How to Conduct Good Product Market Testing

You’ve been incubating a great idea for a product and service, and you’re ready to unleash it upon the world—but have you done any product market testing yet? Rushing a new product or service to market without doing any market testing is kind of like jumping behind the wheel of a car before you’ve learned the rules of the road—you might pick some things up through trial and error and the signposts along the way, but you might not fully get the hang of it before you crash.product-market

First, Why Do You Need to Conduct Product Market Testing?

You need to market test your product because you’re only human, and you can’t expect yourself to be able to accurately and objectively gauge your product. This is a creation that you’ve been working hard on for months or possibly even years, so you’re bound to be biased. You might know that you would rush to the store to buy your product, but will other people? The best way to find out is to put your product in front of other people and solicit their feedback.

Of course, you should put your product in front of people on a small scale at first so that you don’t end up sinking your entire business budget into something that might not be as successful as you hope. Product market testing allows you to put your product in front of a few people so that you can see what they think of it, fine-tune it based on their suggestions, and eventually roll out an even better product.

Ideas to Market Test Your Product or Service

Do some Google keyword testing. You can get a sense of how big a market there is for your product and how much competition there is simply by doing a Google search for relevant terms. For example, if you’ve created a new children’s board game that teaches kids about European history, you might search for “educational children’s board games” (you can always refine your search later). If there are a lot of paid search ads to the right of the organic results, that means it’s a high value keyword (lots of people are searching for it, but there are probably also a lot of competitors). You can use this information to start determining how to differentiate your own product.

Hold a focus group. If you’re running a small business on a budget, you don’t need to hold a formal focus group—just gather a small group of people in your target audience for an informal, roundtable discussion about your product idea. Take note of any suggestions for change (even though criticism can be hard to hear).

Send your product to a few key influencers and solicit feedback. Mail a prototype of your product to a few key influencers in your industry (for example, if you’ve developed B2B software you might send a free trial of that software to an SAAS blogger with a large readership) in exchange for their honest feedback.

Offer your service at a discounted rate in exchange for feedback. If you plan to provide a service (such as a catering business), then test out that service by offering it at a highly discounted rate for a day or two in exchange for feedback. You might even consider giving the service away for free—for example, a new catering business could provide the food for a non-profit event, put out questionnaires to get feedback from the guests, and ask the non-profit organization to provide feedback about the service.

By taking the time to market test your product, you’ll be able to get a more objective perspective of that product’s marketability, allowing you to have a much more successful launch.

Tags: , , ,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

         


Merchandise Ltd + 44 (0)1895 438459 - 63 Fairfield Road - Yiewsley - West Drayton - Middlesex - UB7 8EZ
GB Reg No. 6270341 - VAT No. GB919738969

SSL Secured | © Copyright 2017 Merchandise Ltd | All Rights Reserved | Powered By ProMart 3.0
Our Accreditations