Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Sell a product that you know about. Stay away from any industry you don't know.

There if very little time to learn. The market moves very quickly. Pick what you know.


Michael

thank you michael for the speedy reply, however my partner and i are relatively new to consumer goods.

we started out selling men's clothing online, however we feel that there is another market for us.

Jude,

You're in the right place to ask this question! Your question gets at the essence of marketing. What products to sell (and the corollary of what NOT to sell) depends on your target audience. Who are your customers?

Now, the answer many people give is, "Anyone and everyone." However, think about this: If you are trying to reach everyone - your marketing budget has to be infinite. I'm assuming you don't have that much to work with. So you narrow your focus to a target segment so you can focus your spending to reach them. For an online store, you are focusing and narrowing by use of keywords in your pages, most importantly, and then meta words - although those are less and less important. You can focus with pay-per-click campaigns also. Getting those things right will help to maximize the effect of your marketing budget.

Back to WHAT to sell. You sell based on two things: Your target customers' needs and your core competencies. What are you good at that gives you an edge over your online competitors? What can you offer that isn't available easily from the millions and millions of other websites? What you want to avoid is exactly everything else that is out there for sale - unless you can establish a reason why people would come to your site versus every other site. Since you are small, I'm assuming you can't afford to out-price your competitors for commodities. Many may have volume buying power and you won't. They can chase your low price be below you.

Tests and surveys - yes, you can test and survey...but you really need to define your target customers first so you know who to survey. You can, however, inventory your own skills to define what your core competencies are and this may point you into the directions of appropriate products. You can then review potential competitors' websites to see what they are doing and how and determine how you can meet the needs of your target customers better than your competitors.

I hope this helps.

Wayde

Wade,

You are very right in that we need a target audience. I have been looking into the shopping malls and online stores and find that many of the items are geared toward women.

Upon further investigation i found that women influence the purchase of consumer goods by up to 80%, and so i began to think about marketing toward women.

However, I feel that my partner and I should find a niche. Offer something that no one else in the area is offering, and ion doing this we may find success.

Ultimately, the only way to really find what line to run is to run a product for some length of time, then run another product line for some time and by comparison we may be able to determine what to sell. Also, many products are seasonal, and we wish to stay away from that for a while.

Jude,

1 - Surveys are a waste of time because they're based on past information in a market that may be changing weekly. By the time you get your product to market, the environment that the survey was based on may change completely - and then you're broke.

2 - Asking other professionals can also be a waste of time. They may tell you that your idea is great, but if asked to actually purchase your product (taking money out of their wallet to do so), they may not say "yes".

In short, people liking and agreeing with your idea will not pay the bills - actual purchase commitments will.

*** Tim Ferris, who wrote the 4-Hour Work Week has a very powerful method of testing the viability of a product before investing money. The method involves creating a 1-page web-site that will determine how many people will actually purchase the product. I would highly recommend that you buy this book - ASAP.

Hope this helps,

John
www.CorporateDollar.Org