Creating a one-of-a-kind product is extremely hard in a marketplace that’s already flooded with millions of competing ideas. Shoppers are spoilt for choice already, and more products are hitting the market every day. For your products to stand out, therefore, you must master the art of grabbing shoppers’ attention. You must cultivate an intense desire for your products and inspire consumer confidence within your target clientele. That’s how you’ll bring out the best of your product. To get you started, we have 5 tips for creating and launching a competitive product.

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  Have a great product development strategy

To launch a great product with a high chance of success, you must first create, innovate, and actualize great product development ideas and back them iup with free greeting cards. In simpler terms, you must have a solid product development strategy. A solid product development strategy should include:

• Mechanisms for inviting customers to share their feedback on existing products. Customer perspective is invaluable for future product development. It’s through engaging customers that you can know the features to add/remove, quantities to pack, customer support strategies to adopt, loyalty programs to initiate, etc. 
• Plans on how to modify existing products to incorporate new market insights and generate a fresh customer perspective. This includes adding new features, tweaking the packaging design, adding complementary and supplementary product lines, etc. 
• Ideas on how to minimize consumer skepticism around your new products, e.g. offering free product trials to loyal customers as a way of encouraging early onboarding. 
• Strategies for product customization and specialization based on available customer feedback. Customization provides customers with solutions that suit their needs and wants, hence enhancing customers’ brand loyalty and affinity. 
• Strategies for diversifying the market and appealing to new demographics, geographical locations, social classes, etc. for accelerated business growth. It should answer the question: Which tweaks can make our product more appealing to demographic X or residents of location Y? 

• Implement quality assurance and control processes

Product quality and customer satisfaction go hand in hand. For your products to succeed, they have to keep up with the prevailing market trends and innovations, address customer pain points satisfactorily, and even exceed their expectations. You can only achieve that through foolproof quality assurance and control mechanisms. Here are the basic steps to effective quality control:

• Collect insights from customers through surveys, focus groups, reviews & testimonials, social media engagements, etc. Always remember: You cannot manage customer expectations and address their pain points effectively without listening to them first.
• Analyze customer feedback using tools and techniques such as data visualization and customer journey mapping. These methods will help you identify trends, gaps, and opportunities for future improvements.
• Outline clear and measurable quality standards and goals based on your value proposition. For example, how usable, functional, or luxurious do you want your product to be? 
• Define the metrics you’ll be using to gauge customer satisfaction. Examples of the metrics you can use for this purpose are customer satisfaction scores (CSAT).
• Lay down quality assurance and control protocols in order to actualize the quality standards and metrics you defined above. In other words, specify what has to be done at every step of product development to ensure that potential errors are detected and rectified early enough. Some of the measures you can take to ensure that all products meet the desired quality include thorough inspection and testing.
• Distribute free samples to customers and ask for feedback. Use their insights to innovate, iterate, hypothesize, and generate new ideas on how to improve the product. Make the necessary modifications before releasing the product to the general public.
• Release the product to the market. This is not the end though. You have to actively monitor its performance across different locations, user demographics, etc. You can do this by conducting social media analysis and consumer surveys. This will give you insights into your product’s strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to make timely interventions. 

• Improve your brand packaging 

As you keep up with product quality and customer satisfaction, you must not forget the impact of packaging on customer perception. Customers may never know how good your product is if the packaging isn’t attractive enough to make them buy the product in the first place. To create product packaging that stands out in the market, the best strategy is to outsource packaging design services to professional packaging firms, such as this cannabis packaging company. A packaging design company gives you access to packaging design experts who are skilled and experienced in designing outstanding packaging in your niche. You will have a whole team of professionals working with you to find the perfect fonts, colors, graphics, and images to effectively grab attention and earn the admiration of shoppers. Furthermore, the experts will help you avoid devastating packaging mistakes that brands make, e.g. forgetting important factors such as recyclability, usability, reusability, and practicability of a product packaging.

• Work on improving customer experience

You need to make the customer’s buying journey as painless as possible if you’re to create a loyal customer base. To enhance customer experience:

• Using competitive salaries and professional training to incentivize and enable employees to deliver a great customer experience. Make sure that your company culture is healthy enough to keep employees sharp and ready to serve.
• Embrace an omnichannel mindset whereby you make your products accessible via multi-device digital channels. Ensure that your products are available both in brick-and-mortar stores and ecommerce stores. While you’re at it, ensure that customers can make orders conveniently and safely, both offline and online.
• Incorporate AI and machine learning (notably chatbots) into your website to enhance customer support.
• Make it easy and convenient for customers to contact you and review your products, both online and offline. 
• Use customer journey mapping to analyze and understand customer needs and perceptions at every touchpoint. 

• Elevate trust with social proof

Ensure that there’s enough information on the internet and offline social circles regarding your brand’s credibility and value proposition. You have to work with existing customers when creating your brand’s social proof. Some of the things you can do to build social proof include:

• Adding trust indicators on your website, e.g. displaying third-party certifications and awards.
• Encouraging happy clients to give your products/brand 5-star ratings on review websites. 
• Incentivizing happy clients (e.g. giving them discounts) to share testimonials on review websites. You may also want to post their video testimonials on your business website. 
• Encouraging social media engagement (likes, shares, and comments) through rewards and discounts. Being available to answer questions from former customers is also a good way to encourage engagement. 
• Having a customer-friendly return policy and displaying it on product listings.
• Encouraging happy clients to share user-generated content (UGC) on social media and tag your business. UGC content can be photos or short videos of happy clients interacting with or using your products.
• Getting social media certification, e.g. the blue checkmark on Twitter or Facebook.

Wrapping up

Don’t trust your own ideas too much, to the extent of investing big bucks to create a product. Such a blunder can leave you with a product that’s stuffed with unnecessary bells and whistles, but that flops badly on the market. Always involve the customer when hatching ideas for the betterment of your products.