There’s a lot for you to consider when trying to launch your product and increasing your odds of success. While you need a product to sell, investment money (never enough) and time (also in short supply), you also need to understand your Customers and the Market. And it’s important you put your product in the context of your Customer’s and the Market’s pain-points. Otherwise, you may be offering a solution to a problem the Customer isn’t aware of or even looking for. For example, let’s say you have a product for pets, and you market it as a pet product. However, using market research tools, you may find that more people are looking for dog related items than a generic term like pets.
Let’s take a look at Google trends which is a powerful (and free) tool you can use to see what keywords your Customers are using. You can also add and compare different key words to see which search word is stronger (used more often) than other search words. Back to the pet example, you can see below that the term dog (in red) is a much stronger search word than pet (blue) or cat (yellow). As such, you may want to consider optimizing your product for dogs and market it to dog owners. While pets and dogs are similar, people are searching for dogs more than pets – so position your product in that context to make it easier to reach your potential Customers.
Another powerful and free tool is Facebook’s Audience Insights (you’ll need a Facebook account to use). With Audience Insights, you can tap into the vast demographic information Facebook collects on its billions of users. For instance, if you type in dog as an area of interest, you’ll quickly see that 54% of Facebook users with an interest in dogs are married, 61% are college educated, 83% own a house and while most are woman (67%), there’s not much difference across the ages. You could almost interpret the chart below to show that when women transition from their college years to starting their careers, there’s an uptick in interest on dogs (12% up to 21%). That type of information could be very useful insight for you and how you develop and market your product.
Hopefully this brief overview on market research tools has given you some food for thought and ideas for applying them to your business. If you’d like to discuss further, either leave a comment below or please reach out and let me know.
