Today one of the companies I have been working with released a new and updated product to market. As some of the information in here is confidential, I haven’t mentioned the company name. I thought it would be helpful to other small to medium businesses however, to look at what we did to highlight the importance of the solution and refresh the image of the product and company.
Customer Research: The first thing to do was to understand customers and how they viewed the product. It was music to my ears to hear about the value the solution provided. It is your customers who can tell you what you are good and what you are not good at – so ask them!
Message and Naming: The message of the product had been a technical one, which had worked for the technical audience, but we also wanted to be of interest to those not so technical. So we drew attention to the mission-critical aspect of the product and the importance of the solution.
We also wanted to name the new company – which was a partnership between two companies. Many things need to be taken into consideration here, but we chose an esperanto term, for which there was a free url (crucial in this day and age) and which made sense to the company and product value.
Branding: The logo and look and feel of the brand had not been updated for a while, so we needed to use what we learned above, to define a new logo and look and feel that reflected the power of the product.
Marketing Launch: In a small to medium business – in fact in any business, funds are important. You have to make decisions about where money is spent – do we do flashy videos, or rather descriptive ones, that help our customers understand more easily? Do we want to do big advertising campaigns? Deciding on this is about understanding your audience and where they are. We decided on what we would do based on a mixture of these considerations. At the end of the day, you need to sell your product and deciding what to do is based on insight.
Measure: And finally we will constantly be measuring what has worked, what hasn’t, what customers like and don’t, so that we continue to fine tune the activity into the future.
Of course, there is a lot more I could cover, but I hope this summary has provided some insights and triggered some thoughts for your company. And of course, as a marketing consultant in the Buckinghamshire, Berkshire area, if you’d like help with your branding and marketing, do let me know.
