How To Use Feature Marketing To Get More Customers

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Feature marketing is one of the best ways to acquire more customers and also retain the existing ones.

Expanding your current customer base can be daunting, especially with so many competing brands. This is where Feature marketing is so helpful.

It not only educates your potential customers about your product but also persuades them to continue with your brand.

Let’s learn how you can use feature marketing to get more customers.

Table of Contents

What is Feature Marketing?
Why Feature Marketing is Important?
Features vs. Benefits - What is the Difference?
Feature Marketing Best Practices: How To Add New Features To Your Products
How To Do Feature Marketing?

What is Feature Marketing?

Feature marketing is a business strategy that involves adding new features to your existing products and promoting it vastly to gain more exposure and to attract new customers.

Feature marketing allows you to provide more value to your existing customers and improve your brand image. Because when you care for your existing customers, you develop long term relationships and increase your customer retention rate.

Feature marketing gives you the opportunity to gain attention and execute a successful marketing campaign without launching a new product.

Why Feature Marketing is Important?

Companies should not forget that investing in new customers is between 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones.

Besides, 44% of companies have a greater focus on customer acquisition vs. 18% that focus on retention.

This shows how highly competitive it is to acquire new customers.

No doubt, there are so many strategies available to scale your business, some prove to be effective while some aren’t.

However, the core to any successful business has always been how much value they bring to their customers, so to gain new customers and retain existing ones, you have to make sure you are providing so much value.

An undeniable great way to do so is by adding beneficial features to your existing product.

Features vs. Benefits – What is the Difference?

Let’s address these often used interchangeable terms.

Features are what your product offers, the specs, and details of your product, while benefits are what consumers can gain from using those features.

People buy stuff, not because of all the fancy tech words that describe the features, like “50 GB disk space” of your product but what value it will give them.

So instead of 50 GB disk space, it should be communicated as a large space to store a great number of documents without worries.

If you say “Alkyl Sulphate ingredient” instead of removal of stains from clothes and surfaces; Then your consumers or potential consumers have zero ideas why they should buy your product.

Why do people prefer smartwatches to ordinary watches? The benefits of the added features, in addition to telling time, they get to do a whole lot of other things that save time.

So the benefits one can derive from using a feature is what drives them to buy it. Therefore the first thing to consider when adding a feature to your product is how useful it will be for your consumers.

Feature Marketing Best Practices: How To Add New Features To Your Products

Let’s start with Feature marketing and learn the ways through which you can add new features to your products.

Here are the steps to add new features to your existing products and optimize them for Feature marketing:

1- Carry Out A Market Research Survey

Market research survey is the analysis and investigation of a market or target audience for a product. The survey gives you feedback from the audience.

Market research surveys provide you with valuable data to really think from your customer’s perspective.

This helps your product decision making and enables you to create features that are valuable and specifically designed for your target audience.

The feedback from the survey also influences your marketing strategies, making them more effective and tailored to reach your audience.

Doing this for your feature marketing will help you evaluate the need for your features and what features your audience is actually seeking.

Ask yourself these questions before conducting a market research survey:

What current product features require an upgrade?
What additional features does your product lack but your audience needs?
What features are your competitions using to surpass your products?
The feature you intend to add, are your competitors already offering it? If yes, how can you make yours distinct? What loopholes can you take advantage of?
How can this feature extend your current customer base?
Will this feature be of benefit to your existing customers?
Who is the target audience for this feature?
Can you afford the cost and adjustment that comes with this feature?
Is this product feature or a completely different product that requires its own launch?

You can employ the use of platforms like My Survey Lab, SurveyMonkey, or Typeform to create your questionnaire and collect valuable data.

Related: Best B2B Marketing Stats

Here are the questions you must include in your market research survey:

What do people enjoy most about your product? This gives you insight into how you can provide a feature to accelerate the love for your product.
What do they wish your product had? You can create a feature based on this feedback.
Would they purchase this feature if it’s available? This will make you aware of how your feature will be received.
What will they change your product features? If you are making a feature upgrade, you can keep in mind the changes they mentioned and optimize your products for that.
Finally, don’t forget to evaluate your net promoter score. How likely are they to recommend your product to their friends?

2- Upgrade Your Current Best Product Feature

Let’s talk about movie sequels, movie production companies make lots of movies but not all of them get to have a sequel and even those that get to have a sequel don’t necessarily need a sequel but deserve it.

Why?

Because people loved it! That’s it.

The thing is, most movies that got to have a sequel was a huge box office hit, it only makes sense to draw people’s attention to that which they enjoyed again and make money off it.

For example, the movie Jumanji which was a huge box office hit grossing over 960 million dollars in 2017 didn’t need a sequel, but because it was insanely successful, so they made a sequel in 2019, which was yet again a box office hit, this time even better with more avatars.

So what has all that got to do with feature marketing? Key into a feature your customers are already enjoying!

Do you have a bestseller product feature? Then it’s time to make upgrades to it for more exposure and value propositions.

If your customers love a particular feature, it means you are doing something right. So instead of creating a whole new feature, why don’t you see how you can make this popular feature even better.

Ask yourself these questions:

How can you enhance the performance of this feature?
How can you increase the quality of this feature?
How can you develop the user experience of the product feature?
How can you double up the benefits of this feature?
Have an upgraded version of that feature and market it like it’s brand new.

This will give your product feature, a whole new exposure, and draw the attention of potential customers who haven’t heard of it before.

3- Launch A New Feature To Acquire More Customers

Still, in movies? Let’s talk about movie remakes, we saw a lot of Disney movie remakes on all-time favorites in 2019.

The original movies were animated, while this time the movie remakes are real and lifelike.

Not only did they draw the attention of their fans with a familiar storyline. They also drew the attention of other sets of audiences who preferred real movies over animations.

For example, my cousin hates animated films and couldn’t bring herself to watch the original Aladdin, but when the remake came out, she went to watch it.

So, expanding your customer base can also mean expanding your target audience.

Another great example of expanding your target audience is that of the Instagram shopping option.

Adding the shopping feature to Instagram turned Instagram into not just a place to discover products, but also a place to purchase them.

Stats revealed that 130 million Instagram users tap on shopping posts every month.

Now, if people want to shop, their options aren’t just limited to Google, Amazon, and Alibaba, they can simply log into their Instagram account.

Instagram no longer attracts only people seeking entertainment but online shoppers too.

So, ask yourself:

How can you expand your target audience with your product feature without completely digressing from your overall product benefit?
Is there a target audience you can currently serve but don’t?
How have your competitors expanded their target audience? And who are these other sets of people they cater to?

Focus on features that will enable you to serve another type of target audience while still catering to your current customers.

This will make your product diverse and multipurpose, gaining the attraction of new customers.

4- Add a Feature Your Product is Lacking and is Needed by The Customers

Let’s take a look at an example of a product feature that illustrates this point: The YouTube community tab.

The video platform was designed in a way that creators could only engage and connect with their audience through the comment section.

So, it wasn’t easy for creators to give announcements, updates, create polls, and interact with their audience.

YouTube saw this problem and launched the community tab, this gave creators the capability to give important updates, ask their viewers questions, discuss a topic without posting a video, or even discuss a previously posted video, create polls, and more.

What YouTube did was analyze what their platform and their users’ experience was lacking: both creators and viewers.

They understood these problems and launched a feature that brought a solution to enhance and transform their experience.

Creators are no longer solely depending on other platforms like Instagram to interact with their subscribers, they can now do it via the platform.

This has made YouTube retain more traffic than driving traffic to its competitor’s platforms.

Another example is from “Trello’s Unito’s mirror power up“, one of the main problems that Trello users had was their inability to sync or mirror their Trello cards, which caused communication difficulties like oversharing and repetitive information.

Trello realized this and released this mirroring feature that allowed its users to sync, share, and mirror their cards to keep communication clear and focused on priorities alone.

Ask yourself:

What’s your current product lacking?
How can you create a remedy for them?
What feature does your competitor provide that gives an edge over yours?
Which features does your competitor have that attracts consumers that you lack? And how can yours differ and propose even more value?
Look at your existing product, does it need any feature? Does it lack an element that’s important to your target audience?
If your competitor’s product is the complete package and yours is lacking some required features when potential customers come across your products and that of your competitors, which are they more likely to purchase? Obviously the former, because they want to have all of their needs taken care of.

Also, when one of your competitor’s customers realize that you have a feature that caters to their needs, they would switch if what your product is proposing is better than their current brand.

Now that we have addressed features, their meaning, and examples, let’s move on to marketing it to your target audience.

How To Do Feature Marketing?

Here are 8 ways to successfully market your product features and acquire new customers:

1- Create A Blog Post For Your Product Feature

You have to use and implement various channels to reach your customers. Blog posts have always been a great strategy to reach an audience and a core part of content marketing.

Create a blog post announcing your new product feature outlining the benefits and how they can use it.

Related: How Can I Create A Blog?

The blog post will have strong CTAs to drive readers to take the intended action. It should be written in a way that showcases how it’s all about the consumers and was only created because you realized it was of benefit for them.

Related: Top Benefits of Blogging

Let them know how using these features will give them great results and outcomes. If it’s a product that requires technical use, outline a tutorial with screenshots on how to go about the usage of this feature.

Don’t forget to target keywords that will make your content rank high, this provides more brand exposure.

For example, I typed a search query on how to use a CRM, one of the top articles is that from Hubspot:

While the article wasn’t necessarily about introducing their software, it did highlight their CRM software.

Another example is from Instapage when it added a new feature, called the Thor to render engine, they wrote a detailed blog post, all highlighting why this feature is very necessary.

As you can see from the screenshot below;

They started the post by addressing the problem this feature will solve and the bad effect that problem causes, and went on to introduce the new feature as the remedy.

The remaining parts of the blog post showcased the benefits of the feature and a test example putting the feature to test.

2- Make A Video For Your Product Feature

The video is just like your blog post except for this time the content is visual, you can hardly go wrong with video marketing.

People love visuals because they will love to see things in action. About 81% of businesses use video as a marketing tool — up from 63% over the last year.

And people will spend 100 minutes a day watching online videos in 2021.

Think of the video as an infomercial, so it’s an ad and a tutorial. It announces the feature and explains how and why to use this feature.

Going back to our Instapage example, they also made a video accompanying the blog post.

Another example is when Planoly added a new feature called Pin Planner, a Pinterest planner for Pinterest users.

They made a tutorial video on how to use the feature. Now, apart from the video format, they used to advertise their feature, let’s take a step back and see how strategic this feature marketing is: Remember how we mentioned attracting a different type of target audience with your feature upgrade, this is a perfect example for that.

Related: Top 25 Video Marketing Tools

If you aren’t familiar with Planoly, it’s an Instagram planner software, so it’s target audience was exclusively Instagram creators and users, but this new feature expanded their target audience, this pin planner attracts Pinterest users.

So, this new feature opens more business opportunities for Planoly like more customer acquisition.

3- Advertise on Instagram

We all know social media is powerful and has a great influence on marketing. Social media provides you the largest reach to your customers.

Related: How To Run Instagram Ads

42% of the world’s population uses social media. That’s 3.2 billion users worldwide.

With social media, you have to be creative.

There are different features and tools to help you create engaging content for your audience and advertise your products.

71% of US businesses use Instagram. It has proved to be a great tool for the marketing strategy of businesses. 90 percent of accounts follow a business on Instagram.

Below are the different formats on Instagram you can use for feature marketing.

Instagram posts: This is the standard Instagram post that is displayed on your feed, here you can post a visual announcing the feature, like images, Gifs, memes, a 60 seconds video, and boomerangs.

Also, you can even build up the excitement by informing them to look forward to an amazing feature before its official announcement. This builds the momentum and attention to your new product feature.

When you post, your caption serves as the copy to go into details of what this new feature is all about, this is where you will include CTAs for your product feature.

You can use this Instagram post to lead them to your landing page, blog post, and video for more in-depth information.

IGTV: This is Instagram’s video format for longer videos, so this is best for your tutorials and other longer video form content for Instagram.

So, you can post your long format video on Instagram too, and not just YouTube.

And video content seems to be winning on Instagram, as it receives 49% higher interactions than images.

For example, Tailwind made an IGtv advertise and illustrate how to use their new feature: Hashtag finder

They posted a tutorial video for the new feature.

Instagram Stories: Another popular content format for Instagram is stories, with over 500 million accounts using Instagram Stories every day.

Instagram stories have lots of elements and strong CTA features to market your product features.

There, you can share visuals, videos, and the use of swipe up links to drive your followers to your feature landing page, blog post, and videos.

Here’s an Instagram story from HubSpot introducing a new feature:

Highlights: This is an Instagram feature that displays the archived collections of your stories in the form of little circles below your bio.

Since stories can only last for 24 hours, Instagram highlights can permanently display selected stories.

So, create a highlight dedicated to the product feature which will be one of the first things that a profile visitor comes across on your profile.

This highlight will contain all the details of your product feature, it will highlight the why and how of your product features.

Back to the planoly example, they dedicated an entire highlight to their pin planner.

In the highlights, they made a tutorial on how to use the Pin Planner

They also directed their followers to their blog as I mentioned earlier.

Instagram Bio: This is where you can effectively drive traffic to your product page, you can insert a link on your bio to advertise your product feature.

For example, Tailwind advertised its new smart bio feature on their bio.

You can use a linked tree or smart bio that will display different segments of your business, simply add your product features landing page to any of them.

Here’s Tailwind smart example:

Here’s a link tree example:

So whichever you choose.

4- Create A Landing Page

For every feature you release, you should create a landing page for it. This will give your customers an overview of everything they need to know about your product.

This landing page will boldly market your product, it will help you convert web visitors into customers.

This is your sales page, so you have to pay attention to your headlines, copy, CTAs, and persuasion.

The layout of your landing page is incredibly important, you want your site visitors to be persuaded not demotivated.

Make sure your landing page is clean, focused on the offer, and void of distractions like navigation bars.

For example, Freshbooks has a landing page for all its features.

When you click on any of the features it leads you to a landing page.

The image above is the landing page that appears after clicking on Freshbooks’s Time tracking feature.

5- Send Converting Emails

Email is still a goldmine when it comes to marketing. Research reveals that 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel and 80% for retention.

Related: Ways To Avoid Email Blacklists

So, send emails to your subscribers to announce these product features and inform them of the benefits.

These emails should begin by talking about the problems this feature is going to solve and the results they will achieve when they use the features.

Before the proper official announcement, hint the arrival of a new feature in your emails.

Highlight the reasons for this feature and how this feature will transform their entire experience.

These emails might retain an existing customer who was thinking of abandoning your brand if your new feature excites them.

Remember to personalize your emails, make them engaging, include an irresistible subject headline, and include CTAs.

Don’t sound overly promotional, it should be about them and not about you.

What’s Next?

Acquiring customers is no easy feat but using this underrated marketing strategy can put you 2 steps ahead.

Feature marketing can boost your customer acquisition opportunities and content marketing efforts.

Make sure your features are of value and heavily focused on enhancing customer experience because that’s the key to retaining and acquiring customers.

Carry out your market research and ensure you do your best in creating an amazing product feature for your customers.

After getting your features ready, it’s time to market the heck out of it, let people know that you just launched a life-changing product feature to attract your target audience.

If you carry out an excellent feature marketing strategy, you will definitely get lots of ROI from it, so what’s stopping you from implementing these tips

Get to work and get those fantabulous results!

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SEO Sandwitch

How To Use Feature Marketing To Get More Customers

What is Feature Marketing?

Why Feature Marketing is Important?

Features vs. Benefits – What is the Difference?