads to viral loops. To spread a word about your product you need to provide the right incentive to the users. Dropbox gives 120MB free space to the invitee and the existing user while Uber gives free balance to the new user and existing user when the new user signs up and avails the ride for the first time.

To get the maximum out of marketing, use strategies that yield the best results.

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