Author: Franz Malten Buemann

A Product Marketing Plan describes specific actions that should be taken to achieve the main objectives set in the strategy. It is usually written by a marketing team together with a Product Manager. In this video, we are talking about the product marketing plan and how to create a plan that leads you to success.
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Did you know that the first video published on YouTube was only 18-seconds long?
Since launching in 2005, the video giant’s founders have learned time and time again that content doesn’t need to be long to engage audiences.
Now, following a five-month beta test — as well as the success of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and other viral video platforms — YouTube will soon roll out a global short-form video feature of its own.
YouTube Shorts — a YouTube app feature that rivals TikTok and Instagram Reels — began its first round of testing in India last September. The beta feature enables users to see and create 15-second videos with musical overlays.
Even in its most basic beta form, the Shorts feature has already seen solid performance in India. In late February, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that videos on the India-based Shorts player receive 3.5 billion cumulative daily views.
When You Can Access YouTube Shorts
YouTube users — at least in the U.S. — could see Shorts appear any day now.
A recent post from YouTube’s Chief Product Officer Niel Mohan mentioned that Shorts is expected to be released in the U.S. in March.
While there’s no word on a global launch yet, Pichai recently told the press, “We are looking forward to expanding Shorts to more countries this year.”
As the full launch of YouTube Shorts inches closer, marketers are likely wondering how they’ll take advantage of this video feature, what the final platform will look like, if it will have similar virality to TikTok, and how it could help brands better engage with YouTube’s more than 2 billion active users.
The truth is, as short-form video platforms grow more and more popular, it’s hard to know which will rise above the others. And, because the YouTube Shorts could evolve between now and its official launch, we can’t fully predict what using it will be like.
However, because YouTube already houses millions of hours of branded content, YouTube Shorts could be worth your time — especially if you already have a video strategy on the platform.
Below, I’ll walk through the basics ofYouTube Shorts, and what opportunities it could provide for marketers upon its official launch.

When explaining why YouTube decided to launch Shorts, a blog post from the tech giant read, “Every month, 2 billion viewers come to YouTube to laugh, learn and connect. Creators have built entire businesses on YouTube, and we want to enable the next generation of mobile creators to also grow a community on YouTube with Shorts.”
“User-generated short videos were born on YouTube starting with our first upload, a short 18-second video called ‘Me at the zoo.’ As technology advances, creators and artists can now take advantage of the incredible power of smartphones to easily create and publish high-quality content wherever they are in the world,” the YouTube post added. “People can be entertained and informed by bite-sized content in the spare minutes of the day. — That’s why we’re excited to announce that we are building YouTube Shorts.”
What YouTube Shorts Could Look Like
YouTube Shorts is currently in beta form, as YouTube plans to add more features in the coming months. While we don’t know what Shorts will look like for certain when it launches globally, I dug up screenshots of the Indian beta feature to help marketers envision the potential user experience.  
Creating YouTube Shorts
When Shorts is available, creators will likely be able to produce them by going to their home screen, tapping the “+” icon on the lower navigation, and selecting “Create a Short” from the menu that appears. Below is a screenshot from YouTube:

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When you tap Create, the Shorts creation interface will be similar to that of Instagram Stories in that it opens to a camera screen that allows you to:

Record segments of a 15-second clip or a full 15-second video.
Upload pre-created content from a camera roll.
Film a “short” with back or front-facing cameras.
Adjust video speed.
Set a recording timer.
Pick sounds for musical overlays.

While YouTube says it plans to expand on the features shown above, here’s a quick screenshot of what the platform looks like at the moment:

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Watching YouTube Shorts
Before the Shorts beta test, YouTube had already been testing a section of its site where shorter videos were placed. While Shorts doesn’t seem to have a dedicated spot on the YouTube homepage for beta testers yet, videos could show up under the “Short videos” shelf shown in the screenshot below:

When watching a Short, viewers in India can tap icons on the bottom of the screen to “Like,” “Dislike,” or comment on the video. If they enjoy what they see, they can also tap the “SUBSCRIBE” button in the upper left corner next to the YouTube channel icon to follow the video creator.

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After a viewer finishes a Short, they can swipe their finger to see a feed of more Shorts from other creators. This seems quite similar to the vertical video feeds you’ll see on TikTok.
What Makes YouTube Shorts Different from Its Competitors
As a marketer, seeing every social media platform launch Stories or short-form video features might be overwhelming. And, now that so many have come out, you might be asking yourself, “Will YouTube Shorts provide more opportunities than Instagram Reels or TikTok?”
Well, we still don’t know yet. However, we think YouTube Shorts will be worth watching. Here are a few reasons why.
1. Short-form creators could see a bigger reach.
While Gen Z users flooded TikTok, causing its astounding early growth, YouTube, the second largest website globally, will launch Shorts to more than 2 billion monthly active users.
Rather than wondering, “Will YouTube Shorts get awareness?”, you can ask yourself, “How do I tap into YouTube’s huge audience with Shorts?”
According to Nelson Chacon, HubSpot’s Principal YouTube Content Strategist, you’ll want to know which segment of YouTube’s huge audience you’ll want to market to before producing Shorts — or any other YouTube video for that matter. Additionally, if you have a solid subscriber list, you’ll want to continue to create content that’s still relevant to them — even if it’s shorter-form.
“Your subscribers know your channel for its content and Youtube, as a platform, works best with consistency,” Chacon says.
For example, if you regularly create long-form content related to your product or industry and find that it engages your audiences, Chacon notes that you can use Shorts to create “quick tutorials” or “step-by-step videos” around those content topics.
2. Brands in most industries could leverage Shorts.
Because TikTok has a somewhat niche user-base filled with younger consumers, some types of brands, such as B2B companies, might have a harder time growing awareness there. While YouTube shares similar popularity with young adults, the content on its huge platform is so vast that it brings in people from all sorts of age groups, countries, industries, and niches.
Ultimately, there’s a video for everyone on YouTube. With Shorts, more brands will be able to engage with audiences from a much wider range of audience targets.
For example, while a B2B brand might have difficulty connecting with Gen Z consumers on TikTok, they might be able to connect with professionals looking for industry-related content on Shorts. Similarly, if you target older generations, such as Gen X, your short-form content might get more engagement on YouTube than TikTok.
3. YouTube Shorts could be less vulnerable than other viral platforms.
This summer and throughout the fall of 2020, TikTok was threatened with bans and censorship regulations.
Why is this concerning? If you’re a marketer who spends time mastering content strategies on a social media app, a ban or regulation of that app could mean that the content you’ve worked so hard on might never be seen.
However, because YouTube’s one of the oldest and most successful online platforms, and it’s owned by the publicly-traded Alphabet, it might be seen as more trustworthy to governments around that world than viral apps that provide less public data security information — like TikTok.
4. Shorts could provide long-term benefits.
While Instagram Stories and Reels content to expire by default after 24 hours, some YouTube Shorts beta testers say Shorts don’t disappear from YouTube — which could help grow long-term YouTube awareness.
For example, if a person who prefers short-form content stumbles upon your YouTube page, they can see all of your short videos, rather than only being able to access your longer content. Or, if someone’s in a rush and searching for a quick how-to video related to something you’ve filmed, they might find and watch your short videos on that topic — even if you published them months ago.
How to Prepare for YouTube Shorts
While we aren’t sure when Shorts will launch, it’s not too early to consider how you could implement it into your social media or video marketing strategy. Here are a few quick tips to keep in mind.

Optimize Short YouTube Videos: Chacon says global creators should begin to add, “#shorts” to descriptions of videos that are 60 seconds or less. Although YouTube hasn’t launched Shorts globally, this hashtag still increases the chances of short videos appearing “on the Shorts shelf of the app.”

Identify Short-Form Topics: Are there any topics your team creates content around that could be distilled into a few quick tips, steps, or data points? If so, you might be able to repurpose this information by creating a Short.

Audit Your Short-Form Videos: Have you created Instagram Reels, TikTok’s, or other social media videos that would only need a few light tweaks to engage your YouTube audience? If so, you could test them on Shorts when the platform launches.

To learn more about YouTube Marketing, check out our Ultimate Guide — or download the free resource below.

Have you ever been playing a game with your loved ones and you have to look around to suss out the competition?
Whether you currently own or you’ re looking to start your own business, you need to do the same thing.

A competitive analysis will help you identify your competitors and research their products, sales, and marketing strategies. By doing this, you’ ll learn your place in the market, how to differentiate yourself from your competition, and how to improve on their processes.
Below, let’ s learn what a competitive matrix is, and review some templates and examples.

Before you dive into the world of competitive matrices, it’ s important to understand that there are different types that you can use to compare your company to your competitors:

Features and benefits analysis
SWOT analysis
Competitive strategic overview
Content marketing strategies
Review tracking

Essentially, you can use a competitive matrix to compare any characteristics of your company with a competitor.
Sometimes these matrices will be more visual in nature (a plotted graph), but sometimes it’ s just an excel doc with the information listed in columns.
The goal of the competitive matrix is to be able to see at a glance the competitive landscape and your position in the marketplace. This will help you see gaps in the marketplace and hone in on your unique value proposition.
Perhaps, after looking at a competitive matrix, you brainstorm new product ideas, or new tools or features that you hadn’ t considered before. Or maybe you come out of it with a ton of ideas on how to improve your content marketing strategy.
Regardless, you can use a competitive matrix for a lot of reasons. You can use it to develop new ideas, or you can use it to train sales staff on how to differentiate your company from the competition.
After figuring out what you’ re going to do with the information, make sure you write down your ideas, develop KPIs, and regularly conduct this analysis so you can stay up to date with your strategy.
Now that you know what a competitive matrix is and how to use one, let’s review some templates that you can use for your own strategy.

Competitive Matrix Templates
1. Two-Feature Competitive Landscape Chart
One type of competitive matrix you can do is a simple comparison of features. You can use this information to plot where your company is compared to competitors.
The features could be something like price or customization potential. Then, you’ d place the logos of each company (including yours) on the graph depending on how well a company executes a certain feature. The point of this matrix is to visualize who does what better, so you can see what you have to work on and how to differentiate yourself against the competition.

Download this Template
2. Content Marketing Analysis Template
As a content marketer, this is my favorite template. With this template, you can compare social media followers, blog strategy, email strategy, SEO, etc. This will help you decide where you need to focus your content strategy — should you place an emphasis on Twitter, rather than Facebook? If you download this template, it also includes a graph and more strategies to analyze.

Download this Template
3. SWOT Analysis Template
A basic competitive matrix is the SWOT analysis. Conducting a SWOT analysis will help you identify areas where you could improve. You should conduct a SWOT analysis for yourself, but also for your competition. Knowing what weaknesses your competition has will help your sales reps and help you make improvements in those areas.

Download this Template
4. Review Tracker
A review tracker matrix will help you see at a glance the types of reviews you get versus your competitors. It’ s important not to forget about reviews because they can have a big impact on a business. With this template, you can also use a scoring system to normalize the averages.

Download this Template
After reviewing those templates, it’ s time to see what a competitive matrix looks like in action. Let’ s see some examples below.
Competitive Matrix Examples
1. HubSpot

This is a public HubSpot competitive matrix comparing the overall pricing of our CRM versus Salesforce. This is a standard matrix that’s meant to help people see the difference between the CRMs at a glance.

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2. SugarSync

This is a great example of what a feature matrix might look like. SugarSync compares its feature offerings against the competition in an easy-to-understand visualization.

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3. 360iResearch

In this example, 360iResearch reports on survey management software. This is a plotted graph showing which companies have the best product satisfaction and business strategy.

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Competitive matrices are great tools to help you uncover how you’ re different from your competitors. You can learn your unique value proposition and identify areas for improvement.

As a marketer, you might be focused on creating organic content most of the time. But you should keep in mind that paid advertising is just as important.
When you manage the paid ads for your business, you can go through individual ad managers such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. However, that’s not the only option. You can also use demand-side platforms (DSP), which are automated, as a way to purchase and manage your online ads.

In fact, did you know that in 2020 $46.86 billion, or 88.7% of all US mobile display ad dollars, were transacted via automated means?
This means that a majority of marketers paid ads used DSPs as a way of purchasing, managing, and tracking online advertising.
Below, let’s review all the basics about DSP advertising.

With a DSP, you can purchase mobile ads on apps, banner ads on search engines, and video ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and even more platforms. Instead of using both Google Ads and Facebook Ads, for instance, you can purchase those ads in one place on a DSP.
The purpose of this is to make ad buying faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Now, let’s dive into how DSP platforms work and why you should use one.
DSP Advertising
So, you might be thinking, “How do DSPs work?”
DSP’s work by using programmatic advertising, which is the buying and selling of ads in real-time through an automated system. With real-time bidding, ad placements are auctioned off in milliseconds.
When you get started with DSP advertising, you’ll need to begin strategizing how much you want to spend. Think about what an effective cost per click and cost per action might be. This will help you set up your online ads so the platform knows how much to spend in any given auction.
The best DSP platforms will allow you to include multiple rich media ads, including video, images, and animation.
Now you might be wondering, “Why would I use a DSP?”
The main reason is that it makes your digital ad experience easier and more cost-effective. You can control, track, and maximize all your digital ads in one place. This means you can manage an entire ad campaign across sites on one dashboard. For example, you can show someone an ad on Google, then show them ads on Facebook, and then across other sites they visit all in one campaign. Before DSPs, those would be separate campaigns on Google and Facebook Ads.
This means you can advertise on many networks, including all the major publishers, in addition to more. With the amount of networks, you’ll have a more global reach.
Additionally, DSPs often partner with third-party data providers, giving you better tracking and reporting capabilities than a single network usually provides. And in the planning process, the targeting options are more personalized, meaning you can get better conversion rates.
When you’re choosing a platform to work with, you’ll want to look at how many ad exchanges the DSP has access to because that affects how many people you can reach. Plus, you’ll want to consider cost, training (full service or self service), support, and ease of use.
Now that you know more about DSP advertising and how it works, let’s discuss the platforms that can help you do it.
Top Demand-Side Platforms
1. Centro

Centro is an omni-channel DSP built to generate better outcomes for your ad campaigns. One of the best features is that it uses AI machine learning to automatically analyze data from numerous campaign parameters to optimize your ads.
With this DSP, you’ll be able to target hyper-local audiences across devices and multiple touchpoints. You’ll also get access to the industry’s leading exchanges, along with 25,000+ audience segments across over 30 different data providers.
2. Google Marketing Platform

Google Marketing Platform is Google’s unified advertising and analytics platform for smarter marketing and better results. This DSP has several products for both small businesses and enterprise companies, including Campaign Manager 360.
With this product, you can save time with cross-channel ad management to maximize insights and optimize media and creative performance across all your digital campaigns. The flexibility is the standout feature on this DSP. You can use third-party features and integrations so you can choose the capabilities that best help you manage and measure your campaigns.
3. Knorex

Knorex is a universal advertising platform that automates personalized marketing across channels, devices, and ad formats. You can market on Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn all in one place.
This DSP also uses AI to learn from past data to predict and adjust ad budget dynamically in real-time to drive higher efficiency.
4. Jampp

Jampp is a DSP that leverages unique contextual and behavioral signals to deliver customers and in-app purchases through programmatic advertising.
The key features of this platform are user acquisition, app retargeting, geolocated ads, dynamic ads, and predictive bidding. This is mainly a mobile user acquisition and app retargeting DSP where you can focus on mobile first ads.
5. Smadex

Smadex is a mobile DSP engineered for growth. The platform uses a combination of its own programmatic advertising technology, machine learning, and first-party data.
With this platform, you can reach global audiences at scale and re-engage audiences with its retargeting capabilities.
When you choose a DSP, make sure you understand how many inventory sources it accesses, which third-party data integrations it offers, and what targeting criteria is available. To successfully run programmatic ads on a DSP, you’ll need to reach global audiences with personalized ads.

Have you ever shopped for something online, compared prices, and read reviews until you knew you were making the right decision?
That’s similar to what businesses do when they need to purchase something as well, except it’s a slightly more formal process.
In the business world, the process includes having vendors or companies submit RFPs (request for proposal) or RFQs (request for quote) so you can compare their products and services.

These documents help businesses decide which vendor they want to buy from. It’s similar to when we, as consumers, shop online and look at prices and reviews to compare, say, new phones.
Below, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about RFQs — from what they are, to how to write one, to how it’s different from an RFP.

In an RFQ, you’ll find a vendor’s costs, payment terms, and product specs or details. Most businesses use an RFQ when they know exactly what they’re looking for, the budget they want to spend, and are ready to make a purchase.
If you know what type of features you want to see, you plan to choose a vendor based on price, and you don’t need a service plan or supported contract, an RFQ might be right for you. When you have a bunch of RFQs, you can properly evaluate all the solutions based on price, quickly.
Now, what’s the difference between an RFQ and an RFP?
While an RFP gives more detailed information on the service itself, an RFQ mainly answers how much it costs. An RFQ implies this is a simple, on-demand purchase as opposed to a longer term project that will have a longer buying process.
So, now you might be wondering what this looks like in action. Let’s review below.

1. Preparation
As a company, if you want to use an RFQ, you first need to decide if you want to open the bidding to any vendor, or choose a select group of vendors.
If you’re going to send RFQs to several vendors, you need to decide which vendors you want to send the RFQ template to. You might make this decision based on reputation or people you’ve worked with before.
If you want the bid to be open to all vendors, you can use a procurement software to simplify this process — this will post the RFQ document on your website, allow vendors to upload, ask questions, etc. Plus, this will keep all the RFQs in one place, easy to review, and contact all the vendors that you say no to (more on this later).
Then, you need to create the RFQ document (see template below). This should detail a list of requirements, including a list of products (features required), quantity or duration, date of delivery, and payment terms. If you don’t use a standard template, then companies might give you different information and you can’t compare apples to apples.
Also, ideally you’ve included an introduction to your company, what you need, the deadline to submit, and how to submit. Introducing the problem you’re trying to solve will make it easier for sellers to recognize if this is a good fit.
As a vendor, when it comes time to fill out an RFQ, you need to look at the template that was sent to you, and start gathering all the information. How much will those products cost? Is it in the right currency? Did you include your contact information? As a vendor, your work is now done, unless you’re chosen of course.
2. Review
Now that you’ve sent your RFQ documents to your list of vendors, it’s time to wait until the deadline. When you start receiving the RFQs back, you can review them. Which company gave you the best price? Which company can provide all the products/services you need?
This process will be easier if you used a standard template and asked everyone for the same information. If this was thought out, and you included all the details you need in the template, then this process should be quick.
3. Choose and Close
Once you decide, you can either email everyone the decision, or use the software mentioned above to send out notifications and alert vendors who submitted an RFQ.
It’s best practice to wait to alert the vendors that didn’t get chosen until the one you did choose signs the contract and the deal is closed.
When you let vendors know they weren’t chosen, thank them for their time. It’s important that when you choose a vendor, you aren’t burning bridges with the other vendors because you might need to use them in the future.
RFQ Template
Below is a list of information that you might ask for in an RFQ. You can separate the document into buyer information, seller information, and review and evaluation.
Buyer Information

Company Name
Company Description
Product Details and Goals
Contact Information – name, title, phone, email of the point person

Seller Information

Product Details — name and specs
Product Quantity
Delivery Requirements
Product Price

Review and Evaluation

Evaluation Method
Timeline
Terms and Conditions
Submission Requirements and Instructions

If your company is deciding between multiple vendors, you know what you want, and it basically comes down to price, an RFQ might be the way to go.

Boosting your online sales can be simple with the right tools, and GetResponse provides the full toolbox. See how to use GetResponse ecommerce solutions to grow your online store.

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