Planning your launch and being clear on your offering will help to put you in a good position.
By now, you should know why you need to test your business idea. Here are some steps you can take to determine the value proposition of your idea.
Make a prototype
Before you create your business plan or rush into employing a management team, you must test the idea by building a prototype and showing it to the people. To see how they receive it
Go for a minimum viable product
Building a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, is creating the simplest form of your idea which will get it functionable. It’s better if you use an MVP to test the market so any tweaks or improvements can be made before the final product
Get critics
You will never know how good your product is if you don’t show it to people you know who might use it. Or build up an initial customer base and ask them for their honest feedback. Go for critical thinkers or critics
Tweaks and improvements
The next steps are about putting your product before the market. The feedback and perception of the userbase will guide you through how best to improve it. These steps may recur in a cycle allowing you to make periodic value driven adjustments and improvements that are worth it
Test the waters with social media or website
The best place to reach the market faster and more effectively is through social media. Your MVP may be a landing page website, with that live you will want to begin driving traffic to it, to see how receptive your audience is to the concept. A great way to do this is to run some test advertising campaigns across social media. You will need to start by creating organic content to post on your pages. This content can then be boosted by paid advertising to get it in front of your target profiles. In this step, you can monitor how people are interacting with your brand or product and gather useful insights
Build a marketing plan
Whilst you are following the steps above, there’s no doubt that you will be thinking wider marketing plans. Your marketing plan will highlight how you want to convince your potential customers how your product or service is the best and can solve their problems. The plan will include a list of strategies and tactics for pushing your concept. Having gleamed some initial insights in the steps above, you’ll be able to feed them into your plan and start to trial a range of other marketing channels, such as more in-depth content creation, events, sales outreach and more. Select three or four further channels, start testing them and monitor their performance and impact towards achieving your business objectives. It should also contain how much you want to spend on marketing.
Experiment and take note
Do not be afraid to fail. Be ready to try out new methods if one doesn’t work. Every business is different, so what may work for one may not work for another. Adopt an experimentation mindset so you can redefine your business model and goals comfortably when your initial plans don’t work out