When a product upgrade is ready, the product manager often has to help push it to market. These are six keys for doing that well.
Understand your target audience. Identify who you are selling to and their pain points. Work out what motivates them to buy and how the upgraded product meets their needs. For a fitness app with new workout-tracking features, your audience might be fitness enthusiasts looking for an easy way to track progress and reach their goals. Interview them, learn their preferences, and tailor both the messaging and the features to what they actually want.
Develop a pricing strategy. Set pricing that reflects the value proposition and the competitive landscape, at a point that is both profitable and attractive. For a project management tool, that might mean tiered pricing with different levels of functionality at different price points, along with a launch discount to encourage upgrades.
Create a marketing plan. Build a plan that highlights the benefits and features of the upgrade. That can include clear product descriptions, compelling visuals, customer testimonials, and social and paid channels to reach your audience. For a photo-sharing feature, you might create strong visuals, partner with photographers or creators, and run targeted ads.
Use customer feedback. Use feedback to improve both the product and the marketing. Gather it through surveys, user testing, and your social channels, address the issues raised, and let what you learn shape the messaging. For an upgraded checkout flow, you might find and fix slow page loads flagged by customers, then make the whole flow more usable.
Collaborate with the sales team. Give sales the information and resources they need to sell the upgrade well: training materials, product demos, and, where it fits, promotional incentives. For a travel booking app with new search functionality, that might mean demos that showcase the feature and incentives that encourage customers to book through the app.
Monitor performance. Track sales and engagement to see how the upgrade is landing and where it can improve. Use the data to inform the next round of product and marketing decisions. For a subscription news app with new personalisation, you might watch engagement with the new features and track renewals and cancellations to find where to improve.
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