The past couple of years have seen an increasing number of people setting up their own businesses. This is understandable. The pandemic has seen coronavirus and Covid-19 spread around the world, taking out many businesses in its wake. Whether people have started a business because the company they worked for collapsed, were made redundant or simply because they had enough time away from the workplace to realise that they want to follow a different career path. Now, setting up a business is a lot of work and you’re going to find yourself having to learn a lot along the way. If you’re close to releasing your first product, here are a few areas of focus that can help you along the way.
By Team Savant
Image: Birgith Roosipuu
Market Research
If you haven’t carried out market research, you need to make sure that you engage with this essential step in the product development process. Put simply, market research is any research that you conduct to find out more about your target demographic and whether they’d be likely to buy your product or not. You can learn a lot about what people want and what they are willing to pay, giving you a good chance to make last minute changes to your product that could result in better customer satisfaction and more sales. Most small businesses use an agency to carry this work out, as it’s a one job that you won’t need to carry out on a day to day basis, so isn’t necessary to bring in-house.
Consider Your Marketing Campaigns
You’re going to need to market your product well. You could have the best product in existence at the most competitive price, but if people don’t know it exists, you’re not going to make any sales at all. You’re going to have to come up with marketing campaigns to build brand and product awareness and to entice people into shopping with you for the first time. Unlike established brands, you don’t have the benefit of social proof, good reviews or people recommending your product. Some campaigns to consider could include:
Social media — people spend a lot of time on social media nowadays. Social media advertising can be low cost and well targeted. This could include paid ads or collaborations with social media influencers followed by your target demographic.
Sampling — have you got a product that you can sample? Food products, beauty products and similar items could benefit from brand sampling campaigns where people get to try a sample for free.
TV and radio — TV and radio are expensive forms of marketing, but if you have the budget, this can be an extremely effective way of raising awareness of your brand and products.
PPC — PPC ads can be very budget friendly. PPC stands for “pay per click”. Ads will be targeted in areas where your target demographic are likely to frequent, and you only pay for them when people actually click on them and are redirected to your site.
These are just a few areas of focus for the time being, but hopefully, some will come in useful for you and your first product launch!