Integrated User Experiences: Let Your Product Market Itself
Marketing is a significant, valuable, and inevitable organizational spend in determining the success of a product—how much to spend on marketing is always a closely analyzed decision. Determining the product’s unique selling proposition and understanding target customers are important steps in devising a successful marketing strategy.
A new idea being implemented in software is engineering marketing elements into the product itself. While this may sound complex, it is very simple at its core. When a suite of products is developed, the right levels of touch points, integration, and cross-collaboration are built right in.
When such an integrated user experience is included, if the main product is well marketed, the other products can automatically fall in place, even without actively being marketed for. For example, Apple mainly advertises its iPhone and iPad, but the rest of the product suite, such as Macs, Safari, iCloud, and FaceTime, take advantage of the core marketing campaigns and reach end-users anyway.
This “product inter-connect” is leveraged to empower tools in aiding the passive yet effective marketing for the vendor’s full range of products. Microsoft has recently acknowledged this in a public forum and shared details of how it lacks a competitive advantage in this space compared to Apple and Google and Microsoft needs to make headway in fixing this issue. Microsoft may have a large user base in specific areas (for instance, Windows, Office, and IE), but the lack of an integrated user experience forces them to market for each of their products individually as opposed to building one over-arching plan.
Besides the core marketing advantage an integrated user experience brings in, mainly that marketing costs can be cut down significantly and improved marketing results can be attained, this practice brings in several other benefits as well. Building marketing into a product forges a better connection between engineering and marketing teams during the early stages of product development, helps engineering get a better understanding of the market, and gives marketing a better handle on the product and its internals.
The large players with encompassing product suites are competing in a similar space—all of them have computing solutions, smartphones, operating systems, browsers, search engines, storage drives, and communication tools. A focus on an integrated user experience also helps product teams understand how competitors have achieved more successful marketing and how they can fare better, promoting an overall holistic product landscape view instead of focusing just on the low-hanging tactical pieces of a product.
With such a public discussion by Microsoft on this topic and its push to make changes to fix gaps in its across-the-board marketing efforts, it will be interesting to watch what changes other companies and products make this year to accommodate an integrated user experience to positively aid in their marketing strategies.
