Let me start with a question (I love starting my blog posts with questions) and I hope you will have enough time to answer it: What is more important for you: Marketing or Product? Social Media or Product? Advertising or Product?
I know your answer is biased, according to what your job is right now. Because if you are a marketer, than it’s the marketing; if you are a social media manager, than it’s social media and if you are a product manager, it’s the product. But let me rephrase that: What’s the basis of your company/business? Product or Marketing? Product or Social Media? Product or Advertising? See…now we have a new perspective on this issue.
I’m afraid that if your intent regarding this blog post was to read about tips and tricks on growth hacking or social media marketing, you will close this page and move forward with your daily routine. I just want you to understand that the most important thing in your business is not your marketing, your advertising, your facebook status, or how many followers you got on Twitter. It’s the product, that supports every other strategy and department.
Everybody in your company works for one thing – the product. The driver tries to drive the car as fast as he (legally) can to optimize the time and make it to the destination in time. The marketing department works on how to promote and push forward the product to potential customers. The customer service department works with the clients who complain about the product and helps them solve their problems. We can talk about the company structure every day, but notice one thing: there is one important word in every sentence – The Product. The basis of every action is the product.
And when I’m talking about the product, I mean the core cause you are doing whatever you are doing every day at your job.
THE PRODUCT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN MARKETING
I’m sorry dear marketer fellows, but this is the real truth. You can’t do marketing without a product. You can’t do great marketing with just any product. You need a good product to do good marketing. In today’s society in which the customer has the power in his pocket (yes, I’m talking about the mobile phone) and has the chance to connect with everybody, anytime, everywhere, you need to focus more on your product than on your marketing.
I really love the answer that Joe McCambley gave in our interview
If marketers thought about the interactions between their products and messages the way Asimov envisioned interactions between robots and humans, the world would be a much better, and much more interesting and creative place. I’ve always felt that the best digital marketing is designed to be as infinitely helpful and useful to consumers as Asimov’s robots are.
Now think about this quote:
“the best digital marketing is designed to be as infinitely helpful and useful to consumers”
and start thinking about your marketing. Is it helpful?
THE PRODUCT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN CONTENT MARKETING
For my dear content marketers who are reading this blog post: Let me tell you something that will be really disturbing for you and maybe you will not be agree with me – your job is not as important as you think it is. Yes, you are telling great stories and we love it. Yes, you can connect with the people that are reading and engaging with your stories. But the main puropose of everything you do is the product. So if you have a shitty product and you package it in a beautiful and sharable content but at the end of the day the product is just shitty, the customers will figure it out. You should never forget that your product is more important than your content and ask yourself today: How can I make my product be more helpful for the customers?
THE PRODUCT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SOCIAL MEDIA
For my beloved social media marketers who think that they rule the world with their social media strategy and everything out there, let me tell you something – you are working too hard to gain a lot of numbers, followers, like, reach, engagement, shares, retweets and so on. I have the same question for you too, and please stop watching your smartphone right now, and think about it. How can you help your product with social media? Keep on working on these social media platforms, understand how they work and more than this, try to understand the customer behavior. Yes, you can drive sales and reach customers with these tools, but at the end of the day, the product is the most important thing you should focus on. How did you help your product today?
THE PRODUCT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ADVERTISING
Last, but not least, are the advertisers (digital or traditional). I know that your purpose is to track down potential customers and to make them come in the store and just like that, your job is done. But if you’re focusing on advertising alone, I think your job is pointless. How much time do you spend thinking about the actual product? Is it more than the time spent thinking about the advertising strategy? How much time do you invest in research and ideas about how this product can be helpful for people?
Here at Bannersnack we are working everyday to make our product the best app that you can use for banner design and banner advertising. We want to optimize marketers’ time, we want to reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place and we work hard to keep our product the center of our work. And let me tell you a secret: everytime I open my laptop and connect with the world, I think about this simple question: How can Bannersnack be helpful today?
In conclusion, I want to leave you with a simple question
How can your product be more helpful today?
Originally published at www.bannersnack.com/blog on April 21, 2015
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