Product Experiments in the Name of Market Research
Is Your Merchandise Any Good? Try Product Testing
You’ve put all your efforts into creating a ‘perfect’ product for your store. After putting it out on the market for everyone to see, only a small number liked your merchandise. This scenario can be disheartening once you go back to managing expenses incurred for product building and development. A crippling loss of profit can scale you back and close down your business. Product testing is recommended to solve future product problems.
How do you effectively perform this to ensure you won’t suffer a setback next time?
Simplify your blueprints before entering into full-scale product planning. Make your strategy flexible instead of committing to a fixed plan of action. This will allow you to make necessary improvements without acquiring huge losses. It will also help if you keep the plans on the drafting table before creating a prototype. If you do want to start production, one or three copies should be enough to help you with market research. Creating more will just create avoidable failures.
Testing should not involve family members and friends. They tend to be biased product testers who’ll tell you your product works. They might not voice any misgivings they feel or if they do, they tentatively tell you, instead of giving the straight answers you need. This makes it necessary to find potential customers. They will be more likely to provide honest reviews about your product’s overall function, design, and other qualities.
Persuading at least 10 people to try your product takes convincing negotiation skills. Not being able to talk people into sampling your product does not necessarily mean you have poor influence. It might be that they don’t like your merchandise at first sight. Don’t take the rejection too much to heart and ask questions why they’re not willing to give your product a try. This will give insights on what to improve about your merchandise or your approach to customers.
If you can’t manage to convince ten people to give your product a shot, you have little hope of getting 100 customers to buy your product. Let them try out your product for free. Not being required to shell out money for something can make people get interested enough to try your goods. This might cost you a bit on production expenses, but you can consider them investments for market research.
Product experiments don’t have to be costly, though. You can use your social networking pages to contact your existing customer base for some opinions about your products. Facebook is especially effective for this purpose, with its ‘Ask a Question’ feature. The first step to do this is to log on to your Facebook page and go to Timeline.
Click ‘Event, Milestone +’, and then ‘Question.’
Type your question and click ‘Add Poll Options’ to encode choices. You can also edit the settings to gain more specific results from a specific country or language. This feature is especially useful for multinational companies with different branches across the globe. It will allow businesses to hide their polls from international customers and limit the product improvement phase on one country…
…or a state or two. Or you can limit the poll to one-four cities. Assign languages as well.
Once you’re finished tweaking with the privacy settings, click ‘Gate Post. Click ‘Add Poll Options,’ and set the answers to be chosen. You can also allow responders to add their own options. This will make your poll more communicative to your customers. Allowing them to post their own options can help them voice their opinions in a more effective manner.
Click ‘Post’ to make the poll appear on your Timeline.
Your poll will look like this as a result:
You can change how your poll appears on your page’s Timeline. To do this, hover the cursor on the header of poll post. Two squares will emerge. One will show a star, and the other a pencil. Clicking on the star will make your poll post occupy your Timeline’s two columns. Choosing this option will immediately catch the attention of your customers.
The pencil icon will let you pin the poll post on the top of your Timeline’s feed. If you made a mistake in phrasing the question or the poll answers, you can choose ‘Delete’ and create a new poll.
After posting a question, you can ask open-ended questions with status updates. Probe more into customer reactions with queries like:
– What are the qualities you don’t like about Product X? How would you like to change them?
– Is Product X ineffective alone? How do you think Product Y will improve Product X’s performance?
Try creating a poll today for product research. This method will help you get the ideas you need to further improve your goods and make them more attractive to your target market.
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