The Right and Wrong of Product Marketing Development

In this video I’m talking about product marketing development – how to create the most powerful product for your marketplace.  First, let’s talk about the wrong way of doing it. The wrong way is doing it in a vacuum.  You sit at your desk,  come up with what you think your marketplace wants, write that down, and create a product. Odds are if you come up with the product by yourself, you are only going to sell it to yourself.  So, let’s talk about ways to engage your community and create a product that speaks to them.

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Start with your own internal team. Have a brainstorm, pull out the customer frustrations, see what your team thinks about the marketplace, and come up with the basic framework. After you have done that work, then take that concept and bounce it off of individual customers.

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Hold interviews. Call up a customer and have a conversation or interview.  See what their frustrations are. Get their one-on-one feedback.  See where they are and see what new innovations in your product marketing development come naturally out of the conversations.

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Have telephone seminars. Make it a “customer feedback seminar”.  Dedicate one hour to get feedback and on what your clientele needs.  Ask them and see what they say.  I bet they tell you exactly what to do.

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Attend a live seminar. There are all kinds of live seminars, gatherings, and meet-ups where you can go interact with your clientele.  Introduce yourself to your marketplace, shake their hand, and take them out to lunch.  Listen to what’s going on in their world and ask how you can best help them.

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Engage in online forums. Get a membership, get involved, ask questions, contribute and pay attention to the feedback that comes to you.

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The whole point of this conversation is to ensure that you are having a conversation with your marketplace. Do not make products in a vacuum. Interact with your marketplace. Interact with your client base. See what they say and let that lead your product marketing development.