Creating an MVP is undoubtedly an efficient use of those first phases of creating a new business.
An MVP is a stripped-down version of your product that is used only to get feedback from users and insight of the market into which you are going to release your product.
When you’re creating a Minimum Viable Product, your aim is to collect as much validated learning about your customer with minimal effort. That is, without huge amounts of ad spend.
But marketing an MVP is quite unlike marketing a mature product, and often people run into mistakes due to having not drawn this distinction.
Creating Your MVP
Creating an MVP is a truly effective way to collect valuable information about your product, audience and the relevant market space.
With that in mind, it’s important to remember that you’re starting from scratch.
Nobody knows what your product is yet, perhaps not even you. You don’t know what’s going to go wrong, and you don’t know how to fix it when it does. But most importantly, you don’t have any data on which to base the claims you’re making about your product – and claims you must make!
At this point, it’s all about what your product can do for your customer.
And when it comes to customers, it’s quality over quantity. At this stage, you want the right customers and not a ton of wrong ones.
Since an MVP is all about learning, you want to attract customers that will engage with your product so you can learn something about them. That is, you want to learn about the customers who do want your product more than the customers who are merely showing half-hearted interest.
Remember that since you are starting from scratch, you have to make a lot of assumptions about your audience and your market space – so any extra information you can get will be extremely valuable to determine the viability of your product.
To secure the information that you’re looking to learn from your MVP, there are various simple marketing tools that you can use to help the process.
Analyse Your Competition
Since you don’t know much about your audience, researching your competitors is pretty fundamental to understanding your potential consumer. And to learn valuable information about that area of the market.
One of the initial, and most simple, things you can do is just Google your competitors.
Check out their website, Google My Business, social media accounts – everything!
Not only will this give you an insight into how people are marketing products that are similar to your own, but you’ll also see how their audiences engage with them.
Dig deep – look at the comments and reviews. Take note of how the audience interacts with your competitors, and how your competitors interact with their audiences.
Then, dig deeper.
There are many tools available that are great for taking a further look at the competition.
One of our favourites is SimilarWeb which is a browser extension that gives you immediate access to information about a given webpage including monthly traffic, sources of traffic, website ranking and more.
This sort of insight is invaluable when you’re creating your MVP and tools like SimilarWeb do all the hard work for you!
So, now you’ve got more of an idea about your competitors and your audience, the next extremely helpful tool will be your landing page.
Create Your Landing Page
Not to sound like a broken record but your landing page, like any stage in creating your MVP, should be focused on learning. Specifically, learning more about your audience.
With this in mind, a key part of the landing page for your MVP should be something that encourages audience engagement i.e. a signup form.
If you’re looking to create a free signup form, MailChimp offers a huge range of templates and a comprehensive guide on how to pick the most appropriate sign-up form for you.
Signup forms are key to finding out what it is about the way you’re marketing your product that makes them most likely to sign up. You can learn what the information is that they need, and how much of it, in order to want to take your desired call to action.
In fact, MailChimp found that on average, business growth rates increase by up to 50.8% after sign up forms are added to landing pages.
Although sign up lists are probably superior, your landing page might also include another opportunity for audience engagement. Or better yet, an additional opportunity for audience engagement.
People may often include things like price plans on their landing pages that ask website visitors to select the price plan that appeals to them most. This might be as a precursor to an email sign up through which you can offer them emails that fit their specific needs, rather than generic emails that apply to everyone.
All in all, it is key that your landing page is used to validate learning about things like the actions your users are willing to take. According to Medium, this is the most powerful use of a landing page when it comes to an MVP.
Once you’ve collected some data about your own audience from your landing page, you can start using slightly more advanced tools to learn the specifics about your audience. And make effective changes to your marketing strategy.
Facebook & Google Ads Accounts
The final stage in your MVP journey is to collect data about your customers. And you can do this with tools like Google Ads, Analytics and a Facebook Advertising Agency – all of which you will want to have in place in order to launch your marketing campaign.
Google Analytics allows you to read into specific metrics about the people who have visited your website including:
- Demographic – the age range/gender etc. of your visitors
- Location – where in the country or the world your visitors are
- Device – what device people are looking at your site on
All of these metrics will be extremely important when you begin to market your product. You will already be ahead of the game in knowing the best people to target and how to optimise your ads.
You can also go a step further and chart the activity of the visitors to your website such as how long they stay on your page, how many people that visit your page sign up, how many people visit your website and leave straight away – all extremely helpful in determining who to target and with what information.
You can also use both Google and Facebook Ads accounts to determine not only your optimum audience, but also your optimum content.
Using tools like A/B Testing allows you to test different versions of your content and show them to different areas of your audience. Over time you will be able to recognise which content performs the best with which audience members – talk about optimisation!
All this information will form the basis of your marketing campaign. So, you’ll be way ahead of the curve in terms of knowing how to set up your ads accounts.
Plus, when it comes to budgeting, you’ll have an idea of where to spend your pennies! And that’s half the battle for most initial marketing campaigns!
So, all in all, MVP’s seem like a pretty good idea. And with all these free & simple tools, we can’t see any reasons not to create an MVP.
This post was submitted by The Good Marketer, a Marketing Agency in London which drives more traffic, generates conversions and increases sales for Small-To-Medium Sized Businesses.
