You have a new product but who wants to buy it? You could dress it up with a nicely designed logo, roll it out and hope for the best but what would happen next? Casting a new product or service out into the marketplace might feel like a lottery but it doesn’t have to be that way. A well planned strategy can greatly increase your chances of success; but how do you go about it? Well, there is a long story and a short one.
Let’s go with the short one….
What’s the Solution?
The solution is to break the world down into pieces and to pull out groups of people that could really benefit from your product. Massive task? Maybe, but we enjoy it. Here is a brief overview of how to do it:
Segmentation
Large sized pieces… First, look at a seemingly huge and overwhelming market place and break it down into demographic segments in order to narrow the focus into a broad group of people – this is known as demographic.
Demographic groups share common traits such as interests, behaviour, age, gender, financial backgrounds and more. The demographic you go with is usually based upon the type of strategy that is most appropriate to get the results you want.
Demographics have been one of the most traditional marketing approaches as they involve clearly defining potential customers. However, lifestyle segmentation has increased in prevalence as companies try to identify their customers based more on shared interests and activities in order to offer personalized ‘storytelling’ messages. More about that stuff some other time; seriously – we could go on about that one for a long time.
Once the demographic has been identified and analyzed, it is then further broken into a smaller, concentrated group – the Target Audience. Dom-dom-dom!
Target Audience
Much smaller pieces… The target audience is a specific group of customers who have been taken from the demographic and selected as the narrow group of people that we will sell the product to.
Generally speaking, the aim of the game is to go after the market that offers you the best immediate or long-term profit. Market size, growth potential, number of competitors and company strengths are among the key factors.
As soon as we have successfully identified your target audience we actually profile them. Sometimes –depending on the scope of the project- we give them their own little photos and give them nice names before describing where they live and what they like to do. Although this is kind of cute and quite a lot of fun, we do this to really understand the people that want your product to and this, in turn, allows us to really sell, sell, sell!
Positioning
Now that you know about your target audience and what makes them tick, it’s time to properly and distinctly position your service in the market place, relative to other competing services and in a manner that makes yours easy to find.
In order to achieve this we must consider the benefits that your service offers to the identified target audience. Once this has been defined properly we can then produce a value proposition.
The value proposition is made of a few choice ingredients but to cut a long story short, it helps if you come up with some kind of positioning statement in order to keep things nice and focused. By simplifying your service into a memorable, credible statement that can deliver on its promise you will ensure that your value proposition never loses its way and that the message that you send out to your target audience is loud and clear and effectively separates your product from that of the other guys.
Problem Solved!
The product is now ready to sell. Fortunately, because of all the hard work you put into figuring all this stuff out, you now know how it should look and how it should be promoted. You might even know how it’s supposed to smell – if that’s necessary, of course.
Will your customers love it? You’re darn tootin’! Why? Because you know who they are, you know what they like, you know how to talk to them and know how to sell your product to them.
So, there it is! This is how to turn your new product into a local behemoth. So if you need to push your service, product or brand out there and really make a mark in the world, talk to us. We can help you make it happen!
