Build Better Products with Marketing

Building products is expensive. Building the right product, even more so.

Here at LOKAL, we use a few quick tactics to build better products without writing a single line of code or hiring a developer. Marketing tools make it easy to gain rapid insight into the product you want to build or the idea you want to flesh out.

Here are the tactics we use to gain rapid insight and build better products with marketing:

• Sizing the opportunity and the market
• Validating product ideas and features
• Finding the "jobs" for Jobs Theory
• Creating user personas for user thinking

In the sections below, we discuss how you can do these for your products.

1. Finding the market size for your product

Startups looking for investors need to understand the size of the market they are targeting.

Normally, this involves requesting government studies, understanding penetration rates and doing quick calculations to work out the size and value of the market.

For consumer-focused digital products, you can do this with Google. Google has both the historical and projected search volume for every keyword searched on its engine. Every search is an approximation of interest in that subject, so by using keyword volume as data, you are counting the unique expressions of interest in your product.

2. Validating demand for your product

You can validate demand for your product before you have built it.

Validating early saves a lot of time and effort, and it can surface insights you can use to build a better product.

The goal is simple: show an ad for your product to your target audience, then track your landing page and the clicks on it. That tells you how much demand there is for your product and which features resonate.

The budget depends on the size of the test. The bigger the test, the bigger the budget it needs.

After a week or two, you should have two sets of data:

1. The number of people who clicked your ad and reached the landing page. This tells you the demand for your product. If people are clicking the ad, your product has a real market.
2. A heatmap of the landing page. The heatmap shows which features of the product people are drawn to. Use it to prioritise which feature to build first.

3. Finding the jobs your product is hired to do

One of the key product frameworks of recent years is Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) theory, or Jobs Theory for short.

It's the idea that your product gets "hired" to solve a particular problem, and that a product has "multiple jobs" depending on who uses it. You can read more about it in this Jobs to Be Done article.

Figuring out the jobs your users hire your product for usually takes qualitative research such as interviews and surveys. Google Ads gives you a faster way in.

This experiment relies on the search terms report in Google Ads. It lists the searches people used before reaching your site, so you can see what specifically they are looking for when they arrive.

The budget depends on the size of the test. The bigger the test, the bigger the budget it needs.

After a week or two, pull the search terms:

1. Open your campaign.
2. Open the search terms report.
3. Download all search terms.

The search terms show every phrase people used to reach your product. They tell you, far more accurately, the words people use to find a product like yours, and they often include clues to the "job" people are hiring your type of product for.

4. Building user personas for your product

User personas pin down who your users are and align the whole company around them.

Alan Cooper, who originated user personas, described the trap they help you avoid:

"You tend to canvas the user community, collect their requests for functions, and then provide them a product containing all of those functions. I call this the sum of all desired features."

User personas are a more defined picture of your target audience, with likes and dislikes, that guide your team towards a better user-centred product. You can read more about them in this article on personas.

To build user personas, startups can use Meta's audience data to learn about the people they want to serve. With Meta ads, you can quickly build different sets of personas for people who want your product, based on real quantitative data.

Results:

From there, check the audience breakdowns in Meta Ads Manager and the event data from your Meta Pixel. They give you:

• General demographic data (age, gender)
• Where your users are
• How many actions and sessions they add up to
• The devices your users are on

From here, you can create your user personas. Take the top three trends in each category, then connect them to each other. You'll be able to divide your users into personas based on real data.

Note: This piece is based on our years of product management work in the Philippines. We first gave it as a talk at a QBO/DICT event. If you have questions, feel free to reach out.