Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz
| @randfish | rand@moz.com The Art of Product Marketing How to attract, entice, and convert the right audience for the product(s) and company you’re creating.

Why Do Startups (and new
products) Fail?

CB Insightscompiledan analysis from startup
post- mortems. I’d argue these 5 are mostly “couldn’t find enough customers” or “couldn’t affordably find customers”

“Lean Startup”methodologyteachesus to builda productpeopleactually
want and willuse: From Eric Ries’ slide deck on The Lean Startup

But it misses howto market
and growan audienceof rightcustomers so our product can scale… From Eric Ries’ slide deck on The Lean Startup What’s after the MVP?

Identifying
the Right Customers

I’ll use 10K’as an example
to illustrate

Who wants this product and
is already seeking it out?

What else is our audience
searching for? And what else do they use to describe this problem? Note: AdWords’ numbers should be viewed as ranges, not absolutes (e.g. 880 might mean 300-1,200 actual searches/month)

AdWords hides many searches that
Google thinks are non- commercial, so use Suggest + Related, too.

Search queries can often lead
to great sources of audience and customer discovery And, next year, 10K’ should be on this list! This can help tell us what matters to reviewers & customers

Once you have real people
signing up for your product, you can learn more about them

Now we just need to
find out where people like this guy hang out

Have a community & can
find/recruit folks excited about your product? Do that!

Then you can survey this
audience to identify their clones 

Targeting the Right Audience in
the Right Places

SEO & PPC for relevant
keywords are obvious starting points On average, paid results get ~18% of search clicks Organic gets ~82%

Smart marketers invest throughout the
funnel, to maximize opportunity

Facebook’s ad creator can give
some sense of audience size for many fields/interests

SimilarWeb Pro can show you
where other sites get their traffic (relatively accurate except for the long tail) Via SimilarWeb Pro

SimilarWeb can also show search
keywords: Via SimilarWeb Pro The KWs sites pay for are most often those that convert best

And referring/social media traffic: Via
SimilarWeb Pro These sites can lead you to potential press opportunities, content ideas, partnerships, etc.

Don’t be too biased to
invest only in Google or Facebook – there are tons of opportunities Many products’ entire, very successful, strategies fit into channels w/ <0.1% of global web traffic.

Attracting an Audience to Your
Platform

The 5 Paths toAudienceAttraction: The
Product Itself Network & Viral/WoM PaidAdvertising Influencers, Press, & PR Content + Search, Social, Email, et al.

Using the Product Itself: How’d
they do that?!

Using the Product Itself: The
product is naturally appealing to Reddit’s audience, and the visuals fit squarely into the current zeitgeist.

Using the Product Itself:

Using the Product Itself: Unless
you can envision headlines like this about your product, don’t rely solely on the product to sell itself.

Network & Viral / Word-of-Mouth
Everyone who takes a SurveyMonkey survey is a potential future customer

Network & Viral / Word-of-Mouth
Via First Round Capital’s Article on Slack Slack is a product where 1 or 2 people can convince an entire organization to use it.

Network & Viral / Word-of-Mouth
Via Skarp’s Kickstarter page Kickstarter is an inherently WoM & viral-driven marketing Launchpad. Products only get made if people who want them share & amplify.

PaidAdvertising Thanks to retargeting, RLSA,
browser-ID’ing, and social logins, paid ads are more intelligent than ever.

PaidAdvertising Via Recode on DraftKings
& FanDuel

Influencers, Press, & PR Via
Techcrunch on Quora’s Growth Quora has intentionally foregone some forms of growth (SEO notably) to focus on influencers, press, & PR- style partnerships.

Influencers, Press, & PR Via
YouAreAwesome’s Blog Post Urbanspoon needed to compete w/ Yelp’s domination in restaurant reviews, so targeted bloggers who felt left out of Yelp’s ecosystem.

Influencers, Press, & PR BeardBrand
continues to generate great press and has started their own beard-focused magazine.

Content + Search, Social, Email,
et al. Moz invests relentlessly in content strategy & distribution.

Publish Amplify Grow network Rank
for slightly more competitive terms & phrases Get links Grow authority Earn search traffic

Content + Search, Social, Email,
et al. Free tools (& freemium) can be great forms of content marketing. Via Crew.co’s App vs. Website and VoilaNorbert

Nearly every startup & new
product uses a combination of these: The Product Itself Network & Viral/WoM PaidAdvertising Influencers, Press, & PR Content + Search, Social, Email, et al.

Converting
the Right Customers

Remember those people who signed
up for your product & loved it?

We need to identify the
traits that separate customers who’ll use & love our product from those who won’t.

My Favorite Process: From Conversion
Rate Experts’ case study Boom. And Shakalaka.

Didn’t try the product Tried,
but didn’t love it Tried & loved the product What do you think the product does? What made you try it? What made you try it? What would make you more likely to try it? What are your biggest objections to signup? What objections did you have and how did you overcome them? What caused you to stop using the product? What would have made you stay a customer? What objections did you have and how did you overcome them? What’s been most valuable to you? If you’ve loved it, can we share your story?

Retaining, Delighting, & Growing
Amplification

ID usage & profile characteristics
shared by your most loyal users. Encourage & message both in the product, & via external marketing, those traits in the rest of your audience. Recognize & reward, as personally as possible, users that exhibit behaviors that trend toward loyalty & amplification. Don’t be fooled by my oversimplification; this process is even harder than acquisition marketing.

Which marketing channels & tactics
should you invest in?

The Biggest Mistake Companies Make
When Investing in Marketing?

Assuming non-paid media channels work
like paid media: People Pour more dollars & people in + Dollars = IF: ELSE: Positive ROI THEN: Find new channel/tactic

Organic channels, like products themselves,
need time to experiment, fail, learn, & iterate The 1st WB Fridays were some of our worst performing content. But, after years of experimenting, we found a formula & an audience, & now they’re some of our best.

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz
| @randfish | rand@moz.com Bit.ly/productmarketing