December 22, 2022
Product Design -
Taking Your Product from Concept to Market: A How-To Guide | OneLink Holdings
Learn everything you need to know about taking your product from concept to market. From ideation to launch, this guide has you covered.
Congratulations—you have a great product idea! Now what? The process of taking a product from concept to full market launch can seem daunting, but don’t worry; we’re here to help. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about taking your product from concept to market. Keep reading for a step-by-step guide on making your product dreams a reality.
Step One: Research Your Idea
The first step is to make sure your idea is actually viable. This means doing some market research to see if there’s a real demand for your product. There are a few ways to go about this research. You can conduct surveys, talk to potential customers, or look at similar products that are already on the market. If there are similar products already on the market, doing some research into how successful they have been can give valuable insight into what you could expect. Other factors such as retail price, shipping costs and discounts offered will enable you to gauge your price to set for your product. Once you’ve done your research and you’re confident that there’s a demand for your product, it’s time to move on to the next step.
Step Two: Create a Business Plan
Creating a business plan will help you map out the ins and outs of taking your product from concept to market to both external and internal audiences. It is an important document to have as you can use it to attract investment before your company is established and can help to secure lending from financial institutions.
Your business plan should include things like your target market, your marketing strategy, your financial projections, and your operating procedures. It should also include projected costs and possible issues that could arise from each decision.
Basically, you need to figure out all the details of how your business is going to run before you can start running it. Below are the key sections to include in your business plan:
Executive Summary
The executive summary should outline the company, with a mission statement and details about employees, operations, and location of the business.
Products and Services
The company should outline the products and services that they are going to offer, including pricing and product lifespan
Market Analysis
This section outlines the target market, as well as any competitors already established in the market. You should also identify your strengths and weaknesses and expected consumer demand for your product.
Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy will outline how the business is going to attract and keep a customer base as well as how they are going to reach customers via social media channels and advertising.
Financial Planning
The financial section is important as it will list the company’s financial planning and projections. This section is most important when seeking investment from external sources or with lending facilities as they need to see a potential for return before they commit to lending or investing money into your company. When starting a new company, the financial planning section should include targets and estimates for the first few years as they will not yet have available financial statements and balance sheets.
Budget
This section will include estimated costs associated with staffing, company development, manufacturing, marketing and other expenses.
Step Three: Develop Your Product
This step is all about bringing your product idea to life. You need to figure out things like what materials you’ll use, how you’ll manufacture your product, what packaging you’ll need, and so on. Once again, having a solid business plan will make this process a lot easier because it will give you a clear roadmap to follow. The most time-consuming element of developing your product is finding and negotiating with a factory to manufacture. You will need to establish whether you want to manufacture domestically or internationally, keeping in mind cost and quality differs between the two options. To find a factory, there are free online supplier directories which act as catalogues for hundreds of manufacturers, wholesalers and suppliers. When beginning to develop your product, follow these steps:
- Research potential suppliers
- Collect information and contact suppliers
- Show your designs
- Order Samples
- Negotiate
- Place your order
Step Four: Create Your Branding & Marketing Materials
Now it’s time to start thinking about branding and marketing. This is where you decide things like what your company name will be, what logo you want to use, what colours represent your brand, and so forth. You also need to create things like website design mock-ups, social media profiles, sales decks, and any other marketing materials you think you might need. Remember when you create your website to make it mobile friendly, as majority of people will be viewing your website on a mobile device.
Social Media can increase brand recognition, increase website traffic and promote your products and services. You should establish a Facebook business page, Instagram business page and a LinkedIn page to get started. Most of the traffic still occurs through Facebook, with Instagram becoming another great option for secondary advertising. Using the online marketing tool, Google AdWords, you can bid to display brief advertisements and product listings for your business.
When developing design schemes and templates to use for social media and website content, consistency is key. Using the same colour scheme for all designs, consistent logo placements and font size and style, it keeps the same look and feel throughout.
Once again, refer to your business plan—it should contain all the information you need regarding branding and marketing.
Step Five: Launch Your Website & Start Selling!
The final step is launching your website and starting to sell your product! If you followed all the steps above (and if you have a solid business plan in place), then this final step should be relatively easy. Just remember to keep track of all your sales and metrics so that you can fine-tune your operations as needed. An excellent way of tracing the traffic to your website is using google analytics. This program collects data from websites and apps and creates reports to provide valuable insights into how your business is performing.
So, there you have it—a complete guide on taking your product from concept all the way through to market launch! Just remember to do your research, create a solid business plan, develop your product thoughtfully, brand and market deliberately, and track everything along the way. With these steps in mind, you’ll be well on your way to making your product dreams a reality.
Written By
OneLink Holdings team
With our experience it puts us in a very unique position in being able to take your business from idea to reality, or if you’re part of the way there we can help with a number of individual areas in your business.
