In this Expert Insight Interview, Tyler Elliston discusses marketing to find your product/market fit vs growth. Tyler Elliston is a growth advisor as well as the founder and marketing strategist at Right Side Up, a collective of premium marketing talent.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- The differences between advertising for product/market fit vs growth
- Why businesses often market for growth before having a fully finished product
- How to market for product/market fit
Advertising for Product/Market Fit vs Growth
A lot of early-stage companies look to advertising to grow. Sometimes, however, that happens before the product is ready for it. We can roughly put performance marketing into two categories:
- Pre-product market fit — for when you’re trying to figure out your position on the market
- Marketing for growth
Confusing which stage they’re in is one of the most common challenges for marketers and business owners.
Common Mistakes with Marketing
Unfortunately, it is often encouraged to create your minimum viable product, get things up and running and go to town on marketing as soon as possible. The goal is often to grow your audience and customer base as quickly as you can. The problem is that in this case your product/solution can come out half-baked or not really mapped to any particular market need in the right way.
Part of the problem here is the fact that business owners are often under a lot of pressure to perform in the early stages. There is usually a set window in which investors want to see results, so there’s a need to move as fast as possible and even skip a few crucial steps along the way.
Product Marketing
So, what are some of the things that you can do differently when you market for product/market fit rather than growth? The most important thing is creating a close connection to the customer. This is also often called product marketing and it involves things like doing user research, interviews, surveys, focus groups, etc.
Early on, you want to try and understand what your prospects’ problems are, and the solution you can put in front of them. This stage is extremely customer-centric and very experimental in nature.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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