If you are trying to make sure that your business is as successful as possible, there are a lot of places you can look at first. But one of the very best will always be the product itself, and this is something that is really worth focusing on if you want to ensure you are moving in the right direction. The truth is that you can always improve your product to some degree, and this is one of the main things you can do to ensure that your business is going to keep on moving up in the right direction.
So how can you approach this? Here are some of the things you can do to craft a product that really sells, so you can ensure that you are going to have a much better chance of growing your business effectively. All of the following will help make a product that is really going to sell well.
Start With A Pain
A lot of people start off their product pitches with ideas that excite them. At first glance, this might seem sensible, but actually it’s not the best approach to take. If you want your product to be successful and to really sell, you need to think about the pain that your product is going to help solve. Successful products start with friction – something that wastes time, costs money, causes stress or blocks progress.
If you think you have identified something like that, then that is a good place to start for creating your next product. Before you even think about the features of the product, ask yourself: what is frustrating people right now, what workaround are they already using, and what does this problem cost them emotionally, financially or otherwise?
If people are already hacking together solutions, and you come in with something that fits that demand, this is going to be a really good place to start. And it will mean that your product is a lot more likely to succeed.
Define One Clear Outcome
Products often struggle when they try to do too much. Buyers don’t want versatility – they want certainty. They want to know exactly what changes after they buy. A strong product is therefore often one that answers one question clearly: after using this, what will be better, and how quickly? If you are able to answer that in a snappy and short way, that will bode very well for the future of the product in question. This is the kind of thing that is going to be hugely important to consider.
And it’s a good indicator of how your product design is going. If you can’t describe the product in this way, it usually means you need to go back to the drawing board. This is something that you will want to pay attention to if you are keen on crafting a product that is really going to sell.
Design For The Buyer’s Context
A product never exists in isolation, and this is a really useful thing to remember as best as you can. It lives inside someone’s day, workflow, habits and constraints. As you are designing a product, you should therefore make sure that you are considering this. Ask yourself when the product will be used, what tools are people already using at the same time, and how much mental energy people will be able to give it, just to name a few things to start off with.
The better you appreciate the actual context the buyer will be in, the more you will be able to do regarding the product design itself, so this is something that you will definitely want to think about here.
Cut Features
More and more, it will prove prudent to cut out features as relentlessly as you can. It’s rare that having more features in a product increases sales. It’s usually more that they create confusion. Instead, think about what you can get rid of. This is usually a much better approach, and will mean that you are going to have a much better chance of actually being able to sell a lot of products.
Focus on making sure that each feature earns its place – either by making the core outcome faster, making it easier to use, or increasing the reliability of the product. Anything else is just noise, and noise kills clarity – clarity being what you want in order to convert interest into purchases. So make sure that you are cutting features as well as you can, and this should help a great deal.
Think About The Shelf
You should make sure that you are thinking a lot about how the product will actually look on the shelf. This is one of the main indicators of how likely your product is to sell, who is likely to buy it and so on. So this is something that is going to be really important for you to think about in general. Think about the packaging, consider using die cutting services for the product tags, and consider how it is going to be placed alongside other products – whether it’s on a supermarket shelf or elsewhere.
Online too, consider the digital ‘shelf’ and how this appears. It’s a vital part of making sure that your product is actually going to be attractive, and will end up in people’s hands. It’s a simple thing, but a hugely important one, and not something to overlook.
All in all, there are a lot of things that you will want to think about to ensure that your product really sells. On top of all this, make sure that you are considering the price, and that this is based on the actual value the product gives. This is going to be the last piece of the puzzle in ensuring that people actually buy it.
