One of the most important questions any business owner needs to ask is whether he or she has the right product on offer. Among other things, having a good product is key to having a successful business. In this article I will discuss how to find the right products and how to have a proper approach to product creation and development.
Finding the Right Products
The most important thing for any business is to make sales. Without sales there would be no business, so if you are thinking about having a business you need to understand where your market is – and develop the right products for these markets. Product selection is, therefore, fundamental for any business to prosper.
You may have a great idea but if your product sucks then you will get nowhere.
But how do you know which is the right product? How do you know whether your product will sell or not. Well I will give you three strategies that can be used by you to know what to do. And, by the way, I hate surveys and customer interviews. I find them to be really not the perfect assessment of a market. And they are quite expensive most of the times as well.
Keyword Research. So the first strategy is to use any keyword research tool. You can look at your industry and see what is actually searched by customers. You can also see what potentially you may be offering that has no connection to the market you are targeting.
Keyword research is, therefore, a good strategy to use to understand whether there is a natural and organic search for your product.
Amazon Best Sellers. What you can also do, and this is the strategy preferred by drop shipping specialists but that can also be used in e-commerce projects, is to look at amazon best sellers list.
Amazon is a powerful tool to understand what actually sells in your market. Look at the top sellers options and see what you may be missing in your catalogue that is a winner.
Google Trends. Google trends is another tool that can be used to assess the relevancy over time of particular products or services. In google trends, you can assess whether a particular search term is being requested recently and you can jump on that wave as well.
Google trends can give you a specific assessment of seasonality, but it can also allow you to assess and jump on a new trend ahead of time.
This strategy is quite subjective but in concrete terms, it basically means that if you think that a new idea is coming into the market that you find particularly interesting and associated with that idea is a product, then you can look and create new products around that particular opportunity.
Lead Generation: Dissecting your Core Product into Sub-Products
The second thing you need to do is to have a clear understanding of what your premium product is and from then you need to dissect it into sub-products. Say you sell a really expensive photography course. What are the components of this course? How can you divide them up in a way that you can not only sell the premium offer but also individual sub-sets of that offer?
And you can do this also to your sub-products. For example, imagine that I have this photography course idea and that want to look into the details of how to develop my technical capabilities. Well, you can have a product around that and then a product around composition, lightning and even how to best format your images.
E-Commerce: What Are your Top Products?
If you have an e-commerce website then the challenge is a different one. You do not necessarily need to dissect your products but you need to have cheaper products and more expensive ones.
Be it as it may what we are looking for in e-commerce websites is for the top products – the ones that sell the most. These will attract other sales to other closely related products.
Conclusion
Having the right products is one of the most important elements of any business plan. A great idea without a great product is not enough. In this article we developed a number of strategies that can be used to assess whether you have public for your products and how to constantly be updated with new trends in the market. I’ve also suggested that your core product needs to be separated into small chunks – only then will you hit the right buyers with the right offer.