You probably spent months or even years starting and then promoting your product, and it hasn’t given you the success that you truly want. But the reality is never that simple, and when it comes to selling products the first thing that you probably think is maybe it’s my pricing or my product isn’t enough.
STOP! It can be easy to blame the obvious factors if you aren’t a Marketer, and you aren’t monitoring the key metrics of the performance of your products and only looking at the sales of the product.
And I know you were expecting the product to take off, the moment you created a website and some Facebook posts, but unfortunately, that reality will only exist in your dreams.
What should you do next? Well, that answer depends on a variety of factors, lets first investigate these factors:
1. The Market is changing, are you?
It’s hard to market a product unless you have a marketing strategy in place, and also different strategies for different stages within the product life cycle. You need to be able to adapt to the changing market. Your product might suit what is selling well now, but it won’t last unless you can determine what is missing while it’s good.
Another factor could be that your launch strategy, or even your lack of launch strategy was non-exist, so now you are stuck always launching and never growing. If you are trying to sell in the digital world, then you need to be able to adapt to changes more frequently, then selling to shop owners.
What you need to do first, is outline a proper marketing strategy with a professional. You can’t make the strategy on your own because you are too invested in the product, and it becomes hard to find problems when you ‘love’ your product too much. Find a marketer or a marketing agency that can run through the positives and negatives of your product and assess what you have done so far to make it work in the future.
Lastly, economic conditions are big reasons why the market is changing. This one is hard to adapt in making your product work, the one thing you can look at is changing your advertising messaging, focusing on the value of your products or including discount offers that are too hard to refuse.
2. You don’t want to spend money to grow
I don’t think I have ever read or seen a product that didn’t spend a little money in marketing to grow. I have heard stories of products taken off quickly with no marketing expenditure, but that strategy doesn’t last.
The idea with growing your business is not to always have the same customers, but to always grow your database with new customers every month. Relying on repeat business is a very old school way of thinking, as the circumstances of a customer could change in the heart beat. The idea is that you are seeking new customers, but maintain the old. The only way to really gain true momentum with new customers is to spend money on Marketing.
Do you send e-newsletters?
Do you spend money on Social Media ads?
Do you nominate yourself for awards?
Do you make product packs for prospects?
These are all good ideas and a good way to spend money on Marketing without breaking the budget.
If you are very serious about growing, then the ideal amount you spend on Marketing is 3-1. Being that if you make $300, you will spend $100 on Marketing a month.
3. Your branding is wrong
Modern-day consumers eat with their eyes before opening their wallets, so it’s essential that you tell a story to them about your brand without always selling to them.
Like most companies, the brand isn’t what sells, it’s the work you do to build trust with your audience. Consumers are sceptical about spending money on new products, but building your brand correctly means that the consumer can relate to your brand more quickly than not.
At the moment, the biggest grabbers to a brand come from ‘real people’. I wouldn’t say to go as far as influencers, but more other customers will sell to other customers. For example, I want to know that a mum of 2 can sell me a product for babies, then an 18 year old who has nieces.
This is called ‘building your community’, if you have the community behind you and marketing across many channels, they will nurture existing and new customers and leave positive reviews and testimonials that demonstrate trustworthiness in support of future marketing efforts and products.
You need to be able to tell stories about your products, videos of yourself making the products, others using the products, cute babies, cute dogs; anything that spells trust with a consumer by seeing someone that they can relate to and put themselves in the same picture.
Now, this isn’t going to work out if you haven’t figured out who your target market is. So, before you start recruiting your family and customers to help with content, figure out who your target audience is and write it down, and put it on your desk in front of you. This will help with keeping you on track.
The good news is that poor branding is readily fixed in the early stages of your business by working with the right company. For more established brands, rebranding is harder, but not impossible.
4. Your website is too complicated
Throughout the customer journey, a slow website, broken links, complicated checkouts are a recipe for disaster. When you are selling to a consumer, the timeframe to make a sale is 10 seconds. The customer journey is – I see what I want, I click on it, I purchase it. If your website is too complicated and it takes more than 10 seconds for a sale, then you lost them.
This is more of a mental conclusion; it takes 10 seconds to talk yourself into something and 10 seconds to talk yourself out of something.
If you’re getting plenty of clicks to your site but few sales, an audit is necessary to uncover problems and fix them quickly.
Making websites isn’t easy, the customer user experience isn’t something that everyone knows. You need to first have a good website developer that knows the ins and outs of the website design world, where they can recommend the right platform that works for you, and then you also need someone to project manage it. I would suggest that you don’t do it, as you are too close to the product to see the issues on hand, and need an external company to manage the process. Also, before you launch anything, give it a test with a consumer database to see if they see any issues that you missed. Again, being too close to a product or project you become sensitive to the changes.
Another important thing to note, is that website payment gateways are equally important, if you haven’t put a pay later option on your website yet, then you have probably lost a lot of sales.
It’s important in all aspects of website development that you keep with the trends of what is working now and get rid of elements that don’t work.
Again, this is where it’s handy to have a project manager of your website to keep your website up to date.
Lastly, website layout trends change every 3 years, so you need to be thinking about changing your website every 3 years as well.
So, there you have it.
Four reasons why your product isn’t selling and what you can do about each to fix now or in the future.
If you are needing any Marketing advice, get in touch with us and we can help you. Book a free phone call now and let’s help you make more sales for your brand and business.