In this article, we will discuss how to find a market, especially in areas related to digital products, and methods of measuring the success rate that the product can achieve in the market. I tried to compile this article from my past experiences and the success stories of entrepreneurs who have achieved success on the internet. It's a bit long, but I believe it will be very useful.
Entrance
This article will help you understand how correct the ideas that come to your mind before starting your online business (or when you plan to expand your existing online business).
will also guide you in finding people who want to market your products or services You will stop guessing what people want and gain knowledge on how to take concrete steps.
There are also these;
- How come 80% of new businesses fail in the first 18 months?
- Strategies and examples to sell products or services before launching them
- Methods of taking advantage of customers' expectations and thus growing the business
Finding a market is the first step to generating income from online business. According to Bloomberg, approximately 80% of new businesses fail within the first 18 months of opening. The main reason for this can be said to be whether the business idea of the entrepreneur is the right choice. Before finding a market or market and starting a business, you must make sure and guarantee that your concept is correct. There are some proven methods to understand whether this business is really successful or not.
Will Your Business Work?
In order to avoid being one of the 8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who fail, you must first be a guarantor. This delivery method will give you an idea of whether your project will take off and thus whether it will actually work when you put your idea into practice. You will be able to understand.
One of the best ways to secure your idea is to analyze ideas that are similar or equivalent to yours. We can list them as follows;
- Doing research on large platforms like Amazon. Examining similar products, looking at sales rates and understanding whether they are still popular
- Conducting keyword analysis on pay-per-click (PPC Advertising) advertising platforms
Constantly using tools such as Google trends , Google keyword planner , follow.net , Ahrefs.com , Semrush.com Constantly analyzing the keywords of your target market.- Prepare surveys about your product and conduct surveys in online environments
Pre-Sale Analysis
Pre-sale analysis is the best way to predict whether a product will be successful before sale. Developing a product can take months or even years. Instead of investing time and money into a product without knowing what the outcome will be, it is a more logical way to measure interest in the product before preparing it or to create interest in the product among buyers.
Many internet entrepreneurs misunderstand this part. It may be very wise to launch a version similar to the best-selling book, thinking that it sells well anyway, but this may not always be true. You must have seen many people around you who made this type of mistake and were disappointed.
Another logical aspect of the business is to develop this product and make it more useful, rather than releasing an identical product to the market just because it has achieved a lot of sales.
On the other hand, a group of entrepreneurs embarks on many adventures but unfortunately cannot benefit from any of them. Courage is a characteristic that an entrepreneur must have in a commercial process, but blindly jumping into every field is not courage but a bit of stupidity.
The brave entrepreneur thinks that his idea is a great invention (sometimes he may be right), but a smart entrepreneur applies a method that has been proven correct before and always keeps the probability of winning high.
In the example below, you can see the story of a smart entrepreneur who sold his product before launching it and created a market for his product.
Sample Story: John Lee Dumas
Fire founder and entrepreneur John Lee Dumas never starts development on a new product unless it reaches $10,000 in value before launching it. After failing many times in the past, he decided that this would be a good metric and implemented it in his new projects, looking at things from the following perspective.
As you read this, think about how you can apply this method in your own business. Podcasters' Paradise , John created a small funnel where people interested in the product could sign up.
After creating the landing page, John shared his sales message with people through the weekly newsletter and social media.
As a result, more than 240 people got on its list within the first five days.
Yes! That was enough information for him, will people be interested in this product? A positive answer was found to the question. But John didn't stop there, because he knew that people saying they were interested in the product meant something very different from actual interest.
Therefore, John offered to his community of 240 people that they could purchase the product for a price of $197. After just 72 hours, 35 members were registered in the system. This transaction resulted in sales of approximately $7,000. Here is success...
After 4 more weeks of selling his product at a slightly higher price, John found that a total of 114 people had joined his group. This transaction resulted in over $26,000 in sales!
In my opinion, this work is a perfect example of idea validation.
Would this person follow a smart path and spend months developing a product and keep it successful? Doesn't it work? Instead of looking for an answer to his question, doubting and hoping, he confirmed his idea.
Even before the product existed, John turned his product into real sales months ago.
To summarize;
Providing pre-sales and validating ideas for your product is an excellent way to test whether it is a successful project. In fact, even before the project is finished, you will earn many times more, let alone deducting the expenses you will spend on the product.
This situation is similar to the construction industry in Turkey, most of them sell through models even before the foundation of the construction is laid, and there are even a lot of companies that hold the groundbreaking work until they reach a 50% pre-sale rate.
It is possible to shape the above perfect strategy according to your own product and use it in all your online businesses.
If You Don't Have an Audience and Email List
You may not have an email list of 10,000 people to send traffic to your landing and promotion page. But that's okay, there are other methods.
Dane Maxwell and Andy Drish teach their students how to build $6-figure (USD) software companies from scratch in 6 months or less. Many of their students start out with no money, no experience, and no email list, so they have no excuse!
At the Foundation, Dane and Andy teach their students a concept called idea extraction, which means extracting or extracting ideas in Turkish. Within the framework of this program, students hold meetings with potential customers.
In their meetings, they listen to the past painful experiences of prospective customers and sort out the most painful experiences they have had in the software they use in their businesses.
These determinations begin to emerge after many questions and answers. During the continuation of the project, the student analyzes and extracts the necessary ideas and manages to impress the customer by presenting these extracted ideas at the table. The student reaches an agreement with the potential customer and agrees to receive financial support before starting to develop software.
It doesn't matter if you have an formed organization, community or email list. By using project procurement or verification methods, you can verify whether your project will be successful before producing your products or services, and even obtain financing before starting work. In fact, the most important point here is problem solving. The moment you can solve someone's serious problem, it starts to come back to you as income.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC Advertising)
Another way to find a market is to observe pay-per-click ads. If people are spending money on advertising in any market, there is potential for significant profits in that market.
Sample Story: Gary Vaynerchuk
Gary Vaynerchuk is originally a wine expert and has a video blog. In one of his videos, he teaches his viewers how to find advertisers for their own blogs. By the way, this video is very popular.
In the video, Gary searches for “beer” on Google and clicks on one of the ads that appear in the search results. He then reaches the company's phone number and dials the number.
After reaching an authorized person by phone, he immediately gets to the point and asks if he will advertise his beers on this blog, saying that he will open a new beer blog and that the blog will become a hit in a short time. After having a convincing conversation with the company representative for a while, he accepts the offer.
As a result of this incredible tactic, Gary Vaynerchuk found a paid sponsor for his blog, which actually never existed and had not started publishing. We can say that this incredible method is a very strong example of providing a market.
Market Research with Amazon
Using Amazon.com is a great place to do market research and verification. You can access the number of products in a certain category and feedback such as individual reviews and comments for these products on amazon.com. When you look at the product details, there are review comments under them
. It is possible to make analyzes based on the number of these comments and the degree of negative or positive comments.
For example, when we search for the keywords "making money", many products with hundreds of review articles come up. From this example we can understand that niche projects on making money online are a proven market
Once you've identified your market, view the sales pages of the top products and then start reviewing negative reviews.
At this stage, after reading the 1.2 star reviews, you will understand what the market actually needs from the negative comments
.
Negative reviews show the shortcomings of a product and reveal that the customer's expectations were not met. With this method, you will be able to see what the real expectation is among the unmet expectations.
This is a seller's dream, in fact, it is a method that will help you develop a better product by seeing the deficiencies in your competitors. In this way, the process we call idea generation will be automatically verified.
For example, when we look at the review below, we come across the fact that the book in the second row in the screenshot above is a poor product. According to the reviewers, we see that the book consists of unnecessary and outdated information, which is generally referred to as garbage. Each of these negative comments
is a very important feedback for you.
The same bad criticisms actually appear throughout the pages. Assuming that we, as an industry, will make a product in the same category, all we have to do is produce a better product. Don't say you don't know English and you can't sell books on Amazon. You can write a book on a subject suitable for your field, have it translated, and sell your book on Amazon.
Instead of targeting the local market with everything in Turkish, try looking at it from a broader perspective. You can make more money faster and more in a global market. If you can find a niche product suitable for your field based on the examples above, you can make more money faster in the global market.
Understanding the Market
In order to generate high amounts of income online, you have to understand your market and the category you are in very well. Knowing the demographic and psychographic information of your ideal customers prevents you from wasting unnecessary time, energy and money by following the wrong customer profiles.
Once you know exactly which audience you are targeting, it becomes easier to make a profit from your work.
Demographic Information
Determining demographics, that is, knowing which type of person profile you will appeal to in your target audience, is one of the key points in an online business. If it is unclear which human profile you are targeting, your marketing messages will not be effective. People with different demographics desire very different things.
It is necessary to know the age, location, race, gender and income level of the target audience. At this point, especially age and gender are the most key points.
Psychography
We talked about the importance of demographics, but psychographic information, which is always overlooked by online entrepreneurs, is actually even more important. In order to truly sell online products, it is necessary to know and understand the motivation of the target audience.
This product, which is a source of money for you, means different things to them. When you use humorous language or attitude while marketing a product, you should be aware of which problem this product will solve for the other person. People who will buy this product may want to buy your product to solve their problems, make their work easier, improve their mood,
satisfy their desires, and find a solution to their disappointments. Therefore, you should determine marketing methods according to the content of the product.
The colors you use in the marketing environment, the attitude and clothing in your promotional videos, and the words you use are among these.
For example, if you are planning to sell a book about natural treatment methods to prevent migraine attacks, your attitude should be more serious because your customer is, after all, a sick person. When you know what really matters in your target market, you market your products and services better.
Internet millionaire Brendon Burchard says;
“Marketing is 30% pain and 70% desire. Reach your customers' deepest desires"
Identifying Customers
There are various ways to better understand your target market, one of which is to listen to people. You should listen to everyone you see as a potential customer, so read your emails, always listen to the comments on your blog and your audience on social media. Keep in touch with them and take into account all good and bad criticism.
Try to discover people's wants and expectations using survey tools. All these strategies will help you understand your target market better and most importantly, earn more. In addition, another important tactic that can be applied is to ask potential customers about their needs. In these ways, you identify your potential customers and interact with them.
Conclusion
Knowing your target market is a truly amazing thing. When you know exactly who is targeting what, you can prepare marketing messages and tools that attract your customers. But this business can only be successful if you follow or go beyond the recommendations in this chapter.
Good luck!
