How to Market New Products on Social Media

Social media can play a crucial role in an effective product launch strategy.

How to use Social Media to Launch a Product

Use the following tips and tricks to maximize the power of social media in your next product launch.

Create a video

Video drives engagement and captures consumers’ attention, and video-based social media sites such as Vine and Instagram are soaring in popularity. Now is the time to harness the power of video content. Try to create mini ads or behind-the-scenes content in preparation for your product launch. YouTube is also a social media powerhouse these days, and is now the world’s second largest search engine and largest video-sharing site. An astounding 72 hours of video footage are being uploaded to YouTube every single minute. If your brand doesn’t have a YouTube channel yet, now is the time to get one.

Develop a unique hashtag

A creative hashtag can go a long way when it comes time to launch a product, especially if you’re running a campaign that relies heavily on user participation. All in all, a hashtag is a great way to generate buzz around a new product.

Create a quiz

Between BuzzFeed quizzes that tell you where you should live, and Starbucks quizzes that tell you your ideal fall drink, people love wasting their time on fun quizzes. Create a quiz that somehow connects to your launch, and ensure that people can share the results across social media sites. Take Heinz, for example. The company created a Facebook quiz app to promote a new Five Beanz variety. Users responded to questions about their personalities in order to discover which kind of beans they were. Every hour, five winners were picked and sent a customized bean. Silly? Yes, but effective? Absolutely. The company reached 10.8 million people on Facebook, and an additional three million people through Twitter, blogs, and news sites.

Encourage your fans and followers to spread the word

Social media is an excellent way to encourage your fans and followers to engage in new product launches, but that means you need to make it easy for your fans and followers to share your content. Keep in mind that it also helps to add share buttons to all blog posts and website content. In 2012, Cadbury successfully used social media (primarily Twitter) to relaunch the Cadbury Wispa in honor of the 2012 London Olympics. They created the “Retweet for Sweets” challenge, in which Twitter users could win a box of Wispa Gold if @wispa retweeted their completed Tweet: “I love #WispaGold because _____.” Engagement went through the roof, and the company was successfully able to incite followers to spread word about the launch. All in all, Cadbury saw a 25 percent increase in engagement rate, a 116 percent increase in product mentions, and a 1,800 percent increase in positive product mentions.

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.

Here’s How to Figure Out Your Target Group of Audiences

Honing in on your target consumers is an absolutely crucial component of business success. After all, you need to know who you are selling to in order to be able to sell your product effectively.

How to Identify Your Target Audience

To effectively identify your target consumer, be sure to take the following into consideration.

Check out Google Analytics

Google Analytics can help you establish an in-depth understanding of who is visiting your site and how they are getting there. This includes analysis of keywords consumers use to get to your site, as well as any referral sites. Analytics allow you to see what types of needs or preferences are driving users to your site. For example, if you are manufacturing BPA-free water bottles and you discover that parenting sites are commonly directing consumers to your site, you might hone in on health-conscious mothers as a target consumer group. Remember, when it comes to identifying a target consumer group, the key is to find a common thread between consumers — common traits, common needs, common interests, etc. The more precisely you are able to define this common thread, the better.

Pay close attention to Facebook analytics

Once your Facebook page garners over thirty likes, you will have access to Facebook analytics. This can provide a tremendous amount of insight into who is visiting and interacting with your Facebook page, including sources, visitor demographics, external referrals, and media consumption, among much more. This information will help you not only get a grasp of who your target consumer is, but also how they behave. Facebook analytical data can provide you with insight into your follower’s likes and preferences, as well as what other sites and pages they regularly frequent. Furthermore, this information is invaluable when it comes to crafting an advertising and marketing plan, and allows you to spend your dollars more effectively and maximize impact. After all, you want to be cultivating a presence on sites where you know your consumers will be.

Take a look at U.S. Census Bureau data

Last but not least, it never hurts to take a look at US Census Bureau data for more information. The Bureau has a significant amount of information that can be sorted by state, city, age, business, geographical region, etc. This allows for you to more precisely define your target consumer based on factors such as location or income, among many more.

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.

Is There a Market for your Product?

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times before: when it comes to business success, a good idea alone isn’t enough. In fact, many entrepreneurs have come up with fantastic, innovative ideas that simply haven’t translated into business success. The reason? There was no market for the product they were selling.

How to tell if your product invention will sell

The bottom line is that once you have come up with a truly fantastic idea, you need to make sure that there is a market for that product idea. Here’s how you can accurately ascertain whether or not there is a market for your product.

Conduct personal interviews

Before you start manufacturing a product, it’s a good idea to actually conduct interviews with consumers to see if this product will really meet an unmet consumer need. “It’s a big red flag when someone outlines the size of the market — multibillion dollars — but doesn’t clearly articulate a plan for how the idea will meet an unmet need in the marketplace,” explains Aaron Keller, a managing principal of Capsule, a Minneapolis-based brand development firm. The bottom line is that you need to be absolutely sure that your product can meet an unmet need better than other products out on the market — otherwise, your product is unlikely to succeed, no matter how good the idea.

Carefully analyze competitor products

There is no getting around it: before you put a product on the market, you need to know how it compares to any competitor products that are also currently out on the market. There are three different groups you’ll need to keep in mind: primary, secondary and tertiary. A competitor’s placement within each level largely depends on how directly your business would compete with the business or organization. You will need to carefully evaluate these competitors, especially your primary competitors.

“Visit their Web site [sic] and put yourself on their list,” explains Nancy A. Shenker, the president of the New York-based full service marketing firm ONswitch LLC. “Talk to your competitor’s customers, too — ask them what they like or don’t like about your competitor’s product or service. If you conduct formal research, include a question like ‘Where do you currently go for that product or service? Why?'” This research will help you figure out whether there is enough space in the current market for your product, as well as how you can differentiate your product from those of competitors.

Acknowledge problems

The bottom line is that throughout this whole process you need to be honest with yourself. If your idea or plan has holes, acknowledge them and objectively evaluate if and how these holes can be fixed. There is no shame in reworking or retooling a plan. While this might seem frustrating, it’s worth it in the long run. “No entrepreneur wants to hear that his ‘baby’ is flawed, but only by listening and reacting to feedback can he give his idea a chance for success,” Shenker explains. “Ask yourself, ‘Is this a weakness that can be overcome?’ If you can’t create true value for your customer and your business, then it’s time to pick another idea to pursue.”

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.

What You Need to Know When Doing Market Research

The goal of market research is to help you figure out what your customer wants. In today’s world, e-commerce sites and online options only make competition stiffer, meaning that understanding the wants and needs of your customers is the absolute key to success.

“Whereas in the past a small business had competition from other, often local, small businesses and their customers were known, today a small business competes in a much larger field,” explains Jose Scheuer, a lecturer in business and marketing at the London School of Business and Finance. “Competitors are much larger and have greater negotiating power to source and sell at cheaper prices.

The Most Important Market Research Questions

In addition to this, small businesses face competition from the unstoppable growth from e-commerce.”

The bottom line? Whether you’re running a multinational corporation or a one-man show, market research is essential when developing a new product. Here are the three questions every entrepreneur needs to keep in mind when conducting market research.

Is there a market for my product?

First and foremost, before developing a product you need to carefully examine market needs, market growth, and market trends in order to evaluate whether or not there will be a demand for your product. This includes carefully evaluating what kind of consumer need your product meets, as well what other products on the market currently meet this need (if there are any). Remember, it is always a good idea to define your product offering in terms of target market needs. That way you can focus on the buyer needs you satisfy, rather than what you have to sell. At this juncture you will also need to carefully consider any established or emerging market trends that could affect your target market.

Who are is my target customer?

In order to figure out whether or not there is a market for your product, you also need to learn more about your target consumer. Here it helps to segment your market into different workable segments. There are an infinite number of possibilities for this segmentation — age, income, lifestyle factors, geographical location, etc. When developing these segments, you will want to consider what factors differentiate purchasing choices between consumers. Does age influence what kind of restaurants people eat at? Or does income play more of a factor? Once you have established these segments, you will want to prioritize them, taking into consideration market potential in each segment. The segment with the highest priority will be your target consumer.

How much is my target customer willing to pay?

Once you have your target consumer established, you need to figure out how much he is willing to pay for your product. This will be established by looking at any pre-existing competitive products, as well as by taking a look at economic data pertaining to income, discretionary spending, etc. Keep in mind you not only need to understand how much money your target consumer is willing to pay, but also how often he is willing to pay it, especially if you are selling a product or service that is finite in nature.

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.

How to Calculate Product ROI

You can’t jump into the product development process unless you have a clear understanding of your anticipated return on investment, or ROI. ROI essentially illustrates the costs and benefits of a specific product, showing how much a company needs to put in to produce and develop a product and how much the sale of that product will bring in. A high, anticipated ROI can easily win over management and show the value of a new product. Here is what you need to know about calculating ROI.

Determine how much work is required to complete the product

This first step in any ROI calculation is determining how much work is required to complete the project. To do this, you will need to break production down into as many small tasks as possible. It can be helpful to use a mind map to visualize this breakdown.

Determine how much the work will cost

Once you have broken down the product production process into numerous small tasks, you will need to estimate how much each of these tasks will cost to complete. Be sure to take into consideration wages for all hires, contractors, and consultants, the cost of any necessary new equipment, and the cost of leases or rentals if you need to rent property or lease equipment.

Keep in mind that project managers will also recommend that you calculate opportunity cost at this juncture. Opportunity cost essentially describes the cost of picking a specific project over any other project. This isn’t really a true dollar amount, so not everyone calculates it in the same manner. However, it is incredibly useful when determining how to use your in-house resources appropriately, such as your employees’ labor and your company-owned equipment.

Calculate the returns

Here you will calculate your company’s change in revenue. In other words, how much this product will generate in additional revenue. Of course, you won’t have a perfect dollar amount available at this part, but that’s part of running a business — all entrepreneurs have to deal with imperfect data and ambiguity. But you should be able to come up with a reasonable estimate based on market data. Ideally, you will want to estimate the worst, average, and best case scenarios for sales.

Once you have the revenue the project will generate and the estimated cost of the project, you will need to subtract the costs from revenues to produce your ROI. Remember, the higher this number the better!

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.

Here’s How to Figure out if a Product Idea is Good for Development

Just because a product idea is good, doesn’t mean the product will succeed on the market. Even a truly fantastic idea is no guarantee of success. So, how can you accurately assess the market potential of an idea? When the following factors are in place, chances are your product is good enough to develop.

You have interested customers

When customers are clamoring to get a hold of your product before it has even been developed, that is key (and no, these potential customers cannot be friends or family members). The bottom line is that when evaluating an idea, you need to carefully gauge market interest. If the interest is there, your idea is all the more stronger.

Your idea is stronger than existing alternatives

Before you decide whether or not to develop a product from an idea, you need to take a careful look at the existing alternatives that are out there. If somebody has already solved a problem or filled a market need, there is no need for you to release a similar product unless it is remarkably different, better, or cheaper.

Your ROI (Return on Investment) analysis is promising

Turing a great idea into a great product is a significant investment. You will need to hire and train people to test, assemble, inspect, troubleshoot, and package the product. You will also need to pump money into advertising, which entails developing a marketing strategy, training salespeople, and soliciting feedback from customers. All of this requires money, most likely hundreds of thousands of dollars. You need to carefully evaluate how many units of the product you will need to sell in order to recuperate these development and marketing costs. Be conservative with this estimate (estimating ROI is no time to be overly ambitious). You will also need to carefully consider how long it will take to sell that number of units (again, be conservative). Typically, if a company won’t be able to recover these start-up costs within a year, the idea isn’t worth pursuing.

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.

How Should You Package Your Product?

Product packaging is one of the most important factors of a successful product launch. Believe it or not, product packaging can make or break the success of a product. There are numerous factors to balance when designing product packaging, so be sure to take the following into consideration.

Does it stand out on the shelf?

Packaging that stands out on the shelf is without a doubt a huge marketing advantage. Think of product design as a kind of advertising. Whether it is bright colors or an innovative package design, ask yourself how your product’s packaging can help it stand out.

Does it make the buyer happy?

Always, always design product packaging with the buyer in mind. Just like when it comes to designing a product, different demographics have different preferences when it comes to designing packaging. Keep in mind that the packaging used should visually appeal to the target audience. After all, you wouldn’t use pink packaging for a product targeted toward 18- to 34-year old males.

Does it protect and secure the product?

Remember that packaging isn’t just about making the product look good. Beyond the aesthetics, good product packaging is functional. First and foremost, effective packaging is durable. It should be able to withstand long hauls in trucks and rough handling by stock boys. Your product isn’t always going to be handled perfectly, so it is the job of the packaging to prevent damage while the product is in transit or sitting on the shelves. Good packaging should protect contents against temperature extremes, as well as excessive humidity and moisture.

Security is also a concern

Small items that can be easily concealed (and thus easily stolen) are often put in bigger packaging to make harder to shoplift. Packages are often also made to be difficult to open in order to deter theft and prevent unauthorized item substitution.

Does it meet legal requirements?

There are legal requirements governing product packaging. In many cases legal stipulations mandate that packaging must give information concerning product weight, materials used, whether or not the product is hazardous, origin of contents, etc. Regulations can even be so stringent to mandate where this critical information must be placed on the packaging, as well as the size and type of font to be used. Failure to comply with any legal packaging requirements could mean that stores won’t stock your product, so it is in your best interest to do your research and make sure your product packaging meets all necessary legal requirements.

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.

Creating Product Awareness Using Twitter – A Marketing Guide

It’s no secret: Twitter is a powerful tool that every brand needs to have in its social media repertoire. Believe it or not, Twitter is especially powerful when it comes time to launch a new product.

How to use Twitter To Launch a Product

Let’s take a look at two companies that were able to successfully leverage Twitter to amp up consumer demand and facilitate a successful product launch in a new market.

PepsiCo, @7UPArabia

Global food and beverage company PepsiCo didn’t just want to launch a new product in Saudi Arabia — they wanted to get the local market involved in and excited about the launch. So what did PepsiCo do? They turned to social media. The industry giant (their product portfolio includes brands Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade, and Frito-Lay) offered customers the opportunity to name its newest product via voting on a variety of digital and mobile platforms. The company reached out to and partnered with well-known KSA YouTube personality Bader Saleh in order to attract attention to the voting process and get consumers excited. The company made use of a locally relevant, promoted trend Twitter hashtag (صوت_وساعد_بدر#) to maximize brand awareness and drive contest votes. The company’s promoted Tweets were media-rich, designed to engage Twitter users through clear and simple calls to actions.

The results were impressive. Users did vote to name the new product “squeeze.” But in reality the campaign wasn’t about naming a product, it was about launching a product and increasing brand awareness and brand engagement in the process. Throughout the voting process @7UPArabia drove a Promoted Tweet engagement rate of 26.6 percent, increased mentions of the hashtag by 200 percent, and gained an impressive 3,137 new followers. The takeaway? Twitter can be an excellent way to get your consumers involved in the product launch process. When consumers are involved in key product decision, such as naming, they are more likely to get excited about the product and subsequently more likely to make a purchase.

Hailo, @HailoDublin

To launch their app into Dublin, Ireland taxi app Hailo wanted to expand their local follower base, increase brand awareness, and drive app downloads. Luckily, Hailo turned to Twitter for help with launching into a new market. The key to the company’s success was its real time tweets. To accelerate their follower growth, they used Promoted Accounts with geo-targeting to attract users in Ireland, specifically targeting users with interests in weather, transportation, concerts, sporting events or conferences. The company would identify local events and encourage users to use a Hailo cab to get there, sending them out to the target audience. For example, one such tweet reads, “Heading to the #websummit today? Grab a Hailo cab! Taxi in two taps and pay with cash or card.”

The results were overwhelming. Hailo saw a 20 percent increase in app downloads. The company also managed to increase its number of Twitter followers from a mere 300 to over 7,000 in just two months. Twitter is now an integral component of Hailo’s launch strategy in any new market. The lessons to be learned? Harnessing the power of locally-targeted tweets in conjunction with real-time commentary brands can dramatically boost brand awareness and engagement.

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.

Pivot – An Essential Part of the Business Process

In the world of entrepreneurship, a startup is said to “pivot” when it makes a change in its business model. Though often difficult and laborious, pivots are a crucial part of the business process, helping a startup develop or update products for the right customer and finding the perfect positioning. As the name suggests, a pivot often results in a change of direction. A pivot can lead to a completely new company altogether or it can help a startup achieve a new level of growth.

What ‘Pivot’ or “Pivoting” Means

The pivot is an essential part of the lean startup model, in which businesses are launched quickly but with highly controlled spending. In the lean startup model pivots are very often driven by specific customer feedback, and directly respond to what is working and what isn’t. A number of prominent, high-profile companies have pivoted, including PayPal, Starbucks, and Groupon. Silicon Valley culture is in fact built around the idea that a pivot can turn a mediocre idea into a multi-billion dollar company. The idea is that by fluidly shifting course or radically altering direction can tremendously boost a company’s profitability.

The Groupon Pivot

Groupon is perhaps one of the most notable examples of a company pivot. When Groupon first got its start, it was an online activism program called “The Point,” a platform that allowed users to contribute to causes. Founders theorized that people were hesitant to contribute to causes if they didn’t think their contribution would make a difference. They therefore allowed cause founders to set a tipping point, in which a plan would go into action after a pre-determined amount of money was raised. Unfortunately, however, The Point received little attention and gained virtually no traction. In order to promote their young company, the founders opened a WordPress blog and launched a coupon promotion for a pizzeria located in their building. Only twenty people redeemed the coupons, however, the floundering founders realized that their idea was significant.

The founders of The Point did some thinking and quickly realized that the most effective campaigns on the platform were those that gave consumers buying power. They took the coupon idea and ran with it, blogging various deals found from different businesses each day, calling it “Get Your Groupon.com.” Soon the team was calling hundreds of vendors each day to create daily deals. This is where the original tipping point idea of The Point came into play. In order to get vendors to agree to the deals, the team allowed them to set “tipping points” — Groupon would only get part of the profits if a certain number of people had bought into the deal. Otherwise, they took nothing.

The pivot was dramatic but tremendously successful. Groupon was able to please both consumers and vendors. “Get your Groupon.com” took over four major cities in six months. They went on to accrue millions of subscribers and even turned down a multi-million dollar offer from Google. Ultimately, the Groupon pivot is emblematic of everything a good pivot should be: the founders learned from previous failures, paid attention to consumer wants and needs, focused on what was working and got rid of what wasn’t, and created a win-win situation for all parties involved. By pivoting quickly and efficiently, Groupon went from failure to multi-million dollar success.

Pivot International is a product design, development, and manufacturing firm with extensive experience in the medtech industry. If you are interested in engineering a new product or updating an existing product, contact us at 1-877-206-5001 or request your free consultation today.