With the ever existing complexities and challenges in today’s market scenario, it is often difficult for firms to understand and assess the reach and profitability of their product. However, it is important that we learn about them and then use that knowledge to further enhance our product offering.
So, in order to know about these aspects, product life cycle management is an easy and important tool. As it breaks down the complexities into product phases and enable targeted and measurable understanding of the product.
Each stage has its own significance, costs to be incurred and certain specifically defined set of activities to be performed for promoting the product or service in that particular stage. However, with the advent of Digital Marketing, the earlier present geographical barriers are no more in place and the response time has shortened. Digital Marketing has also changed the way marketer earlier used to plan the activities for promoting their brand.
Digital Marketing has an impact on each and every stage of Product Life Cycle.
Development Stage
A development stage is when management of an organization has planned on launching a new product or service, but are toying with the idea as to whether or not can it be successfully marketed. During the development stage, the organizations used to conduct consumer research and then they had to wait for weeks and at times a month or two to get the feedback on the research conducted.
But, with digital marketing decision makers can get feedback in a time span of just two to three weeks. Yes! That’s right, because with digital marketing it is now very easy for research organizations to digitally circulate their research questionnaires to a large no. of audience in a matter of few seconds.
Introduction Stage
The introduction or launch stage comes once the response of the audience has been received, processed, and disseminated in form of feedback. This is the phase when an organization actually launches a product and the entire focus is on building the brand and generating awareness about the product in the market.
Generally, the time span of the product depends on the marketing channels targeted and the product itself. But, with Digital Marketing and its tools one can easily create brand awareness within the targeted groups. Tools that are used are content marketing, social media promotions and paid banner ads and a number of other SEO activities which help creating awareness of the brand. During this time the focus is on creating a user friendly and informative website and has very crisp content related to the product.
Growth Stage
Once the product has been successfully launched, growth stage comes into play, that is, during this phase the demand of the product rises and the focus of the marketers is to reap the benefit of the rise in demand for the product.
It is in this phase a lot of promotional activities are conducted to attract more and more number of customers.
The customer base at this stage is not limited to the core target group, but is wide spread Past tense. A number of avenues through which product or brand is promoted are banner ads, video feeds, blogging, informative articles, PPC campaigns, social media optimization through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Maturity
The maturity or the stage of saturation is the longest phase of the product life cycle of any product. It is at this stage that the marketers of the product need to introduce new variants of the product in the market to elongate this stage and to prevent the product from a sharp decline. During this stage the number of competitors are high in the market with product which are either the exact substitute for your product or are have something extra.
With the help of digital marketing business organizations can easily elongate the maturity stage with highly effective strategies, such as
- Tap into new market segments without incurring extra costs
- Brand reinforcement through cost effective ways such as email marketing
- Offering incentives for a specific set of people, say for example, devising a promotion strategy only for Facebook users or Instagram users
- Offering value added benefits to customers
- Dedicated SMS campaign, etc.
Decline
It is the final stage in the product life cycle, which occurs due to a number of reasons that is either new and better products are available in the market or the customer preferences have changed. During this stage few possible decisions can be taken by the marketer, that is either to discontinue with the product or launch a brand new product with better features.
When the demand for the product is in slump, through digital marketing campaign you can easily market the product with no extra cost, that is if you plan to exit the market it will help you dissolve your remaining inventory buy running discounts and promotional schemes and when it comes to launching a new product all together in place of the existing one, digital marketing will assist you with launching the product to your loyal set of customers without extra cost.
Study of a product through ‘Product Life Cycle Management’ offers a number of benefits such as it helps in focusing on the product keeping your target group in mind, it enables you to quickly identify potential sales opportunities and revenue contributions, it enables decision makers to enhance their product offering and understand the demands of their customers. It also helps save time and cost and lastly, it will enable marketers to attune to the trends in the market along with competition study.
Digital marketing has huge potential and its all about the right strategy that will help you grab your share of the market.