181: Digital Advertising for Selling New Hardware Products

Jun 22, 2023

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Neha is Project Manager Lead at Meta for Ads Manager Reporting. Before this, she spent 5 years with Google in a number of roles including Google Analytics manager and Head of Merchant Growth. She also invests in a number of startups. Today Neha is going to share some valuable knowledge for inventors, startups, and small manufacturers on what direct-to-consumer digital marketing is, best practices for leveraging organic content to prepare for paid ads, and how to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of paid digital advertising for amplifying your new hardware product’s growth.

Today you will hear us talk about:

What is direct-to-consumer digital advertising
Direct-to-customer allows you to preserve your margins
Focus on organic content to start selling units, this helps you establish product market fit.
Generative AI has made the cost of organic content much less, faster, and easier.
Interview experts in your area that surround your product, and that will drive organic content.
Blogs are helpful, but people have changed the way they interact with them. Use both audio, video, and written blogs.
Find out which customers are your fan, and get them to tell your story, get lots of reviews.
Think about experimentation when you start to run ads.
Most people start with one type of ad. Instead, try multiple different ads, and try different types of advertising.
You can again use AI to create a lot of options for testing your ads.
Customer segmentation and target audience
Customer needs, preferences, and pain points.
Build personas based on the job to be done or the skill level of your customer, and target that audience
Branding and positioning.
You don’t need a lot of money to build a brand.
Word of mouth is powerful for brand building
Data driven decision making. Measure the effectiveness of your spend.
Influencer marketing can be much cheaper than traditional marketing.
Be creative on how to drive customers to your hardware product.
Ensure you set up digital tracking early on. Every customer touch point needs to be monitored.
Run A/B tests, then block time in your calendar to identify the insights.
Three key things for hardware sales on digital platforms are campaign objectives, audience targeting, and ad performance analysis.

EPISODE LINKS:

Neha Bansal Links:

The Product Startup Podcast Links:

https://www.ProductStartup.com/

Mako Design Links:

https://www.makodesign.com/

Kevin Mako Links:

Instagram | LinkedIn | Quora | Facebook | Twitter

Partner: PTC’s best-in-class software solutions Onshape: The only cloud-native product development platform that delivers full-featured computer-aided design (CAD), integrated product data management (PDM) and enterprise analytics in a single system, and Creo: 3D CAD solution that provides designers with the most innovative tools to build better products faster, such as generative design, additive manufacturing, real-time simulation, IIoT, and augmented reality.

Producer: MAKO Design + Invent is the original firm providing world-class consumer product development services tailored to startups, small manufacturers, and inventors. Simply put, we are the leading one-stop-shop for developing your physical product from idea to store shelves, all in a high-quality, cost-effective, and timely manner. We operate as one powerhouse 30-person product design team spread across 4 offices to serve you (Austin, Miami, San Francisco, & Toronto). We have full-stack in-house industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, patent referral, prototyping, and manufacturing services. To assist our startup and inventor clients, in addition to above, we help with business strategy, product strategy, marketing, and sales/distribution for all consumer product categories.