All the Marketing in the World Won’t Make a Bad Product Good

Here’s the scenario. You’re heads down. Trying to build a business from scratch. Is marketing your first priority? Let me tell you why it shouldn’t be.

It seems counterintuitive. And believe me, there’s no shortage of advice out there on the best ways to market your product or business. I mean, just Google it. But don’t be tempted to take a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, take a step back and size up your product. Is it innovative, game changing? Is it something that people will tell their friends about?

Prioritize nailing the product before you put too much focus on marketing. This is an alternative approach to what we currently see from many startups.

Silver Bullets Are Rare: Don’t get me wrong your startup needs a strategic marketing plan. Even with the best product or service, if customers don’t know you exist or understand the value proposition, then you can’t build much of a business.  But everyone thinks there’s a silver bullet. Believe me, silver bullets are rare. When it comes to marketing, the expectations around what it can deliver are often way out of line. Marketing is a long-term play and very much a “what have you done for me lately game”. Very rarely do you hit a home run. It’s much more about hitting lots of solid base hits.

Follow good advice.

Product first: Let your product speak loudest. Whether you’re building a product or a service it must be innovative, disruptive and indispensible. Qualtrics didn’t have a dedicated marketing team for the first 10 years. Instead, we focused on product development. We tore down our systems time and time again until we knew that it was the best it could be. You have to nail it before you scale it. How did we know it was good? Because our customers would share it with their friends, and a strong recommendation from one customer to another is the best marketing. Period.

 Market Focus Matters: Be laser focused on one specific industry. The shotgun approach does not work. You can’t spray and pray. Goal setting is super important to making this strategy work. So set goals and be relentless in achieving them. For Qualtrics it was all about academia. The target: Secure 200 leading universities as Qualtrics customers. Nothing else mattered. Professors were the early adopters, essentially crowdsourcing our product and providing great insight into feature development.

Never Underestimate Word-of-Mouth: Single market focus taught us a great lesson: Word-of-mouth is the most powerful form of marketing. Whether you’re a startup or an established brand, harness the power of WOM, but use it wisely. With a solid product and concentration on a slice of the market, your startup can more readily build customer advocacy.

Be Bold: Now, when it comes time to scale your business and really amp up the marketing machine, don’t be afraid to do it your way. Be unconventional, wild or just different. Or as we say in Utah, “Don’t be afraid to lean out over your skis a little”. There’s no standard playbook.

Qualtrics has grown up a lot since our young startup days, while we currently have a full marketing team, our biggest goal is to stay lean and scrappy no matter how big we get.  And, we haven’t forgotten the core values that ultimately took our company from a crowded basement to almost 500 employees.

This lesson is one that we won’t soon forget: Stellar products that deliver ultimate value are the foundation from which all marketing efforts will either succeed or fail. Let’s face it; you can put lipstick on a pig, but all the marketing in the world won’t make a bad product good.

Mr. Smith is CEO and co-founder at Qualtrics, a private research software company.