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