Launching your minimum viable product without a solid marketing plan is a recipe for disaster. If no one knows about your product, you won’t know how good it actually is.
But, marketing an MVP using traditional techniques can cause it to flop just as quickly as not marketing it at all. In this article, we’ll explain what MVP marketing is and how small businesses can use it to maximize product validation.
A refresher on the minimum viable product (MVP) concept
At its core, a minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to serve its purpose and attract consumer attention.
As simple as this concept is to grasp, there are plenty of ways to do it wrong. Approaching the MVP development, not knowing what you want to achieve, is a great example of getting off to a bad start.
Here are a few questions you should ask before going public with your MVP.
- Are you trying to tailor your solution to teens, tweens, or twenty-somethings?
- When, where, and why will they use your product over the competition’s?
- Who are your competitors?
But building an effective MVP isn’t about your market alone. It’s also about your philosophy of validating your product idea. MVPs help you gather valuable feedback from your market before you invest thousands of dollars in development.
It’s a fast, iterative approach that will empower your team with market knowledge in the later stages.
Here are a couple key details to keep in mind for your next (or current) minimum viable product:
- Your MVP is not an incomplete product. Your MVP should be a product with just enough features as opposed to one that’s missing features.
- MVPs are optimized for fast improvement. Although your MVP may start off with bare-minimal functionality, you should prepare to push it in the direction your customers demand with each new iteration.
Taking inspiration from MVP development process, minimum viable marketing (MVM) offers up a particularly effective alternative to traditional marketing techniques. Here’s how to use this approach:
What Is Minimum Viable Marketing
Think of MVM as the essentials of marketing. And the vital element of any marketing plan is setting proper goals.
The goal of your minimum viable product is to validate your product. You approach the market with hypotheses about its needs. Your MVP should help you make adjustments to the final product vision and prioritize future development investments.
When launching a new product or service, it’s tempting to want to market it to the masses right away. However, this can be an expensive mistake if you haven’t validated your core assumptions about the product-market fit. That’s where minimum viable marketing comes in.
How to Market a Minimum Viable Product
Marketing your MVP should be as iterative and flexible as your MVP development.
Don’t set anything in stone. Allow the feedback and insights you glean from early adopters of your MVP to guide your marketing decisions.
However, it’s good to incorporate some structure to your marketing efforts. This will make your marketing more effective, bringing even more valuable insights about your customers.
Here are a few steps you should start your MVP marketing with:
Building Your Minimum Viable Marketing Plan
When launching a new product or service, having an extensive marketing plan can be tempting. But a limited marketing budget needs smarter approaches. Here are some tips for building an effective and affordable minimum viable marketing plan.
Step 1: Define Your Target Audience
Start by getting crystal clear on who your ideal early customers are. Specify details like demographics, common interests, pain points, and where they congregate online.
Develop one or more buyer personas representing your beachhead target market. Understanding what makes them tick is key to creating resonant messaging and campaigns.
Step 2: Identify Your Beachhead Market
A common mistake startups make is trying to market to everyone right away. It’s better to focus on your beachhead market - a subset of early adopters who will provide a foothold to gain traction.
Prioritize marketing to the niche audiences most likely to be excited about your product. As you grow, you can expand from there.
Step 3: Choose One or Two Key Channels
Given limited resources, you can’t be everywhere at once.
You need to define marketing channels that will allow you to find your customers fast and easily. Say you’re working on an app for product managers in small-sized businesses. Analyze your target audience to see what types of marketing would work best for them.
Should it be a fun, eye-grabbing paid ad or maybe an influencer campaign?
See how your competitors are currently attracting users. Which channel seems to work best for them?
The key is to drive targeted traffic from those most likely to convert initially. As you gain traction, you can expand your efforts.
Step 4: Develop Core Assets
If you don’t want to explain how to use your product to each user, you’ll need some foundational assets.
These might be things like:
- Website: There’s no need for any fancy web development, but you need a page that will explain what your product is and how it helps your target audience.
- Explainer videos: Record a simple Loom walkthrough for your product to explain the most important features of your MVP. This will reduce the number of customer support tickets from confused users.
- Product photos: Take high-quality screenshots of your app and include them on your website. This will help your user visualize your product’s benefits.
- Email marketing: Write a welcome email you’ll send to each new user. You might include a quick explainer video showing the first steps new users should take.
- Blog (optional): Do you serve an audience who might benefit from guidance? it’s a good idea to write a few articles about your audience’s biggest pain points to establish your expertise.
- Landing Pages (optional): If you plan to launch paid marketing campaigns, you might need landing pages that relate to your ad.
Make them visually consistent and optimized for conversions. Well-designed assets establish credibility and make marketing easier.
Step 5: Track Conversions Diligently
Closely monitor traffic, leads, and sales from each effort. Optimize towards the campaigns, ads, and content driving conversions.
Cut ineffective initiatives quickly to maintain lean operations.
Step 6: Continuously Optimize
Treat marketing as an ongoing process of optimization. Improve page conversion rates, keep testing new offers and content, and refine your message.
Use promotional techniques like drip email campaigns to convert interested prospects.
By starting small and focused, you can launch successfully with limited resources and gradually expand your marketing efforts. The key is staying laser-focused on your ideal audience and iterating based on data. With this approach, you can gain traction even with limited resources.
Bonus: Extra Tips to Remember While Marketing Your MVP
Focus on the Early Adopters First
Minimum viable marketing involves focusing your initial marketing efforts on the early adopters.
These are innovators and early tech enthusiasts who get excited about trying new products in their space.
The first thing to do is to find them, of course. Here are a few places where they might hang out:
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Reddit: In communities such as r/IndieHackers, r/SaaS, or r/startups, you’ll find many people willing to give you feedback on your MVP. Write a short post inviting users to try your new product. Make sure to specify who the product is for and what kind of feedback you’re looking for.
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Indie Hackers: It’s a website dedicated to people building products (mostly SaaS). Posting your MVP offer there should bring a few new MVP users at least.
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Social Media: This method is the most targeted – and most time-consuming as well. Pick a group of users you’d like to participate in your MVP testing and write a personalized DM invitation. Many new product builders gather a decent early adopter base using this method.
Learn and Iterate
Minimum viable marketing is about learning what resonates as quickly and affordably as possible. Let the early adopters guide your marketing strategy.
See what content and messaging excites them, and what channels drive conversions. Be prepared to iterate based on those learnings before expanding your marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Minimum Viable Marketing is as important to your product as an MVP. It allows you to gain more insights about your market in a shorter time. And the faster you move at the start, the easier it becomes to reach product-market fit.
Book a call with VeryCreatives today to learn how we can help get your MVP ideas off the ground and out to market.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a minimum viable product (MVP)?
An MVP is a product with just enough features to serve its purpose and attract early adopters. It helps validate product ideas through real-world user feedback before investing in full development.
What is the goal of an MVP?
The goal is to test product assumptions and hypotheses with real customers. An MVP provides the fastest and most affordable way to gather insights that can inform pivotal product decisions and future development priorities.
What is minimum viable marketing (MVM)?
Minimum viable marketing involves promoting an MVP using lean, targeted tactics focused on resonating with early adopters. The goal is rapid learning and optimization rather than broad awareness building.
How is MVM different from traditional marketing?
MVM is flexible, iterative, and data-driven, optimizing based on user feedback versus detailed pre-planned campaigns. The focus is on niche audiences versus mass marketing. Efforts start small in scope before scaling.
What are some MVM strategies?
Content marketing, influencer marketing, targeted paid ads, referral programs, social media, and PR outreach are common initial MVM strategies. The key is micro-targeting likely early adopters.
Why is MVM important for an MVP?
MVM gets your MVP in front of the right audience to validate your assumptions as quickly and cost effectively as possible. This informs wise product decisions before committing to full development and marketing plans.
How do you build an MVM plan?
Define your target users, identify niche outreach channels, develop basic assets, run small campaigns, closely track results, continuously optimize based on data, and expand efforts over time.
What are some tips for effective MVM?
Focus on early adopters first, choose just one or two key channels, create basic but high-quality assets, run small targeted campaigns, diligently track conversions, and iterate relentlessly based on customer feedback.
