API Growth Framework

Marketing strategy

A marketing strategy is a detailed plan that typically spans several years. It establishes a clear understanding of customer requirements. A sound marketing strategy is critical for gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage. At its heart, the strategy helps us figure out who our customers are and how to reach out to them.

The marketing strategy also explains how we decide where to put our product. It helps establish a roadmap of products, their associated variants, and perhaps even features. As is commonly understood, the marketing strategy provides guidelines for advertising, partnerships, and promotions.

The marketing strategy for APIs is designed in very much the same way as any other product, but it does come with its own set of challenges, based on its unique technical nature. Let’s look at the components that constitute the marketing strategy:

• Target audience: A target market is a group of people who have some things in common and who a business thinks might be interested in its products. Finding the target market helps a company make decisions about how to design, package, and sell its product. Target audiences for our APIs could be developers, small businesses, or large enterprises across various industries and domains. It’s important to clearly recognize the target audience for our products as we shape our marketing strategy.

• Value proposition: A value proposition is a short sentence that tells customers why they should buy our product or service. It makes it clear to customers what they get from doing business with us. Every value proposition should address a customer’s problem and show how our business can solve it. For example, the Google Maps Platform’s value proposition is presented as, “Create real-world, real-time experiences with the latest Maps, Routes, and Places features from Google Maps Platform. Built by the Google team for developers everywhere.” A good value proposition may talk about what makes us different from competitors, but it should always focus on how customers see our value.

• Product mix: The number of product lines and individual products or services a company sells is its product mix. This is also called a product selection or a product portfolio. Each company has a different mix of products; for a large company, this might be a number of products, while for start-ups, this might be a single product or service. For example, Twilio provides APIs for SMS, voice, email, and so on. These product offerings are designed to complement each other in a product mix that can be bundled together to create advanced communication applications.

• Brand messaging: Brand messaging is how our brand’s verbal and nonverbal messages share its unique value proposition and personality. Our message can make them feel inspired and want to buy our product. It’s the way our customers can connect with our brand. With APIs, we are messaging developers who would integrate with our APIs to build applications. In the clearest possible way, we should design the brand messaging so that it drives the value of our APIs to these developers in terms of value proposition and ease of use.

• Promotional strategy: A promotion strategy is essential for positioning our brand on the market and letting people know about the products and services we offer, along with how they could benefit from choosing us. A promotion strategy is the plan and methods we use in our marketing plan to make more people want to buy our product or service. Promotional strategies are an important part of the marketing mix (product, price, placement, and promotion) and are based on the target audience, budget, and plan of action. Developer relations teams work closely with the marketing teams in the promotional strategy for our APIs across social media, blogs, white papers, and so on to make sure the right audience is able to receive the information about our APIs in a medium of their choice. These teams also work to build a developer community around our APIs for a sustained cycle of promotion for them.

• Content marketing: This is a strategy to gain relevance through the proliferation of content about our product via various mediums, such as print, and video. The objective is to reach as many potential customers as possible and make them aware of our product or company. Both traditional mediums, such as magazines, as well as modern ones, such as social media, should be considered. The most attention should be given to a medium that is preferred by our target audience. Developers often learn about APIs from platforms such as YouTube, Udemy, and technology blogs. These platforms can be great mediums for getting developers to discover and try out our APIs.

Create a marketing strategy that not only makes sure that our products meet the needs of our customers but also tells them about them. The strategy guides us on how to approach our customers and stay laser-focused on targeting them with the right products, effectively keeping our spending under control.

We should work closely with the marketing teams to understand how to market our products. A well-researched marketing strategy is expected to align with and complement our sales and pricing strategies, which we will learn about in the next section.