Once you’ve finished designing the product and started on manufacturing, you might believe that the hardest part of your journey is done. Your product’s journey is just starting. It has a long trip to make, getting into retailers, into the imaginations of the market, and finally into the hands of your customers. Here, we’re going to look at what you can do to pave that path for it, helping ease its journey to land with real impact.
Get Real Feedback
You might have done plenty of testing in the lab, but you have to rely on a broader range of perspectives. To make sure that it’s truly ready for launch, you need to get a few other opinions than just your own. Getting it into the hands of consumers early at events like trade shows can help you get impromptu feedback on how appealing it is, how easy it is to pick up, and whether or not they would be likely to use it in a real-life setting. If you get it into the hands of influencers, like bloggers and Youtubers, you get more than just their feedback, too. They can start spreading the news and building the hype in advance of its arrival on the market.
Make Sure It’s Love at First Sight
You can also do retail product testing to see how well it performs in an actual store environment, particularly when its positioned against some of your top competitors. Visual appeal is a big factor in every purchase, even if it’s as simple as being able to get across the key functions and advantages of your product easily. You need your product to capture the attention of the consumer and using labeling systems to ensure that your brand is well-represented and that the product is clearly defined can be a big part of that. Don’t be afraid to give it an extra push by partnering with retailers, providing product displays to ensure that it gets the attention it deserves.
Spread the Good Word
The product can market itself to some degree, but you don’t want it to simply appeal to the demand already in the market. The best launches create new demand for the product, as well. The time of the launch is a critical period in marketing, and it’s worth putting aside a large proportion of your marketing budget aside for the week or two leading up to it. Make sure that you’re ready to keep all your messaging on point, too. Besides the most seemingly obvious uses and benefits of your product, try to think of the niche that it best appeals to or the qualities it has that your competitors’ products don’t.
So long as you’re continuing to put the product out on the market, it only makes sense to continue supporting it, refining it, and helping to spread it to as many customers as possible. You’re not going to see it live up to its true potential if you simply let it out there to fend for itself.