How To Know If Customers Will Buy Your Products
By Ted Iwere
You don’t have to wait until you’ve spent so much money to launch a new product before you can tell if your customers want it or not.
It is quite unfortunate, that many small business owners in Nigeria still have to go through the process of product development, marketing, etc.
Before they could gauge the customer’s interest.
All that cost could have been avoided if they had conducted a simple demand validation.
Demand validation is the process of determining whether the people you’re targeting are willing to pay money for what you’re offering.
Thanks to a few simple strategies, small business owners like you can know if customers want your product or not before you launch the product.
Let’s walk through the simple steps you can take to validate customer demand for your product or service.
Three (3) Simple Steps To Validate Customer Demand
1. Ask Questions
2. Capture Interest
3. Estimate Demand Size
1. Ask Questions
The first step to take to determine if customers want your product or service is to ask a few questions and get answers to those questions.
a. Is the product or service solving a problem that’s important to customers?
No matter how fancy your product or service may seem in your head, if it does not solve a critical problem your customers face, they would not pay for it.
They may say they like it, but they would not want to pay for it when it comes to it.
You can ask yourself this question and try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes to evaluate what you’re offering.
But this is not always enough, the best way to get the right answers is to talk to actual customers.
No expert report or beats talking to customers.
Another way you could get answers to this is to research if businesses are operating in the market and how well, they are faring.
b. Why would customers pay for this product?
You need to know why customers would pay for your product or service.
Such insight is critical for your evaluation of its factors that affect the intent and its strength.
To get a response from which you can draw the answer to this question, you need to talk to customers.
2. Capture Interest
You want to be able to know if people would want to buy your product or service.
But it’s not enough for your target customers to give their word of mouth, you want them to be able to take action to back their words.
There are different ways to go about this:
– You can capture interest, by asking customers to pay in advance for a product or service. This is the best way to size up real demand for your products or services.
– Another way you can capture interest is by building a simple landing page. Then asking potential customers to indicate interest in your offering by inputting their information on a form.
3. Estimate Demand Size
What number of people or businesses depending on your type of business in your target location are interested in and have the means to buy your product?
This insight is critical to understand if the market is large enough for the new product or service you want to launch to be worth it.
You have to calculate if the number of customers available is enough to guarantee a profit and sustain the growth of your business over time.
Again, the best way to get this information is through market research.
You can get the information you need about your market from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), simple internet research, competitor research, etc.
With all these, you should be able to determine if your product or service is something customers want.
And if the number of customers that want it is large enough to make launching the product or service worth your while.
Hopefully, you will find that it is.
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