Don’t forget the consumer when doing PR for a new product

Forgetting how your service can help a consumer can cost you when launching a new product

Let’s say your company has made and rolled out a new product. Everything looks great on your end, but people aren’t buying it for some reason. The product is well reviewed by the people buying it, and there aren’t any deficiencies that would draw ire from consumers, so it’s not the product itself causing the lack of sales. You just don’t know what’s causing this.

One big issue that could be causing this problem: In your enthusiasm for developing and marketing, your company forgot to create context for your product to directly tell consumers how it can help them.

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Avoid depending on feature lists for marketing

While leaning on a list of features may wow consumers, your product could lack context if your company doesn’t explain how these features can help consumers in their lives.

An example of this is only stating that your company’s new refrigerator has a touch screen and can connect to the internet. Instead of simply stating that, your PR messaging can tell customers how this will make their lives better, such as how the touch screen makes it easy to adjust the refrigerator’s settings and how connecting the fridge to the internet lets you view the contents of the fridge with an app that can work on any phone with internet access.

This doesn’t mean you should cut feature lists from your overall PR and marketing plans – you should center your PR and marketing for a new product around how a product will help someone.

Why it’s important

Customers are more receptive to statements about how something will improve their lives instead of a list of features. An impressive feature list can be helpful to sell the product to enthusiasts or people who are close to making a decision and want the nitty-gritty of how something works. However, most people need to know how a product will make things better in their life or job before they seriously consider buying it. If your company doesn’t do so, then you’re going to be losing potential customers because you never explained the benefits of your product.

New services and customer appeal

All of this applies to services as well. If you want to successfully sell a new service to customers, you need to tell them how it will improve their life, such as how a tech company’s new premium IT package will ensure the safety of their clients’ computers and protect them from malware. The company focusing on the fact that they have a large number of employees dedicated to a certain IT function, instead of stating the benefits of their IT service, does not do that.

Always remember the consumer

Strong PR and marketing plans for a new product or service should always focus on communicating how it will directly improve someone’s life, whether in their job or their personal life. After all, they’re the people you’re trying to appeal to. Make sure to review your strategies periodically so customer benefits don’t slip through the cracks of communication.

If you’d like to improve your marketing and PR even more, read our e-book on the benefits of Inbound Marketing.

Clients love Jacob’s speed. Jacob is an inbound marketing-certified webmaster. He earned an integrated communications degree from Florida State College at Jacksonville. Jacob joined Axia PR as an intern in August 2015 and earned his way into a critical role at our PR agency.