Designing a product can be challenging, and the last thing you want to happen is for it to fail. Businesses need to look for insights they can use to reach their target market and persuade them to buy their product.
If you’re facing the same challenges, this article will try to make things easier for you. Here are four strategies to ensure product success:
- Know Your Ideal Customer
The first thing you need to do is to craft your buyer persona. A buyer persona is a description of an ideal customer to whom you wish to market. Their demographic information may include age, sex, geographic location, credit range, income, their title, the trends they follow, where they get their income, and data about their business if they have one. The buyer persona is a vital component in marketing strategy.
Some of the factors you must include in your buyer persona include their pain points, unmet needs, and aspirations. What keeps them awake at night? What concerns bug them, what kind of life do they want, whom they want to be friends or associated with? These are just some components you need to know about your ideal customer. It’s vital to get as many details as possible. Remember, the information you gather in this phase will help you create opportunities to convert potential buyers into customers, eventually transforming them into loyal fans.
2. Check Out Your Competitors
‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,’ goes the adage. Although you don’t see your competitors in that kind of light, this advice can still be applicable to some degree. Doing a competitor analysis will help you gauge if the market you want to enter is already saturated or has barely any players. The health of your chosen market will determine if you get to tap unseen opportunities or if your product will fail to fit the market.
Keep in mind that a saturated market can give birth to innovations, while a non-existent competitor may mean that there’s no demand for the kind of product you want to sell—or you’re talking to the wrong crowd.
3. Know Your Product’s Strengths
Another factor you should assess is your product’s perceived strength. What is your value proposition, or why would your ideal customer choose you over your competitors? You should be able to flesh out the benefits and features of your offer and communicate how you can resolve their unmet needs with your product.
If, however, your product doesn’t directly resolve an unmet desire or a need, you need to emphasize the importance of the experience your customer will get when they buy from you.
Take for example the approach used by Slack, a collaboration tool for teams with instant messaging capabilities. Their value proposition is ‘Be More Productive At Work With Less Effort.’
Marketing campaign focuses on their value proposition of saving time and breaking down systems and communication silos in a fun way, efforts—hinged on their value proposition—were proven to be very effective and resulted in 77% of Fortune 500 companies using Slack.
4. Tell Stories
One of the most powerful ways to ensure your product’s success is to tell stories. One of the innate things humans appreciate is a good story. Telling your brand’s story aims to capture, inform, and engage your target customers and loyal fans.
Knowing how to craft your story is guaranteed to help you stand out from the competition. This technique makes you more relatable to your audience, transfers your values and beliefs to your listeners, and helps your customers and employees understand your purpose in coming up with your product.
Every story needs a hero, and in the realm of launching your product, it will boil down to this: UX strategy vs product strategy. While both methods are powerful in their own ways, you’ll have to decide which strategy to use for a holistic product campaign launch.
How are these two strategies different from each other? Here’s how:
- The Hero is Your Product
Storytelling using the product strategy means your product is the hero. The primary focus of your story’s theme is how your product will answer the unmet needs or improve the user’s quality of life. A product-centered game plan will hinge more on the value proposition—the features and benefits.
An example of this is CrazyEgg, a website analytics tool that allows users to pinpoint parts that have the most traffic and how long people stay in these areas. CrazyEgg isn’t the first or the only player in this niche. However, their value proposition, ‘Website Behavior Tracking At an Unbeatable Price,’ has hooked a lot of users.
- The Hero is Your Customer
On the other hand, a UX-centered strategy focuses more on the users. In this story, the users are the hero. Your company is the Gandalf to your customer’s Frodo.
Your marketing will put the spotlight on how your customers can overcome the challenges they face through your guidance, which is why you’re offering your product to help them in their journey.
In this game plan, you align all your design and marketing efforts in ensuring your customer’s needs are met in every touchpoint they encounter when transacting with your business.
A perfect example of a brand that leveraged on fulfilling their customer’s needs is Amazon. This e-commerce giant banks promises to make shopping online incredibly easy and convenient that you can do it in just one click.
They bested other shopping websites by focusing on making the buyer experience as frictionless as possible by giving their customers:
- Click Checkout
- ‘Buy it again’ button
- Product suggestion
5. Offer A Demo or Free Trial
One way you can check if your product will be successful is to offer your ideal users free trials or a demo. This technique will save you and your team lots of money and time.
Feedback from your users is critical because they’ll tell you which part of your product is deficient and which parts delight them. Their opinion can also help you improve features and contribute to the continuous iteration of your product. Understanding if your product can deliver your promise is a crucial factor to know before you officially launch.
Key Takeaways
To make sure all your efforts in designing a product don’t go to waste, you have to be prepared to take extra care in doing your preliminary research. To summarize, preliminary research is vital to get all the data to ensure your product’s success.
Getting to know the players in your niche, your product’s strengths and weaknesses, who you want to buy from you, and how to communicate your purpose and values to persuade them to purchase from you are factors you need to get the feedback you require your users
