Establishing Product Lines
Launching a new product line can be quite an adventure. It’s important to be as prepared as possible to maximize your chances of success.
Here are 6 tips you can follow to help you avoid potential mistakes.
Learn About Your Customer
You need to know as much as you can about your customer in order to efficiently and successfully reach out to them. What do they like about your product? What do they dislike? Is there anything you can change about that?
Where do they learn about products they end up purchasing? It could be through YouTube ads, radio, TV commercials, billboards or recommendations. This information will give you key insights into the buying habits of your customers.
Research Your Competition
It’s important to know what your competition is doing. Study them to learn what mistakes they are making so you can avoid the same pitfalls.
You should also find out what they are doing that’s working well for them. It’s good to know what your competition’s strengths are so you can figure out ways to distinguish yourself from them.
What you should be researching about your competition extends not only to their product line, but also to their branding, advertising, customer service, and their overall experience.
Create a Plan to Go to Market
With the information above you should be able to work on a plan on how you’ll enter your market.
Your plan should include how your product is going to make its way to the customer. Are you going to use wholesale distributors or retailers? How will your product get to those places? Having the logistics of your product mapped out will be key to success.
But logistics shouldn’t be the only part of your plan. You should create a plan on how you will market your product. Most people and companies don’t have the resources to try all the potential advertising options, so this is why it’s important to have researched your clients beforehand.
Be Open to New Opportunities
There have been several companies that have completely retargeted who their main customers are.
Here are examples of what major corporations have done to grow their customer base. Sometimes the demographics of what could be your potential customers may surprise you. You should keep your ear close to current customer trends to explore potential opportunities.
Markets can change fast, so this is also a good practice to help make sure you are keeping your product line fresh and relevant.
Keep Track of Your Inventory
It’s important to keep a good track of how much stock you have and how quickly you are selling your product to know when to reorder your parts. There are inventory and point of sale systems that can help you track how much you are selling.
Running out of stock or having too much of it can both hurt your business. The effects of running out of stock are obvious, no product to sell means less profit and you’ll need to wait to be resupplied. Having too much stock can also be a problem because it means you will need to make space to store the surplus product, and some products have a shelf life where they have to be sold and used within a given amount of time.
Have a Good Team Alongside You
You can’t run all parts of a business by yourself effectively. You are going to need help with parts of your operation and that’s where we can help you.
At Global Trade Specialists, we pride ourselves on helping people get their products from China safely and securely so that they can launch their products.
We are able to help you at any stage of where you are through your product launch including product development, prototyping, manufacturing. We are a local US company located at Chandler, Arizona which is just outside of Phoenix.