Build a Customer-First Product Marketing Strategy with Lindsey Dillon
Key Takeaways
- Insights for leveraging customer feedback at every stage of product development
- Strategies for aligning a diverse teams to achieve common objectives
- Techniques to foster creativity and innovation within your marketing team
Listen to Your Customer at Every Stage
An effective approach involves constant engagement with the consumer to ensure the product resonates with their needs and expectations. You should be bringing the customer with you, through the entire journey of building, launch, optimization, growth, and even sunsetting. A systematic, research-based approach will allow your marketing team to deliver a product that meets market demands and grows your customer base. Involving customers early and often ensures a better product-market fit and higher adoption rates.
Build & Optimize Your Product Funnel
Early-stage founders build and optimize better product funnels by leveraging a "pod" structure. This means assembling a diverse, cross-functional team of experts, including a product marketer, product manager, design specialist, engineer, and an analytics expert. By working closely within pods, teams can quickly iterate on product features, ensuring they meet customer needs more efficiently. Rapid iteration, quick learning, and a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach are also valuable ways to de-risk new product launches.
Creating a Culture of Innovation and Creativity
While you scale, focus on creating a psychologically safe environment where team members can feel comfortable expressing themselves and exploring new ideas. As a leader, maintain your own work ethos at every career stage to encourage collaboration and empower team members to take ownership and push the boundaries of what's possible. Tactics for maintaining creativity ( in both in-person and remote work environments) include:
- Sharing inspirational materials and personal context
- Creating a ‘swipe library’ of artifacts that can spark creativity
- Running workshops focused on idea generation and constructive feedback
Meet Your Audience Where They Are
Local advertising, linear TV, and streaming platforms remain the future of ad marketing. As advertising continues to evolve, growth leaders must also evolve their advertising strategy to reach the largest audience possible.
Key Takeaways:
- Keep It Local: The importance resurgence of local advertising highlights the potential for customized and community-driven marketing campaigns
- Innovate Creatively: Streaming services like Netflix are pioneering revolutionary ad units that merge direct response with traditional TV's broad reach
- Measure Cross-Screen: The key to future marketing success lies in the ability to measure and optimize reach across linear, connected TV, and streaming platforms
A Return to Local Advertising
While global and national marketing strategies remain dominant, there's a trending return to the roots of advertising. Local ads have always been crucial in fostering a sense of community and relevance. Current TV network innovations in data management have now made it possible for local broadcasts to offer targeted advertising associated with digital giants like Facebook.
Broaden Your Reach, Hone Your Precision
Local television is defying presumptions of datedness and insignificance by leaning into what makes it unique to begin with—community connectivity. This is something broadcasters can leverage to reach their local audiences more effectively.
Ad Unit Innovation
Conventionally, television ads lean towards broad messaging and are less about direct action. Nowadays, platforms like Netflix are blending the vivid storytelling of TV with interactive units, such as QR codes that keep viewers engaged and enable advertisers to track direct responses to their ads. Through continued creative ad innovation, advertisers on Netflix can now monitor the effectiveness of such innovations, essentially breaching the wall that once separated direct response from broad messaging.
Building a Synergistic Advertising Model
Whether on a streaming platform or a local broadcast, the conception of ads can both capture attention and instigate action. Advertisers stand to benefit from combining the reach of TV with the precision and measurability of digital platforms… Linear TV still remains the most cost-effective channel to reach an audience at scale.