Posted by Imagine that you have worked hard to create a new product that can solve your customers’ problems. Now it’s time to do some pre-launch work to spread the word about this product, get it in front of an audience and highlight its main benefits. You need content marketing to trigger and boost sales and grow brand awareness here.
Consider the main advantages of using content to promote your product:
1. Enhanced brand awareness
Top-quality content attracts more paying customers and improves your brand reputation. Going beyond a hard-sell approach to producing educational content related to your product niche will boost brand awareness and customer satisfaction.
Related: Top 3 Strategies to Sell Without ‘Selling’
2. Better user engagement
Insightful, customer-oriented content is a great tool to advertise your new solution. Case studies, how-to videos and workshops will help keep your audience interested in your new product.
3. Expanded target audience
Beyond attracting loyal customers to a new solution, content can help you expand your target audience through various marketing channels, such as social media, blogs, emails and events. You can interact with customers and prospects by offering them webinars, articles, podcasts, infographics, white papers, etc.
4. Higher conversion rates
According to a Social Media Examiner report, 58% of marketers claimed that written content, such as blog posts and eBooks, performs better than imagery and videos. However, it takes some time to see results from content marketing, so it’s crucial to be patient and keep generating valuable content.
Related: 5 Ways to Effectively Utilize Marketing Collaborations
The stages of promoting a new product with content marketing
1. Define a problem
For starters, you must research to identify a problem your customers face and show them how your new solution will improve their lives. Why should your audience be interested in your offer? It’s vital to be customer-focused by aligning your solution with a real-life situation, as this ensures that your audience will understand your offer’s value.
2. Build and announce a new product
During this stage, as the product team builds a solution, marketing specialists create educational materials that show customers how to use the product and gather feedback to polish the solution. Taking the following steps will spark your customers’ interest:
a. Give teasers: Inform your subscribers about the upcoming launch and tease them with some unique features of your solution. You can use social media posts, blog notes and emails.
b. Announce the product launch: Further intrigue customers by telling them about features you have not yet mentioned. Remember to include some attention-grabbing product photos. This is a fantastic time to offer content like webinars, live product demonstrations, guest posts, testimonials from opinion leaders, press releases and how-to materials.
c. Provide product release content: Tell your subscribers the product has been released and explain how to get it. Use your blog, social media and email messages to attract as many users as possible.
d. Follow up: Some customers may forget or miss some of your content. Remind them via email that they can still check out your new release.
3. Keep promoting
After a successful launch, you still have work to do. Continue nourishing your audience with educational content that describes your product’s features and enables customers to get the most out of it. We recommend posting two to three pieces of content weekly between four and six weeks after your launch date.
Related: 5 Steps for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy That Drives Business Results
Our experience: Stripo’s way from a note to an eBook
Creating well-designed content to help customers solve their problems and develop lasting relationships with your audience is vital. Producing content is essential preparation for transforming your idea into a finished product.
Below, we share our experience to demonstrate how our email design platform made its way from a simple note to an eBook on email gamification.
Step 1. Notes
Notes are a great way to initially communicate with your audience and gather feedback on your new product idea. This content is written quickly and shared with readers immediately.
We recorded a video that shared our thoughts on using email gamification. Then, we crafted a Facebook post that shared the experiences of some who have benefited from it. Finally, we published a note on our blog presenting first-rate email gamification examples.
Step 2. Articles
Articles are much more comprehensive than notes. This content covers a subject from various angles and enables you to develop an idea. In our article, we discussed the importance of email gamification, shared results from other companies, and emphasized the traits of a good game (providing examples).
Step 3. Scaling
The main goal of this stage is to distribute your content to a broader audience. You can make this happen through guest posts, white papers, podcasts, live streams, workshops and webinars. It’s a great time to update your previous articles with new data, create checklists for customers to help them get the most out of your product and conduct interviews and surveys.
After we sent our subscribers our first gamified email, our sales increased by 200%. We then sent a gamified Easter email, which generated more sales than its HTML version. Finally, we sent an email sequence to more than 100,000 subscribers.
Related: Want to Increase Sales? Think Deeper About What You’re Really Selling
Step 4. Product solution
At this stage, it’s time to identify your product solution to a problem, share manuals that demonstrate how the product works and create workshops and courses.
After determining our product solution (i.e., gamification mechanics, data sources and data service), we produced a variety of how-to content, asked other brands to use it, gathered their feedback, polished the product and created an email gamification manual. We also ran a workshop to share a checklist and show how to use gamification.
Step 5. eBook
This stage organizes all the materials and knowledge you have collected. Our eBook covers the problem formalization, research methods, scientific novelty, our product’s uniqueness, analysis of results and approbation.
Our eBook also includes theoretical and practical materials, social proof, tips on how to use email gamification properly and ready-to-use mechanics. We also wrote a press release, interviewed influencers and hosted several workshops.