Your website has a respectable hit rate. Your social posts tend to resonate well with a healthy amount of likes and shares. People are visiting your site regularly, scrolling deeply and perhaps even building up some shopping carts. By most metrics in 21st-century business, you’re crushing it. There’s just one problem. Your products just aren’t selling as well as they used to. Whether it’s a particular product that’s experiencing a nosedive in consumer uptake or interest is fading across your range, it can be extremely distressing when the target audience doesn’t share the enthusiasm for your products that it used to.
Image by Nathan Cowley via Pexels
Of course, knowing the cause is the surest step towards determining the solution. With that in mind, here are some reasons why your products aren’t necessarily selling as well as they should…
You’re focusing your marketing efforts on the digital realm alone
Let’s be realistic it’s (nearly) the 2020s and of course digital marketing is an essential concern for business. But if your products aren’t selling it might be due to more than not enough keyword research, too few blog posts or lack of algorithm chasing. Maybe you need to get your products out in the real world. Some products are better marketed in tangible ways. They need to be seen in person, sampled and experienced. Find out where your customers go in your free time. See about setting up a portable hop-up banner display and set about taking ailing products to the people. You may see more enthusiasm than you see online.
Someone else is doing what you do better
While there’s an argument to be made for keeping your eyes on your own work, and focusing on the quality and value you bring to customers, you simply can’t afford to bury your head in the sand when it comes to competitor analysis. If your competitors’ products do the same thing but better, cheaper or more efficiently than yours you may have been losing sales to them for months without realizing.
Always keep an eye on your competitors’ products. Identify ways in which yours are superior but also identify features and functionalities that yours don’t have which can be incorporated and improved upon for future iterations.
The industry or market has moved on
Finally, as much as we may want to believe that the products we create are evergreen, in today’s fast-paced and technologically led landscape, the temporal gap between technological innovation and consumer demand has never been narrower. Every product should be designed with the needs of the consumer in mind. It should help them to solve a problem or make their lives easier in some way. And if changes in technology, culture or consumer behavior mean that the problem no longer exists, the market and industry will inevitably move on.
That’s why it’s so essential to keep an eye on the future and stay abreast of changes in your chosen industry.
Not only could you tie effort and resources into defunct products, your entire business model could become outdated.
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