The 6 steps to expand your business’s range
There are few things more exciting in business than a great new product idea.
Seeing a product you dreamed up on the shelves is tantalising.
And so plenty of business owners are drawn to the notion.
They imagine that their product could change the world.
Unfortunately, seeing these ideas through to fruition isn’t always as enjoyable.
Done well, launching a new product can be a brilliant opportunity.
But get it wrong and you could be flushing time and money down the drain.
This article will cover 6 essential steps to launching your product the right way.
Follow these and you’re far more likely to enjoy success.
Hopefully your next product launch helps you grow your business.
Come up with your concept
If you’re reading this, you may have already completed this step. Sometimes, the best ideas just come to you. They might solve a problem you’ve been struggling with for ages or fill a gap in the market that you hadn’t noticed before.
But perhaps you don’t have an idea yet. Maybe you simply feel a new product could help your business but you’re not sure where to start. If you’re looking for inspiration, gather suggestions from your colleagues and customers.
Don’t rule out anything at this stage, but explore the feasibility of the most promising few ideas. Whatever aligns best with your market, budget, time, and passion—take that forward through the next stages.
For instance, say you run a cleaning business, and customers with pets always ask if there’s any way to protect their carpets. You wonder if there’s a product that can seal carpets against picking up loose pet hair.
Carry out market research
You may think you have a great idea. But will anybody want to buy it? Knowing the answer to that is essential if you’re going to carry on with your launch.
Market research should cover your target audience, including the specific customer profiles you’re looking to target.
See what other similar products are out there and what their strengths and weaknesses are. If the next best solution has a glaring hole in its functionality, can you create something that addresses that?
To continue our example, let’s say a rival cleaning business sells a carpet sealer, which keeps out pet hairs but also turns the carpets hard and uncomfortable. If your product can seal out hairs and seal in softness, you could be on to a winner!
Write up a plan
Having a strategy for your product development and launch will help you stay on time, on budget, and on spec. Map out the upcoming stages and the milestones you want to hit along the way. Factor in rough costs to ensure that the expected profits outweigh the investment.
For your carpet sealer, your plan will include creating and testing some solutions, branding work, and securing a facility for large scale manufacture. You can put timelines and costs against each of those activities.
Build and test your product
The reason we’ve combined these two activities into one step is that they’ll often be part of an iterative process, where multiple prototypes are built and tested, each other addressing feedback from previous results.
Whether it’s a physical prototype, an alpha version of software, or even a scaled-down model of your final product, this stage can help you gather important data.
Take on feedback from a wide range of sources and use the opportunity to work through any difficulties in the manufacturing process. Maybe your concept is too complex to easily physically build, or the specific part you need is going to increase costs or lead times.
Our example might see you test several different sealers for how well they perform, as well as how easy they are to produce. You’d look to test them on a wide range of carpets and against different types of pet hair too.
Launch your product
There’s a lot that goes into launching a product, from finalising its design to building hype through marketing. Make sure you have a website that can handle a spike in traffic if you’re doing a hard launch with lots of interest.
Use the opportunity to reach out to existing customers and give them the chance to be early adopters. Offering a discount in return for honest feedback and reviews in the first few days can help your product build momentum.
For your carpet sealer, why not give returning customers a free sample on one carpet in their home to see if they can notice the difference? If it works, they’ll likely be back for more.
Review your product and launch process
Did everything go perfectly? Great! Make sure you’ve documented the process so you can follow it again with your next launch. Were there things you could’ve done better? Great! Record that as well. Track the data to see how your product performs and gather vital insights for your next big idea.
In our example, you'll want to track whether customers who received the free sample bought the product from you, whether they stayed with you longer, and of course, any lessons you learned throughout the process.
Follow this checklist and your new product launch is far more likely to succeed!