Product is Your Best Marketing Channel

Marketing efforts fail for many reasons. Poor targeting, messaging fails to resonate, positioning isn’t flattering, and on and on. But perhaps the easiest way for marketing to fail is to have your marketing promise not be met by product.

If your product is designed to things such as make home shopping easier, get funding faster, reduce stress in managing properties, or even have a quick set up—but it can’t do that a high-majority of the time—then your marketing is likely to fail.

Product must fulfill the promise marketing makes. This is how expectations remain aligned and people feel happy about an experience.

Amy Bohutinsky joined Zillow to lead their public launch as CMO. She later became COO and is now Board Director. She credits the product for much of Zillow’s early success in gaining traction—not marketing.

In an interview a few years ago with Andrew Flachner (RealScout Co-founder & President) Bohutinsky said, “We realized the absolute best possible marketing you can do is [to] build a product people love, and they want to talk about, and want to tell others about.” She went on to detail how marketing and product worked together for continued success.

I know I’ve advertised this newsletter as a marketing-focused newsletter, so I won’t be attempting to tell you how to “build a product people love, they want to talk about, and want to tell others about”…per se…but, I’ve learned a few things over the years that can help you achieve this.

How Marketing Can Help Product Help Marketing

It’s not helpful to your marketing efforts for me to summarize this all in saying, “Build the best product, and all will be well.” Therefore, here’s a few practical ways your marketing team can help product, help marketing:

• Establish goals or milestones that are shared by both marketing and product to help align efforts and incentives.

• Share search data from your search ads and articles—this helps the product team know what problems people are looking for in their Google searches.

• Raise visibility of product reviews from reviews sites, Google, and other directories to help the product team see real-time wins and missed opportunities.

• Collect customer feedback (both on the product, but also other topics related to the product); sort and report the findings back to your product team.

• Share all marketing tests’ data with your product team—even down to headlines or image A/B tests.

• Archive brand mentions on social media and community forums so the team can read what people say about the product without being prompted.

This is just the start. Even if your marketing team is a team of one (or if you, the founder, are the marketing team), you can put together the systems and automations for much of this data collection and reporting to be done with low amounts of effort (leverage tools like IFTTT and Zapier). When you reach the point of building out your marketing team, this is an area your product marketer(s) can take ownership of.

This can help with deciding on where to deploy resources and effort, such as adding the right product improvements, solving critical tech debt, or killing distracting features. Marketing and product collaboration can reduce waste, both in terms of time and dollars.

Marketing depends on product to succeed, but marketing should be expected to help product, help marketing.

Proptech News

• Roofr Raises $23.5M in Funding to Build Out the End-to-End Roofing Software

• Anyplace, a startup aimed at giving “digital nomads” a comfortable place to work, says new round “nearly doubled” valuation (raised $8.27M)

• Rent Prices Dip for Fifth Straight Month

• Track Expands Hospitality Software Portfolio to Reduce Tech Footprint for Short-Term Rental Companies

• Airbnb Eyes Longer-Term Rentals

Weekly Podcast Feature

Vacation Rental Operations and Management with Jeremey Gall, CEO of Breezeway

In this episode of Tech Nest, Jeremy Gall, Co-founder and CEO of Breezeway, joins us to discuss short-term rentals. Jeremy kicks us off with detailing what owners need to know in order to operate a successful vacation rental.

I had to get Jeremy to comment on topics such as if there's going to be an Airbnb crash and flood of residential properties hitting the for sale market (hint: neither of us believe that's likely to happen).

Of course, we get into the nitty-gritty as to how Breezeway is creating a web-based software for vacation rental managers to be more successful in their operations, the need for integrations (such as Breezeway's latest with Airbnb), and future potentials of AI in the STR and hospitality industry. This one is a doozie—listen in!

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