The #1 Thing You Need to Know Before Launching a New Product or Offer
How to tell if your product is really as good as you think it is.
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Let me offer a scenario that might sound familiar:
You’ve poured your heart into a new project. Spending days, weeks, months, or even years working on this idea you’re sure your audience will love. You’ve got a big launch planned and can’t wait to unveil your newest creation to the world that you’ve been working to make “just right”.
You finally release it to the public and...crickets.
What!?!?
You now start to second guess every decision you’ve made up to this point. Asking yourself, what went wrong?
Don’t let the clouds rain on your parade just yet, though. This happens to just about every founder at some point, whether they admit it or not. And it’s absolutely soul-crushing.
You feel like you’ve wasted valuable resources: time is the most important, and there’s literally no way to get it back.
But the worst part of the entire process? You’re not even sure why it was such an epic failure. That’s why there’s one thing every entrepreneur must do before launching (or re-launching) a product offer - understand your audience.
Yes, you develop products or offerings because you want people to buy them but it’s not about you, it’s about everyone that will be buying your products.
What’s their goal? What are their biggest pain points? What are they struggling with? Why do they yearn to solve this problem?
People have problems and are looking for solutions.
That’s why, when you go to create a new offering, you’re not creating something for you but rather for the end-user. When you tailor your product to meet real needs, your audience will be more likely to buy into it.
So how do you begin to better understand your audience? Here’s my three-step strategy that will not only help you better understand your buyer but also prepare for a successful future launch.
Know the Buyer Journey Front to Back
Whether you already have an audience or plan to build one with your new product, you need clarity on exactly who your ideal customer is. Part of this is keeping in mind that your prospects will engage with you in different ways depending on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Keep in mind, you’re likely solving a problem for a customer about whom you feel you already know a lot. Perhaps you’ve already served this customer in a variety of ways. Or maybe you have had this problem too, so you consider yourself to be your ideal customer.
But guess what?
You aren’t. Your ideal customer didn’t decide to create a sellable solution to this problem. And even if you have helped this customer in a myriad of other ways, you need to go deeper into understanding them, their problem, and how they’d like to solve it.
Your goal should be to interview at least 25 people who fit your ideal customer profile. Ask your network. Join a Facebook group and ask to interview them. Put in the work to land these interviews and learn as much as you can.
Some questions you need to answer:
How did they become aware of their problem?
Are they aware of the actual problem or only symptom aware?
How long has this problem been plaguing them?
How are they currently solving this problem? What workarounds have they tried? Has anything worked so far? What gaps still linger?
Or maybe there aren’t any great solutions out there?
How much time, money, or frustration has this problem caused them so far? If you can get them to give you a number, you can use that to price your product.
All of these questions will affect how you market your product, whom you target, and how much you can reasonably charge. You need to clearly understand the pain points you’re trying to solve and then create your product around those pain points…That’s how you generate sales and create product advocates.
By being the solver everyone’s been waiting for or didn’t know they were waiting for.
Review Your Social Media Activity
How else can you learn more about your prospects?
Individual interviews are a given. Beyond that, social media can be a goldmine of “nuggets” that will guide your product development: comments, messages, and even chatter in groups that relate to what you do.
When you monitor these conversations over time, you can learn a lot about what your audience likes, doesn’t like, and their natural tendencies. Not to mention, this information is free and easily accessible.
Take this research a step further by looking on external resources like Quora, Reddit, and similar forums to see what questions your ideal buyers are asking. Look for clues about their experiences with other solutions.
Most importantly, as you research, look for issues that keep repeating themselves. These should be top priorities when creating solutions.
Validate Your Idea
Lastly, before you go all-in on building your new product or offering, it’s a good idea to beta test your product — even if it’s a course or service, not software — so you can gauge whether you’re on the right track.
Sketch out your product idea, write down a plan, a content map, whatever makes sense for your product. Then, sell the product idea to them. Tell them what you’re developing, how it will help their specific pain points, and see how well it resonates with them. Get their feedback! What do they love about the idea? What turns them off?
Let them know that if you get enough people interested, you’ll build the full product. You’ll quickly find out not only if people like the idea, but if they’re willing to invest in it. This way you can have guaranteed ROI when you actually build the product itself.
The cool thing about doing an audience survey is that these same people will likely be your first buyers. Your early adopters. This is a great way to soft launch your product, get feedback and reviews, and collect social proof for your product before you do a full-blown launch.
You might sell your product at a discount or with incentives to the people who guided its development, making this relationship mutually beneficial. After, their testimonials and other social proof to help you market it at full price.
Doing all of the above begins with connecting with the right audience. Download our free guide, The 5 Easy Steps, which will help you gain clarity on who your audience is, craft a plan to attract them, and create an offer they will love.
Sources
https://blog.thesocialms.com/why-and-how-to-build-an-audience-long-before-you-got-a-product/
https://blog.hubspot.com/service/know-your-audience