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What Will Your Product Marketing Be Wearing This Season?

Every year the global fashion industry rolls out new lines of fashions from famous designers. The world gathers at trendy fashion shows to gasp in amazement as they discover which designers have outdone themselves this year and which ones have gone off into the weeds.

Maybe it’s time for you to take a look at how you are telling the world about your product – are you keeping up with the latest trends or is your product looking like last year’s fashion failures?

Four Trends In Marketing

Just like everything else in this mad, mad world, marketing never stands still. Every company is facing the same set of challenges: everything seems to cost more to do this year, the environment and the role that our product plays in it (for good or for bad) is becoming more important, etc.

The key thing that any time-strapped product manager needs to be able to do is to find the hot areas of marketing that will help their products both grow in sales and be viewed by potential customers as being an innovative product. Here are four marketing areas that both you and your product are going to have to be on top of:

Targeting

All customers are not created equal and so product managers need to stop treating them that way. It turns out that by now we actually have a fair amount of information on our customers: we know what they do for a living, where they live, and what they’ve bought from us in the past.

Given that we know all of this about the people that we want to buy our products, then why do we still have generic product brochures? Why do we send out mass mailings (email and postal) that start out “Dear recipient”?

It’s time that we put all of this information to work. This is the year that we need to take the time to create highly personalized communication with our potential customers.

Measurement & Analysis

As product marketing budgets get tighter and tighter, every product manager is going to be under the gun to show that a marketing campaign is able to boost profits. This means that we’re going to have to start doing a better job of measuring our marketing programs.

It’s all too easy to do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and say “this is what the ROI (return on investment) will be”, but that’s not going to cut it any more. Instead product managers are going to have to take the time and figure out how much each step of your product’s marketing effort is going to cost. Then you’re going to have to come up with a way to determine which customers took action based on coming into contract with your marketing message.

Integration

Sure you use email to reach potential customers. You might even use postal mail, videos, and brochures that you hand out at meetings and trade show. But how well do these different channels work together?

With funds for marketing programs being in such short supply, it is now more critical than ever that each of the ways that you get in contact with your customer need to complement your other channels.

This goes farther than just having your company’s web address in small letters at the end of your product’s brochure. Instead, use the brochure to tell customers where they can find videos of your product in action. Use the web site to tell customers how they can order brochures. Make sure that you are telling the world one unified story about why they need your product.

Prospecting

Where will your next batch of customers be coming from? As the demographics of the people who buy our products start to change, we need to make sure that our product’s marketing messages change with them.

The baby boomers are starting to retire and their shoes will be filled by a mix of Gen-X and Gen-Y customers. Will the story that you’ve been telling about your product still resonate with them? Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and create a new story that will work for them.

What All Of This Means For You

It’s all too easy for product managers to create some form of product marketing and then move on to other more pressing things without giving it another thought. The reality is that marketing messages, like fashion, go out of style and need to be refreshed.

When you go to refresh your product’s marketing message, you need to be aware of the four marketing trends that are currently happening: targeting, measurement and analysis, integration, and prospecting.

Product managers who are able to craft a marketing campaign that leverages these four areas and does a good job of telling their product’s story will be the ones who are hailed as the most fashionable product managers out there.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question For You: What do you think the best way to measure a product’s marketing ROI is?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s sorta the Holy Grail of product management – to become so intimate with our customers that we can almost read their minds. Now while that may sound like a great idea, have any of us taken the time to consider what our customers might be thinking about us doing this?

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Do Product Managers Need To Catch The Bus To Advertise Their Products Properly?

A New Way To Create Ads For Your Products

Welcome to the world of the 21st Century – there seems to be a new competitor who is trying to win the attention of your customers every day. What’s a product manager to do? The answer lies in getting the message about why your product is better out before your potential customers in a way that connects with them. But how? Maybe the answer lies in what your existing customers are saying about your product…

How To Use This New Approach

For years now product managers have been told that we need to listen to what our customers are telling us in order to find ways to make our products better. However, nobody has ever really taken the time to tell us what we need to do in order to create product advertising messages that work.

With the arrival of the Internet, product advertising is yet one more thing that is undergoing a significant change. For the first time, the Internet gives product managers a chance to “eavesdrop” on what your customers are saying about their experience with your product.

We often think about these types of customer conversations in terms of the negative things that our customers are saying – that’s how we can discover what features need to be added to the next version of the product. However, it turns out that the positive things that they are saying can help us out also.

New technologies are becoming available that allow the big Internet to be scanned in order to collect all of the different things that are being said about your product. This information can reveal just what aspects of your product your customers are talking about (“I like the way that it feels in my hands”) as well as what they are not talking about (what? No mention of the extended warrantee that we debated about offering for two months?)

The power of this new approach to creating product ads is allowing your customers to determine what theme you end up using for your next advertising campaign as well as the words and images that you use. Even better, once you’ve launched the campaign, you can monitor the feedback and make changes to it in order to have an even greater impact.

Example: Harrah’s Takes A Gamble

A great example of one set of product managers who are doing exactly this comes from the casino company Harrah’s. Emily Steel has done some research on how they’ve been using these new tools.

She reports that Harrah’s mined the customer comments that had been posted on the travel review web site www.TripAdvisor.com along with watching what was being said on Twitter and Facebook in order to determine how they should promote their hotel / casino. What they discovered is that their customers valued the views they could get out of their hotel windows as well has the amenities in their rooms.

Harrah’s used this information to change the way that their web site looked as well as changing the types of information that they sent to prospective customers. Since doing this, they’ve reported that they’ve seen a double-digit increase in the number of on-line bookings for their properties.

What All Of This Means For You

Although this may seem like the way to go in the future, it turns out that you need to be a bit careful here. The people who are talking about your product already know about it. You will want to advertise to people who may not already know about your product. This means that things like focus groups and traditional market research are still an important part of what you need to be doing.

Ultimately, as a product manager you need to add this new technique for creating advertising that works for your product to your toolbox. It is yet one more way that the Internet is changing everything about the way that product managers do our job…

Do you think that knowing what your customers are saying about your products online would change how you talk about your product?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As product managers we are always looking for ways to give our products a unique selling proposition. However, maybe we’ve been overlooking the single most important way that we can get our potential customers to turn into actual customers: start selling time with our product…

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How Would You Market A Commodity Product Like Bullets?

So there you are: the product manager for a boring product. How often have you caught yourself gazing longingly over at one of those iPhones, Kindles, or some other such highly desirable product and though to yourself “Now why couldn’t I be the Product Manager for a cool product like that?” I have one message for you — get over it. It turns out that there are other product manager who are responsible for products that are even less cool than yours and they are doing some pretty amazing things to make their products successful…

How One Goes About Buying Bullets

I’m sure that there are some of you out there that have very strong feelings about guns and such. Let’s put those feelings aside for a few minutes and take a closer look at the issue of, what else, bullets. If you are not an avid survivalist or hunter, you probably haven’t purchased bullets before.

It turns out that people really care about what gun they buy. However, bullets are almost an afterthought purchase. Sorry about that bullet product managers. Rob Walker over at the New York Times got interested in this product conundrum when he researched a company called Alliant Techsystems (ATK)<.

One of the products that ATK makes is bullets. In fact, they make a lot of different types of bullets — currently some 20 different brands. Awhile back ATK bought a company and inherited the Federal Premium brand of bullets. I think that most of us will understand that the way that this brand of bullets was being sold was based on function and performance. That’s ok, but it really wasn’t brining in the big sales.

Building The Better Bullet (Brand)

The next line of bullets that ATK brought out was called Fusion. With this product line the product managers at ATK were targeting (sorry!) the 25-35-year-old deer hunters. In order to catch their eye, the company created a new “aggressive” box design and even went so far as to add a foil label. They basically pimped the box.

These two products gave the ATK product managers the experience that they needed in order to gain the confidence that they needed in order to do their biggest product launch to date. They recently rolled out a new line of bullets for duck hunters called Black Cloud. This time around they are showing that they know what needs to be done to turn a commodity product into a must-have product.

ATK has partnered with a well known TV personality (in duck hunting circles): Phil Robertson who is known as the “Duck Commander”. They’ve also gone ahead and made a couple of “viral videos” in order to build some buzz around their new ammo. Just to show that bullets also play a role in the 21st Century, they’ve gone so far as to create their very own social networking site called StormChasersNetwork.

Just to top things off, they have also make sure that the box for the Black Cloud product virtually jumps off of the shelf. They dressed it up in a bright color scheme that is designed to catch a hunter’s attention and remind him of the first light of day (which is the best time to be hunting ducks).

What All Of This Means For You

I can’t say for certain what kind of product you are responsible for managing. However, I can bet that it’s probably a little bit more interesting than a commodity product like a bullet. In fact, no matter how boring you may find it, it’s probably a whole lot more interesting than a bullet.

With a little luck this story about how the product managers at ATK were able to see beyond the simple fact that they were charged with trying to sell more of a commodity product that the other bullet makers should inspire you. What the ATK product managers did was to step into their customer’s shoes and identify how they see the world. Once they knew this, it became clear as to what they needed to do.

Spend some time thinking about not what your product does, but rather what your customers will do with your product. This can point the way forward for how you can turn your boring commodity-like product into something that will take off like a (what else?) bullet.

What do you think that ATK could do in order to make their bullets stand-out even more with their customers?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As product managers, one of the things that we enjoy doing the most is sitting back and counting the number of customers that our product has. Customers are great to have, but it turns out that what we should really be doing is looking for ways to turn them into something much more valuable: partners.

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Marketing Programs Require More Important Things Than Just Money To Be Measured

Ah the world of product marketing — it’s where artists dream up brightly colored logos and put together viral YouTube videos that nobody really understands but everyone has to watch and send to their friends. Well, as a product manager you may think that that is what goes on in the world of marketing, but in the end you really don’t care. What you want is results, in other words more sales of your product. Let’s reign in the magic unicorns that live in marketing and try to come up with a way to measure what we’re getting for what we’re spending. Maybe ROI is the way to go…

Everything Is Easier On The Web

Surprise, surprise! In the past few years everyone has fallen in love with marketing / pushing their products on the web. Forget newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV — the web is where it’s at. One of the big reasons that everyone’s in love with the web (besides the fact that it’s all new and shiny) is that it seems to offer a fantastic return on investment (ROI) .

In a nutshell, what everyone believes is that when you use the web to reach out and contact your customers and potential customers, it costs you next to nothing. In turn, if anyone happens to buy your product because you got in touch with them over the web then ta-da you’ve just “found” money.

The problem with all of this comes when we start to take a closer look at just what we really mean by getting “results” from a web-only based campaign. If we dumb things down and just use some measure of ROI as a way to gauge how we are doing, we may be missing some important information.

It’s All About Relationships

How about if we take a collective step back here for just a minute. Whenever you do marketing for your product, what’s your goal? Deep down what are you really trying to accomplish? The real role of marketing is to generate leads which is just a fancy term for “find people who have a problem that might be solved by your product”.

Just telling people about your product once is often not enough. In many cases you actually have to change people’s behavior before they will become a lead for your product. Getting people to change their behaviors and become a lead is what the real objective of your marketing efforts are. How well you are meeting these objectives is what you really need to be measuring. Maybe calling it “return on objective” (ROO) is what we should be doing.

An Example Of An ROO

David Shoenfeld is a VP at the U.S. Postal Service and he knows a thing or two about balancing web marketing with other channels. As an example of an ROO for product marketing he talks about the product managers who worked for a hospital in Kentucky.

Hospital product mangers, you say? Why not — a hospital is actually a collection of very specialized products that get sold to customers and so product managers are needed to play a key roll in managing and marketing those products.

This particular hospital wanted to get more referrals from doctors (“go have your surgery at this hospital”) because there’s a lot of money in them thar referrals. The product managers initially did what we all would do right off the bat: they sent out an email blast to all of the local doctors asking for more referrals. Nothing happened.

A little research revealed the flaw in their plan: in order to get more doctors to refer their patients to the hospital really required a deeper relationship between the doctor — hospital — patient. This meant that to get the results that they were looking for the product managers had to roll out a multi-channel marketing campaign. This included direct mail, TV ads, and even sponsoring some health lectures in the community.

What All Of This Means For You

I know that you’ve heard this before, but in my opinion you just can’t hear it enough: before you start any marketing program for your product, you need to make sure that you are very clear on the objectives of what you are hoping to accomplish.

Yes, money is important. However, since what you really want to do is to determine how well you are meeting your objectives, you need to be able to look beyond the dollars and see how you are doing on meeting your overall objectives.

Make sure that when you invest the time, money, and energy into your next marketing program for your product, you do it right and actually connect with your intended customers. Do this well, and your product can’t help but be successful.

What product marketing situations do you think that email is well suited for?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Put yourself in the shoes of a Microsoft product manger for just a moment. You’ve got a bit of a challenge: you work for a very large and a very powerful company that has lost its cool.  Maybe opening a store would be the answer…

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Your Marketing Message Has To Be Aligned With Your Customer's Needs

If you were going fishing, how much luck catching fish do you think that you would have if you didn’t use any bait on your hook? Sure, there are probably some either dumb or near-sighted fish that might still bite, but you’re going to be doing a lot of sitting around waiting. Is it possible that as a product manger you are fishing for customers for your product without bait?

The Problem With Market Assumptions

As a product manager you work hard to create a product that meets what you think the needs of your customers are. Once you’ve got the product ready to go to market, you whip up some sales brochures that are loaded with your marketing message, create a slide presentation or two, and then dump them on your sales teams and tell them to go sell, sell, sell!

Now this is all find and good if you’ve guessed right. Or maybe a better way for me to have said that was it’s all good if you’ve correctly guessed what your customer’s needs are. If you haven’t, then you’re sending your sales teams off to fish without any bait.

Your market assumptions are those points that you build your marketing message around. Market assumptions are the reasons that you believe that your customers will be willing to purchase your product. If you get this wrong, then nothing else matters.

An Example Of Marketing Mis-Alignment

These types of things are always most clearly understood when there is a good example. In this case, the writer (a title=”Who is Geoffrey James” href=” http://www.geoffreyjames.com/ “>Geoffrey James has uncovered the case of the product managers at Ascent Healthcare Solutions getting their marketing message misaligned.

Ascent takes used medical devices (catheters, drill bits, bags, etc.), cleans, sterilizes, and tests them before selling them back to hospitals for about half of their original price.

The product mangers at Ascent thought that they understood their customer very well – price conscious hospitals. Their marketing assumption was that if they convinced their customers that reprocessed products were safe, then they would buy them. It turns out that they were wrong.

When sales didn’t take off like they were supposed to, Ascent brought in consultants to sit down with Ascent’s customers and find out what was really going on. It turns out that hospitals were already convinced that Ascent’s products were safe to use. The problem was that Ascent’s product mangers had assumed that switching over to collecting and tuning in medical devices to be reconditioned was an easy thing to do. Hospitals didn’t see it that way.

Just like every large organization, any sort of change is always a real pain. Hospitals saw the need to set up special recycling bags just for the devices that Ascent could recondition and then teaching the hospital staff new procedures to use was going to be more hassle than the savings were worth.

Once Ascent learned about their marketing mistake, they quickly corrected their message out to the market. They no longer assume that hospitals will view reprocessing as being easy, they have changed their marketing message to now state that “Ascent makes reprocessing easy.”

What All Of This Means For You

Right now you are operating under a set of marketing assumptions about your customers. You might be right or you might be wrong. If your assumptions are incorrect, then you could be missing out on a lot of customers.

The first step is for you to write down just exactly what your current marketing messages are. You are probably going to need an outsider to help you do this because you may be too close to your material to be able to “see” your messages.

Next, you are going to have to test your messages. This is going to require you to work with the sales team and start to have discussions with customers. This includes not only existing customers, but ones who have left you. Ask them if what you think are their most pressing needs really are driving their decisions.

I speak from experience when I tell you that you are probably in for some surprises. All too often, just like the product managers at Ascent, we can start to believe our own marketing material and that’s how we can get out of alignment with our customers.

What do you think is the best way to test your market assumptions without going broke?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

2009 is dead, long live 2009. Ok, so it’s not quite dead yet; however, even as your sales teams are running around trying to close the year out on a high note you as a product manager need to start to set your sights on what you’re going to do to get ready for next year. Got a plan?

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Grocery Stores Can Teach Product Mangers How To Compete Successfully

The company has no extra money for advertising right now. Your travel budget has been spent so you’re going nowhere. Your competition is slashing their product prices in a desperate attempt to stay in business. Oh, and you are expected to boost sales of your product. Sound familiar?

As product managers we are tempted to look to our competition for guidance on what we should be doing when things get tight. However, maybe that’s the wrong thing to do. Instead, maybe this is when some of that “outside of the box” thinking might come in handy. Who could show us the way? Maybe a grocery store?

Welcome to Publix

Publix is a major grocery store chain in the southeastern U.S. They are especially strong in my home state of Florida – they seem to have stores everywhere. I don’t view them as being the cheapest place to shop, but they do seem to have just about everything so if I need a particular item, I’ll go to Publix.

From a business point of view, Publix is a well run company. It’s an employee owned company with 1,003 stores and 2008 revenue of $23.9B. Publix has the supermarket’s second highest annualized sales per square foot of $548. (Whole Foods, the high-end organic food store, has $820.) For the past 15 years Publix has ranked ahead of Kroger, Whole Foods, and Safeway in customer satisfaction. Not too shabby.

The Economic Downturn Hits Everyone – Including Publix

Just everyone else, global economic problems impact Publix just like everyone else. From a marketing point-of-view, this poses some real problems. Unlike the other player in town, Walmart, Publix is not “the home of low prices” and would probably lose it they tried to compete on that basis (sound familiar?). This means that they’ve got to try something else to keep people coming in and buying their products.

As a company, Publix’s simple philosophy stresses customer service. This focus is helping it through the current tough economic times. Customer service is not something that you can go out an buy, but when you are offering a “shopping experience” like Publix is, it can be very important. Quick question: do you know anyone who really likes shopping at Walmart – we all do it, but do we enjoy it?

Publix Product Manger Strategies

Great customer service sounds like something that we’d all like to have, but just how does a product manager go about making that happen? Here’s what Publix is doing to stay competitive:

• They are staying at full staffing levels and lowering prices in hopes of keeping their existing customers and attracting new customers.

• Realizing that they can’t avoid the product cost issues, they have just launched Publix Essentials a program that lowered prices by as much as 20% on staple items such as milk, bread, and laundry detergent. This gives their customers an excuse to continue coming to their store instead of going to Walmart.

• Next, Publix has started programs to suggest meal plans to help customers stay within a budget.

• Publix has resisted cutting back staff in order to offer its customers faster service times.

Final Thoughts

Although you probably don’t control staffing levels at your company, you do have the ability to make a case for having the company focus on customer service for your product. Even if you don’t have the budget left to add more features or roll out a new product line, you can work internally to improve how you support your current customers – and they will end up doing your advertising for you.

Customer service is important now and will only become more important than ever as more companies enter your product’s marketplace. If you can use this “quiet” time to improve the level of customer service that comes with buying your product, then you will have found out how great product managers make their product(s) fantastically successful.

Questions For You

What do your customers currently think about your product’s customer serivice? Do they complain? Do they complement? Do you know the people in your company who provide customer service – do they know you? What one thing do you think that the company could do to improve your product’s level of customer service? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As a result of attending ProductCamp NYC I’ve been asked a lot more questions recently about how Product Mangers can avoid making mistakes with their products. Half of that answer is to make sure that you understand the fundamentals of Product Management. The other half is to learn from the mistakes of others. Like the big mistake Pepsi made when they tried to change their Gatorade product…

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Is Your Product's Logo Working For Or Against You?

So I’m going to guess that you are pretty comfortable with your product by now. You know what it does, you know what it doesn’t do. You feel that you’ve got a pretty good grasp of how your customers view your product. Maybe that’s a problem. Is it time for you to shake things up a bit and redesign your product’s logo?

About That Logo

Not every product has a logo; however, they all should. If you are lucky enough to be in charge of a product that has a logo (or will be someday), then you’ll have to redesign the logo sometime. The most common time that logo changes are considered is when a product’s name is changed. However, even if this is not the case, then the question that you’ve got to be asking yourself is “is this logo working for me?” If your logo has lost its appeal and is no longer being noticed by your customers, then perhaps it’s time to consider a change.

What Needs To Go?

Every logo redesign needs to reflect the current times. Bill Marsh over at the New York Times has looked into what other companies are doing and he’s got some tips for product mangers everywhere. In these tough times, companies that have company or product names that are all UPPER CASE are redesigning their logo to include lower case letters in order to come across as being more friendly.

Walmart & Kraft Have Redesigned Their Logos To Appear More Friendly

Extras That Help A New Logo

As with everything in life, just changing letters to lower case isn’t enough these days. You still have to pick your colors. John Bredenfoerder is a color expert and he says that colors that communicate joy and happiness are “in” right now – what better way to uplift people during hard economic times?

Additionally, companies have all flocked to the color green in order to communicate how “eco-friendly” their products are, no matter what the product is! Additional current color favorites include electric blue, school bus yellow, and of course, red, purple, orange and green.

Final Thoughts

A logo is not going to sell your product. Instead, your product’s features, your customer service, and the price will be what makes up your customer’s mind. However, while the customer is shopping around, a well designed logo can be the thing that sticks in their mind and causes them to come back to your product for another look. Perhaps a logo redesign is just what you need in order to make your product fantastically successful…!

Questions For You

Are you happy with your product’s / company’s current logo? If you could redesign the text, how would you change it? Why? What changes would you make to it graphics? What colors would you use? Why? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In this crazy mixed-up world that we live in, it’s the words that can often trip us up. For those of us who’s products are software products, often our products come with some carefully chosen words that inform our customers that we have not “sold” them our product, but rather we have “licensed” it to them. What’s the difference?

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Successful Product Web Sites Get People Talking About Your Product

So there you stand: somehow you’ve managed to convince the powers that be that your product needs to have its very own web site (or an upgrade to the one that it already has) in order to attract the masses of customers who would be buying it today if only they knew that it existed. Where to start: embedded flash? viral videos? There’s just too many choices! Here’s a wake-up call for you – your site’s success depends on four non-technical secrets.

Kodak Got It Right

Kodak got it right when they talked about people wanting to create a “Kodak Moment” – in other words, a memorable experience. Marc Levitt from the MSLK graphic design firm knows a thing or two about creating product web sites that work. He says that your customers need to be rewarded with something new every time they visit or click on something on your product’s web site.

This means that you need to spend some time planning what your customer’s experience on your product’s site is going to be. What’s the first thing that they will see? How will they navigate? Do you have great and informative content?

Call Now – Operators Are Standing By!

As with so many other things in life, the key to the ultimate success of your product’s web site lies in how you go about promoting it. Just turning up a new web site and hoping that the rest of the world finds it is not going to cut it. You are going to have to create a marketing plan that will drive people to your new web site. Argh – even more work for the product manager!

Join The Search Patrol

Search has two parts to it that you need to consider: internal and external. Internally, you need to have an easy-to-use way for your visitors to search your web site in order to find exactly what they are looking for. Externally you need to design your product’s web site in such a way as to maximize its Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Bring In The Pros

In every company there is somebody that is a wiz at setting up web sites. There may also be a PhotoShop master on board. However, because having a high quality web site for your product requires such a mix of technical, artistic, and marketing skills, this might be one time that you should reach out and bring in a pro.

Don’t think that you can just open the yellow pages (do those still exist?) and find the perfect firm for you. Instead, you’ll have to reach out to several design firms and have a talk with them. Review the sites that they’ve created in the past and determine which firm will do the best job for your product.

Final Thoughts

There is no doubt that the Internet can play a key part in the success of any product. How you tell the world about your product on the web is almost as important as how you tell people about it face-to-face.

Taking the time to get the non-technical parts of your web site correct is just as important as picking and using the right web technologies. Do this right and you’ll make your product fantastically successful.

Questions For You

Is your product’s current web site memorable? Why or why not? What do you think would be the best way for  you to promote a new web site for your product? Are you doing any SEO techniques for your current web site? Who created you last web site – was it done internally or did you hire a pro? Did that project go well? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As though the job of being a Product Manager was not hard enough, there’s also that added responsibility that you have to manage your career. With all of the turmoil of the past couple of years, it’s now more important than ever for Product Managers to find the time to tend to this task…

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Product Manager, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brand management, content, customer, customer relationship, customers, features, Internet, Marc Levitt, MSLK, navigation, new products, Pixar, product, product manager, products, Sales, splash page, web, web site, web site design, web site redesign, wireframe

Updating A Product's Web Site Requires Buy-in And Customer Input

The promise of the Internet in it’s early days was that it was “always on“. This meant that as you worked on other things (and slept), your product’s web site was always out there selling, selling, selling your product to whomever happened to be looking at it. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Why Isn’t Your Web Site Working For Your Product?

Over time we’ve all discovered the harsh reality of life that not all web sites are created equal – some work, and some don’t. For some odd reason, we always seen to be checking out the web site of products that compete against our product and our heart is filled with envy.

According to Marc Levitt from the MSLK graphic design firm, there are a number of WRONG way to go about correcting this problem and just a few  RIGHT ways to do it. Let’s see if we can get some guidance on what to do after you’ve created a plan for updating your product’s web site.

Don’t Go It Alone – Get Buy-In

Just like when you are developing a new product, it’s critical that you get inputs from everyone who will be affected by your redesigned product web site. The reason for doing this is because if you don’t, then there is  a very good chance that a major stakeholder will show up at the last minute and either kill your plans or end up changing everything that you’ve agreed to.

Get Customer Input

Is this starting to sound more and more like new product development? You wouldn’t go out and create a new product without talking with your customers, so why would you change your product’s web site without talking with them? Specifically, you want to find out what is and is not working with the current design. Your customers are the only ones who can tell you this.

Provide A Freshness Guarantee

What’s the ultimate goal of your product’s web site? Hopefully it’s to increase sales. However, you can’t expect your customers to buy the first time that they visit your product’s site. Instead, you’re going to have to assume that they’ll have to visit it several times while they make up their minds. This means that you need to keep the content of your web site up-to-date and make sure that there is fresh material there on a regular basis. Remember: content is king

Final Thoughts

Your product’s web site can do what you once dreamed that it would do for you: promote your product 24×7. However, an out-of-date web site that was designed years ago and which hasn’t been updated since then won’t be able to do this. Carefully planning an upgrade by working with ALL stakeholders and customers to create a new design that you keep fresh with updated content is your ticket to product success.

Questions For You

Are you happy with the current web site for your product? If you could change only one thing about it, what would it be? When it was originally built, was customer input collected? How about input from all of the major stakeholders? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So there you stand: somehow you’ve managed to convince the powers that be that your product needs to have its very own web site in order to attract the masses of customers who would be buying it today if only they knew that it existed. Where to start: embedded flash? viral videos? Here’s a wake-up call for you – your site’s ultimate success depends on four non-technical secrets.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to the brand-new The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available.

It’s your career – it’s your product.

Subscribe to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter now:
Click Here!

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Building Web Sites Is Hard, Building Web Sites That Work For Your Product Is Harder

Who doesn’t love the Internet? I mean you’re reading this blog posting on the Internet so YOU spend time here – doesn’t the rest of the world do the same thing? Sure there are lots of things that you can do to promote your product just by using web-based social networking tools, but what about a site for your product?

If you can get over the daydream of you becoming and overnight billionaire by inventing the next Google / Facebook / Twitter and instead focus on your product for just a moment, the possibilities seem endless. But where to start?

The Wrong Way To Build A Product Web Site

I’m going to bet that your firm already has a web site that talks about your product in some shape or form. I’m also going to hazard a guess that you’re not terribly happy with the way that it looks or works (or doesn’t) today.

According to Marc Levitt from the MSLK graphic design firm, the WRONG way to go about correcting this problem is to just charge on in and decide that by adding Flash / Air / XML to your site everything will be better.

In fact, Marc says that the #1 mistake that most firms make is to start a product’s web site design / redesign without having a clear plan of what they want to accomplish.

It’s All About The Plan, Man

You better than anyone else should know that you should never start ANY project without having at least some sort of plan. When it comes to promoting your product on a web site there are all sorts of key issues that you need to answer in your plan such as how to easily navigate the site, what kind of content you want to include, and how you want to go about marketing your product.

When planing out how your web site is going to look / work, you’ll want to create what is called a “wireframe“. This is basically a text version of your web site, sorta like a blueprint of a building, that lays out how your product’s web site will work BEFORE you invest in building the real deal. Needless to say, this is the correct time to make changes to the design – it will be much more expensive to change things later on.

Forget The Technology, Focus On The Message

Have you ever seen one of those Pixar movies? What’s interesting is that they are not the only company making great looking animated movies. However, they are the best at doing it. The reason for this is because even though they use fantastic technology to create their movies they have never forgotten the key to a great movie – it’s all about the story.

When it comes to your product’s web site, it’s all about the story – not the technology. Just because your competition has created a spectacular “splash page” that has everyone talking about how cool it is, don’t allow yourself to become distracted. Marc reminds us that a site that is easy to navigate and that has been designed well always wins over a site with the latest in cool technology.

Next Steps

Marc has more suggestions for us; however, you’ve got plenty to work with for now. The #1 place to start is to create a good plan that will deliver to you a web site that actually works for your product. It may be very hard to resist wanting to load your new web site with every new technology out there just to give it a great “look”, but resist you must. Ease of navigation and good content will win the race every time.

Questions For You

Do you think that your product’s web site is working for you today? Why or why not? If you could change one thing on your product’s web page, what would it be? Last time you updated your product’s web site, did you create a plan before the project was started? How did it all turn out? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The promise of the Internet in it’s early days was that it was “always on“. This meant that as you worked on other things (and slept), your product’s web site was always out there selling, selling, selling your product to whomever happened to be looking at it. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

P.S.: Free subscriptions to the brand-new The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available.

It’s your career – it’s your product.

Subscribe to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter now:
Click Here!

No related posts.

© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental Product Manager, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brand management, content, customer, customer relationship, customers, features, Internt, Marc Levitt, MSLK, navigation, new products, Pixar, product, product manager, products, Sales, splash page, web, web site, web site design, web site redesign, wireframe