6 Important Elements in Marketing, What Are They?

The Essential Elements that a Good Marketing Plan should Have

      Companies or businesses tend to put more effort into marketing their products through various marketing elements. From designing fancy logos, setting up marketing automation programs via email, to launching an attractive website. But without a strong product, the effort to build your business brand will be in vain.

Some businesses launch new products and fail. Why? This failure could be caused by the following factors:

- Lack of understanding about market conditions.

- Ineffective communication

- Lack of understanding about customers.

- Product marketing strategies that are not effective.

It's important to focus on fixing the failure, because there are so many parties involved and so much time and money you invest in new products for your business.

Of course, you don't want to spend all of your time and energy focusing on building a business brand that ends up going to waste.

A successful product requires a good and right product marketing strategy. That means you need to make sure your business products meet customer needs and satisfaction, and get them on the market properly.

Essential Elements of a Product Marketing Strategy

Following are some of the important elements for building and developing a Product Marketing Strategy:

Product

The first step to developing a Product Marketing Strategy is ensuring you have a strong product.

Even before strategizing, you need to make sure the product is built with your target customers in mind and whether it fits their needs.

People don't want to just buy things, they also want the things they buy to solve their needs and problems.

So, ask yourself what needs and problems can your product solve for your customers?

How will the product make customers' lives better? Answering these questions will help you determine the right messages for your product marketing advertisement.

The value placed on your product is more important than the product's capabilities. You have to focus on the benefits of your product rather than the features.

Each feature must be developed to provide benefits for the customer.

Customer

Just like a product, you also need to focus on your customers or potential business customers in planning your marketing strategy.

You really have to understand them. Their characteristics, behavior and more are key to understanding customers.

Start by doing research and gathering any information about the intended target customers, such as: age, gender, education, marital status, hobbies and professions.

Interview your customers. Set up phone calls or meetings with customers and ask about their preferences for your products.

Listen to how they speak and the language they use, this can help shape the narrative of your product marketing strategy later.

Any information that comes from a customer can be helpful in uncovering your customer's preferences, and the best way to market your product to them.

In your research, you'll probably find some patterns in common among customers.

These similarities can be grouped to help create buyer personas, or the archetype of your ideal customer, and how customers behave.

This way, you can focus on marketing to one type of buyer instead of your entire customer base – which is inefficient.

You have to have an innovative product, or at least one that can solve common business challenges.

Marketing Team

Building and promoting a product requires team effort and cooperation. However, keeping several teams on the same track consistently is no easy task. The product marketing team should be the bridge between sales, marketing, methods and development. With many people in a team working on one project, it's easy to have miscommunication and disorganization that can derail the progress of your product marketing strategy.

Make plans and product roadmaps so that all parties involved in the team can work in harmony and synergy.

The product roadmap provides an overview of the entire product marketing plan and guides the team on what needs to be done and the results at each step of the process.

You can maintain visibility across projects and make sure all parties involved know what they are working on.

Message

Of course you need to communicate with your customers. According to several research results related to product marketing, 57% of consumers feel confident when they are emotionally connected to a brand.

And of course the emotional connection is built through the messages you convey regarding the products you are marketing.

Your product message should be created narratively. Because narratives are the easiest way to get your customers to connect with your products.

You can write articles on a blog and take advantage of the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) feature so that inspiring articles related to your business products can be found easily on the internet.

In order to create an effective story or narrative, you need to identify the unique selling proposition of your product. Basically, What is the main value that you want to convey to the customer?

Promotion

Having a solid product and a mature strategy is not the end of your job. You can't expect customers to buy your product in droves if they don't know anything about it.

Therefore, you need to deliver product information through strategic promotion.

Your promotion plan should elaborate and convey your product message to customers at the right time.

If you've done your research and built up your buyer personas, you should have no problem identifying your target customers.

The timing of executing product promotions is also important. You have to do research on the market as a whole, for example, in what season is suitable to start promoting your business products.

The point is you need to make sure you have a strong match between the market and product.

Analysis

You can't expect your product marketing strategy to produce perfect results right away. The worst possibility or risk of failure should be considered. Then, all you have to do is evaluate your product marketing performance.

This analysis element is important for the product marketing strategy to work effectively.

Once you've implemented your promotion and product plan, you need to review it to see how successful your strategy was.

Look carefully at the possible fault points. And adjust your strategy going forward from the results of the analysis that has been studied.

By understanding these elements, it is hoped that your business product marketing strategy will run effectively and efficiently.

Always evaluate the performance of your product marketing strategy when it has been executed, so that it is always consistent with your marketing and business objectives.