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Marketing, Competition

· educationproduct management

First things first

Last week was marked with the most successful event in the last 4 months – we managed to arrive (and pass all customs and checks) in Portugal. We're planning to spend 2 weeks here doing literally nothing except chilling on the beach, eating good food (us) and surfing & continuing Product Management courses (Emil).

I've always wanted to try working on a product of my own while being able to surf in the mornings (or evenings) and this is the closest I've got, let's see if I like it or not.

Week 2 in education

This week was about conducting several more interviews with your personas and validating hypotheses and learning new stuff. I had 3 personas, which didn't turn out to be useful – I had to combine the 1st and 2nd ones as they were very similar and now I have 2 in total, which seems to be addressable. Nevertheless I will keep thinking of Jobs To Be Done and personas I could come up.

Marketing is the topic (and I've spent 6-7 years doing all types of online marketing and thought of myself as being really good) and it turned out to be quite interesting.

There are several things I've noted to myself and found quite interesting as action items:

  • your growth drivers: define who will be driving your market growth? who you should be investing into to make your market grow? Imagine you're opening a real estate online product. Your drivers may be landlords, agencies, real estate agents, clients, etc. The ones who drive the growth would most probably be real estate agents as they are the ones who publish the most listings on your website.
  • competition: whenever you launch something it makes sense to do some digging into your competitors. Pay attention to not only including direct competitors, but also indirect, potential and other possible competitors. In the example above this would be not only online players like portals, agencies, but also real agencies, forums, facebook groups, estate agents themselves. You can monitor competitors using google alerts, crunchbase, mention.com.
  • strategy canvas: having found out your competitors, you need to identify the client purchasing decision factors in your market. Think of all parameters that are important for a client / customer and list them out. Then rank your competitors (and ideally yourself) in each of those. You should see the bigger picture – where your competitors have lower marks – and this could be your competitive advantage
  • 'being local' rule: this I've heard of and seen a lot before but feel this should be reiterated. Think globally, act locally: whenever you're doing creatives you should be thinking with local terms, using local people, etc.
  • testimonials are tremendously successful: no explanation needed. Real-life user feedback works as magic
  • don't overcomplicate things: your communication should be easily understandable by your grandmother or anyone else. Keep this in mind.

Jotted down

Marketing Service types
4 categories of service
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