Creating a unique product can be exciting but presents quite a predicament. The same aspect that can bring you great success can also be an impediment. With a strategic go-to-market strategy, a fantastic product has to gain an audience’s trust and create a need in the eyes of prospective customers. Fortunately, there are many strategies you can use to create demand for a unique product. A marketing mix that utilizes the most appropriate approach for your development can help you create high demand while achieving sustainable growth for your business.
Not all demand-creation strategies are relevant to every product launch. Think about your niche, and gain insights from your target market. Regardless of which methods you choose to employ when bringing your unique product to market, it is a good idea to place innovation at the center of your product development and marketing.
In a world where disruption is the goal of newcomers in every niche, putting out one unique product alone will not be a sustainable business model. Follow the example of companies like Apple and Tesla, organizations that are constantly pushing the envelope on trend-creation and marketing. Don’t be afraid to be eccentric and forward-thinking in your demand-creation strategy if your audience will respond well to it.
1. Educate
When bringing a unique product to market, you must deal with the learning curve the audience must overcome to embrace it. Therefore, take the time to devise a strategy to educate your target market clearly and appropriately. Sometimes, people aren’t even aware that something can be done to fix an issue they have.
This may be the biggest challenge and opportunity for a unique product. However, typically not a vast demand yet for it, and thus other options must be explored. For example, when making product changes, you can use tools such as Chameleon, which allows you to communicate product changes and even get real-time feedback – critical to evolving your product offering that aligns with user needs and wants.
2. Focus on the Biggest Pain Point
You can create demand for a unique product if you can solve a persistent problem for the consumer. People are always running away from pain, and providing them with an outlet is a surefire way to create massive demand for your goods. Find your audience’s most significant pain point and create a message around how your product solves this problem.
3. Create Scarcity
Scarcity tips the supply and demand scale in your favor and creates a sense of urgency in the minds of consumers. If done right, Scarcity can push a prospective customer to go through with the purchase of your product. Since you will be bringing a unique product to market, you will have novelty on your side. You can see Scarcity when popular electronics and mobile device providers develop new models.
4. Information Scarcity
Depending on how much buzz you can generate around your unique product initially, you can boost demand by controlling the flow of information. The goal is to share enough content on your product to heighten interest while leaving your audience wanting more. Like a popular television series, you must pique your audience’s curiosity by going some aspects of your product to the imagination.
5. Offer Free Content
Offering free content is excellent for products that solve a problem. You will gain their trust by providing your audience with helpful content before they even purchase. When they are ready to buy a product for their needs, they will have a greater chance of turning to you. You can combine a free content strategy with building an e-mail list to maintain communication with your audience. Not everyone buys upon first seeing a new product, and having a way to continue offering free content to an e-mail list is a great way to keep your product fresh in the minds of potential customers.
6. Make Use of User-Generated Content
Sometimes it is better to allow your audience to sell for you. In the age of social media, it doesn’t take much for a piece of content to become viral if it can generate a high level of interaction. With a unique product, customers can be motivated to share their user experience. You can foster this content by creating a campaign urging users to share their experiences. A contest where users win prizes for sharing their use of your product can be another content-production method that falls under the user-generated category.
7. Exclusivity
Depending on the type of product you will be offering, you may be able to use exclusivity as a tool to generate demand. Exclusivity is a type of Scarcity where you qualify your customers based on a set of criteria that you set. The added benefit of making your product exclusive is reducing or eliminating competition. In effect, you are stating that your product differs from any other. This strategy is usually best reserved for high-end products that leverage premium branding. Patents and trademarks can also help in building exclusivity for a product.
8. Partner with Influencers
Social media influencers hold a lot of power in their ability to impact the choices of their followers. Finding an influencer whose following coincides with your target market can help you create demand for your unique product almost immediately. Make sure that the relationship is mutually beneficial so that the influencer has the motivation to put forth their best effort in promoting your brand.
9. Be Close to Your Audience
One of the areas where businesses with a unique product offering fail is not keeping a close relationship with their audience. Maintaining interaction with your target market plays a vital role in demand generation. Consumers will want to be assured that the company selling them this new product will try to help them become acclimatized to it. If your audience feels left without support, they will be wary of purchasing your unique goods.
10. Leverage Customer Feedback
A significant benefit you can gain from being close to your audience is obtaining feedback on improving your marketing and offering future product upgrades or new products. Encourage your customers to share their views with you and listen closely to the conversation online regarding your product. Create a method of gathering data from your interactions with your customers and online followers and implement a way to draw meaningful insights from feedback.
11. Target Audience’s Emotions
Consumers use logic to weigh a product’s features and benefits, but emotions can nudge them into purchasing. Use story-telling to maximize the emotional response to your unique product and watch as demand skyrockets.
12. Deliver on Big Promise
This is a strategy best left to products that can deliver above-average consumer results. If you can offer a unique product with significant promise, you can center your marketing around this claim.
13. Prove the Value of Your Product
The sooner you can prove the value of your product offering to your audience, the smaller the effort you will have to put into selling.
14. Set Your Brand Apart
Setting your product apart from your competition will be instrumental to its success. It will be counterproductive if you have a unique product but don’t take the necessary care to differentiate your brand from the other players in the market, as you will eventually be lumped in with them.
15. Video Marketing
The use of video marketing can help combine aspects from several other strategies and create demand passively. By creating informative videos showing how your unique product benefits consumers, you will reduce the time spent educating the public about your new product while focusing on customer service and sales. Video marketing can be used with an influencer to boost your marketing efforts further.
16. Create an Affiliate Program
Providing your product has a large enough profit margin to offer commissions, an affiliate program can be a very effective way to create demand for your unique product in the first days of its launch. Seasoned affiliates will promote your product to their e-mail lists and employ their content creation to create awareness.
17. Partner with Complementary Products
Complementary goods like portable electronic devices and batteries are used in conjunction. If your unique product can be paired with another company’s, a partnership may provide synergies that benefit both parties.
Social media can be used as a way of monitoring the conversation that is happening around your new product. You can address user concerns around your unique offering while using various social networks to create demand. Use tools to follow what is said about your product and be swift to help guide the narrative in a direction that will show your goods under the light they deserve.
19. Make Constant Innovation Your Brand
By positioning your company as an innovator in your space, consumers will be more likely to look to you for other products that provide them with unique solutions. Consumers are known to become devoted fans of companies viewed as innovators. Use this branding strategy to boost demand for all your products and solidify your status as a market leader.
20. Employ Gamification
Gamification is a concept used in marketing to create demand for a product through elements that mimic gaming. You can educate and indoctrinate your audience to embrace your unique product into their lives by employing game-design elements in your marketing or the product itself. In a world where mobile devices and apps are virtually indistinguishable from gaming environments, combining a customer’s contact with your product with a fun game-like experience can heighten awareness and increase demand.