Great products don’t sell itself | Angie Jones (Fractional CMO)
It can, but scalability of the idea is very limited. Marketing’s job is to communicate the value & product’s job is to deliver the value.
Welcome to the 1st newsletter for 2024 and 57th edition.
Imagine this:
You are working on completing this task that has been bugging you for so long and there’s no solution for the problem. So you take matters into your own hands and try to build a possible solution for it.
It lights up a great moment for you that now you have a great startup idea.
You immediately start working on it… strategising on how you’ll build it, what will require you to build it, the time that it will take and what can be the result.
You hire a few people to coordinate building it with you…things are going great and in a few weeks you’ll launch a fully functional product ready for people to use.
Now, you’re happy that things work out and all you have to do is market the product and customers will come because your product is perfect.
Boom!!🤯
It’s been 3 months and all you’ve been doing is making the product more usable for each new (potential) customer that comes by…but made no actual sale.
Don’t want to disappoint but this is how most founders build a product - build a great product and word-of-mouth will work.
Yet in reality, you’re building a process that requires a strong understanding of customers and a strategy-loop.
Last week, I chatted with fellow Fractional CMO, Angie Jones - also Director of Marketing - and we discussed building a customer-centric product that will push you to think beyond just building a (perfect) product.
She started as a publisher bringing a strong hold on content & deep insight into a customer-centric approach, then joined a pet healthcare company as a marketer and now as a Director of Marketing in a manufacturing company.
Aside from her full-time marketing leadership role, she’s transitioning into a Fractional CMO - with a focus on the e-commerce industry.
With several years of experience, she also has strong hands-on team building, marketing strategy and developing content marketplace.
Let’s jump into the highly summarized conversation we had!
In this crowded market, especially for the e-commerce industry that heavily depends on social media platforms like Meta, TikTok, Instagram & ads for content distribution we hardly see any organic growth. How do we develop a sustainable distribution channel here?
So true that we are moving towards more spending on ads than organic content to get attention. First is to start by talking to your customers, knowing where they hang out, what they are talking about actively and making conversation with the audience to decide which platform can be the right fit.
Once the platform has been discovered, you can always go for paid ads. With my last company, we had the advantage that we knew & understood the customers very well and had a great team that built a content marketplace. So at the time of the pandemic when everyone was going online shopping it made more sense to develop and expand this system with collective teamwork and we saw tremendous growth through content and ad distribution.
What is your way of getting those insights from the customers and making sure it’s aligned within the teams? For example, most sales teams conduct customer interviews, how does the marketing team make sure they have enough material from them?
The best thing is to have one collective document where both teams put their information and structure it in a form. Suppose a marketing team needs more information from the customers. In that case, they can leave specific questions to the sales team while conducting the interview and then the sales team makes the conversation more open-ended and lets the information flow rather than making it look like Q&A.
The information gathered from the customers will be used to develop not only the marketing strategy but product roadmap and will support overall company growth. That’s why I highly emphasise building a customer-centric approach.
Why is e-commerce your current focus and what’s the opportunity you see in there?
A lot of online stores have been overly reliant on pay-per-click advertising, and understandably so, as it's always been so affordable. But with the current threats to third-party cookies, combined with increasing customer concerns over privacy and an election year that's likely to eat up digital ad inventory, smart digital brands are building out other ways to connect with customers. There are a lot of tactics around this - content, email, SMS, customer advisory boards, etc., but they are all rooted in building a relationship with customers beyond the transaction.
With my expertise in customer-centric approach and creating content that has a strong understanding of customers, many things can be done in this industry. I start by developing strategies, building a marketing foundation and the right approach where brands can launch their product, find a distribution channel and meet revenue goals.
Once a founder said to me that they were going to focus on perfecting & building an excellent product so that the product sells itself. If the app is perfect customers are going to come themselves. What would you say about this?
Firstly, it’s vital to have an excellent product with strong functionalities that can help differentiate it from the market and to have a product that delivers the value that the customer really wants. If you don’t have a great product even marketing can’t save you.
But let’s not overlook that to sustain and grow in any industry and in such a crowded market - where there are far more better alternatives available - building a strong brand requires understanding your customers.
You must know if there is any need for your product, who will buy and convince them that you have the best option available. For all of this, building a strong marketing foundation is where you begin.
A great product and strong marketing go hand in hand.
Thanks for reading! Until next time!
Ritika 👋
Additional Reading 🔗
Align your team for key insights 🎯
Freemium or Free Trial: What's for your SaaS?
Should you hire a CMO or growth marketer?
Missing out on product positioning at the early stage
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