The product development phase is composed of three important elements:
- Innovation
- Creation
- Promotion
However, many times, companies will struggle to identify potential marketing opportunities. Your product development and marketing strategy will not only drive innovation but will implement long-term growth as well.
This empowers organizations to respond to changing environments, leverage emerging technologies, and maintain customer loyalty. However, there’s much more to this than that.
In this article, we’ll dive deeper into learning about each step that you can undertake to create a successful product development and marketing strategy.
Conduct product and market research with a survey tool
Using surveys for product and market research is an effective strategy. It helps you gather insights to accompany you across all product development stages. Despite the wide range of online survey software choices, your planning, designing, distributing, and analyzing results will strictly depend on the tools you use.
Therefore, to make sure you’re on the right path, we’ve come up with a list of the best survey tools for research that you can use:
- Hubble: This tool is free to use, and offers a custom enterprise plan with flexible pricing options. It’s great for in-product surveys and user targeting.
- Qualtrics: Available upon request, and is great for Enterprise surveys and custom Scripting.
- Alchemer: Offers a free trial with a basic plan starting at $55 per user per month. Alcheemr is best if you are looking to include CRM integration and Enterprise Surveys.
- Typeform: Offers a free option, but if you are looking for more advanced features, pricing plans begin at $29 per month. Typeform is well-known for offering interactive surveys and advanced design capabilities.
- Google Forms: Are easy to use and free. Many times, there’s no need to use the paid plan, and the great part is that you get full integration with Google Workspace.
Before choosing your survey tool, it’s important to see if it meets your business requirements. For example, wise to compare prices as there are tools that sometimes offer more features with cheaper plans available.
Use the help of AI video generators for product marketing
An AI video generator tool is used for creating professional videos from text with the help of an AI assistant. They’re great for product marketing purposes and can help reduce time consumption and the cost of video production.
AI video generation makes it easier to share knowledge in the form of engaging video content and offers you the following benefits:
- Cost-effective solution: Minimizes production costs without reducing your video’s creativity and content quality
- Streamlines your video production: Accelerates the video creation process with the help of an AI assistant
- No need for technical skills: AI video generators do all the work for you, and don’t require you to have any technical knowledge about creating videos
- Innovation: Allows you to stay ahead of the curve in such a competitive online world with the latest AI video generation technology
AI video generators have changed the way we promote our products, and also include AI translations, which will help your audience from all over the world understand your product promotion.
Nearly 20% of the global population speak English, so this means that if you’re targeting a global audience, 8/10 people who visit your site won’t speak fluent English. Therefore, AI translations are highly important and helpful when it comes to getting your message across.
Use cloud service providers (CSP) to accelerate product development
Cloud service providers (CSP) are great to use for your product development process since it help accelerate innovation, reduce unnecessary costs, and make sure that all product issues are addressed during the development phase before product launch.
CSPs reduce product development times by using modern research and development (R&D) infrastructure, reducing the development cycle, and using virtual testing more often. There are three key benefits that cloud service providers grant you:
- High-performance computing: Through HPC, you can solve complicated issues by using a model-based design and large-scale simulations.
- Reduces product development costs: CPU, GPU, and FPGA servers on demand in your cloud can reduce product development costs.
- Improves team collaboration: Grants your engineers access to centralized data and computing power in your cloud, which allows your team members to work at the maximum speed, regardless of where they are. Centralized cloud access allows team members to collaborate more effectively compared to having to email data files and use file-sharing websites.
There are many cloud providers available on the market, and with so many options, you mighn’t know where to start. That’s why we’re here to show you some of the best cloud service providers available that you can choose from:
- Google Cloud: The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) holds 1/10 of the world’s CSP market share. It’s well-known for its advantages in AI and handling big data. Most of Google Cloud’s technological solutions are open-source. Compared to competitors, it’s a smaller CSP, but can effectively maintain strategically placed data centers in order to provide low-latency services.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): When talking about CSPs, you’ll hear AWS frequently. AWS is capable of solving your cloud use cases through computing power, virtual machines, cloud storage, IoT, machine learning capabilities, and more. AWS stands out from competitors with the Reserved Instances (RIs) feature that offers usage time at a discounted price. Loyal customers who’ve used AWS for a while will get access to the Enterprise Discount Program (EDP). The discounts granted by AWS make your product development processes much more cost-efficient and reduce the product development time frame.
- SAP: If you want to fasten your product development cycle, SAP is the right choice to go with. SAP offers the EPD plan, which accelerates the product development time. This happens by providing a single source of truth for product data, a 360-degree overview for better data insights and decisions, and software as a service (SaaS) support for collaborative ideas to improve the market process.
- Jatheon: Their AWS-based Jatheon Cloud platform is known for its simplicity, robust features, and efficiency, combining an intuitive interface with powerful archiving capabilities. Jatheon offers a cloud-based data archiving solution for businesses in regulated industries, providing essential compliance features. With a user-friendly design and fair pricing, Jatheon is ideal for organizations seeking cloud archiving solutions to overcome complexity and high costs.
Cloud solutions are always a cost-effective option when it comes to refining your product development process. They operate as a pay-as-you-go option and get rid of overhead expenses.
Categorize your competitors
You can never know how good you are until you know who your competitors are. Every market has different competitors, and it’s important to understand how you compare against them. Create a list of products they have, scan their website to see how you can differentiate, and figure out what kind of content they’re posting on their social media networks.
Competitors can be classified into three categories:
- Main competitors: They have the same product and audience you do. For example, some of Amazon’s main competitors are eBay, Alibaba, Walmart, Otto, and AliExpress.
- Secondary competitors: This includes competitors that are selling similar products to yours, but have a slightly different audience. For example, McDonald’s secondary competitor is Subway. They don’t sell the exact same product but they’re both in the fast-food industry.
- Tertiary competitors: These are the most interesting competitors since they have the same target audience, but aren’t selling the same product. A good example would be Adidas and Gatorade. They are both targeting a sports audience, but not selling the same product.
Competitors need to always be analyzed. Your best option is to separate them into the three categories we mentioned and make sure that you know what their next step is. Competition is healthy and can also help you in your innovation capabilities.
Conduct a SWOT analysis
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Conducting a SWOT analysis is helpful in helping you answer questions you may have never thought about regarding your product, and how it stands against competitors. Here are some questions you can ask for your SWOT analysis:
- Strengths: What makes you different from your competition? Do you offer any unique features that make you different from them? Are you an innovator, or posting engaging content on your social media channels?
- Weaknesses: What’s the barrier that is stopping you from having a competitive edge? Is it your marketing strategy? A lack of sufficient funds?
- Opportunities: Include all openings you can take advantage of to get in front of your competition.
- Threats: This includes anything that can negatively affect your business, both internally and externally.
A SWOT analysis won’t always be 100% accurate, but it’s setting you up for any eventualities. It’s always great to have a prediction of what might happen. Of course, nobody can entirely know what can happen in the future. However, when you know what might happen, it’s better than not knowing anything at all.
Your product development and marketing strategy is ready to be redefined
There are plenty of approaches in staying updated with market trends and identifying customer behavior for growth opportunities. Overall, you need to utilize your market insights for your product development.Your marketing strategy is the key to enhancing creativity and efficiency in your business.
All product issues that are addressed during the product development phase will give you an advantage in your marketing strategy. This not only promotes a better customer experience but gives you an advantage over competitors as well.