How to Evaluate Market Demand of Your Products Before Selling Them

You can never predict the future, but at least you can estimate what can happen. Maybe you have implemented different ideas to find out the products currently trending, but how do you go about evaluating and determining whether potential exists to build a profitable business with those products?

If there was a single person searching for a product last year and 10 people searching for it this year, the trend is increasing. But is the market still significant to enter as a business?

You need to think like your consumers and zero in on their motivation to buy. In otherwords, you need to figure out if there’s a significant demand for your products. Here’s how to determine that.

How to Evaluate Market Demand

Google Trends

This tool searches for a product idea and views the search volume for that keyword throughout the past few years. Visit Google Trends and search the product name you’d like to sell. This will give you an idea as to whether or not the demand for your product will grow or stay flat.

As I searched for iPhone, this is the history of the search that I got:

Google Keyword Planner

This is a way to get an idea of your product demand in just a few minutes. Google Keyword Planner helps you to search for keywords related to your products. You will also find out how many monthly searches are performed for different related keywords.

If Google indicates that there are thousands of searches done for keywords or a page is saturated with high competitive keywords related to your products, then you can assume that the demand is quite high. Hence, you may want to take the next step for your business.

To use this tool, you need to have a Google Adwords account, which you can sign up for free. Simply login to the Adword account, select tools from the menu at the top, and then select the keyword planner. On the next screen, click ‘search for new keyword and ad group ideas:’

Google Adword Campaign

I thought of selling ebook that I was planning to write. However, I wanted to test the demand for an ebook before spending hours on it. I wanted to know whether there was any demand for my book and created a sales page for it, including a buy button. I used Google Adwords and ran PPC (pay per click) ads and direct traffic to the sales page.

Instead of collecting the payment whenever somebody tried to buy the book, Adwords collected their email address and informed them that due to server problems, the books are currently not available.

The trick actually helped me know the percentage of people who visited the sales page and were genuinely interested in buying the book. This tells you, which keywords your organic search strategy should target.

Pre-Orders

An alternative idea is to take payment for the product before you are ready to ship it. Give the buyer an estimated date for when it will be ready. Taking pre-orders can help:

• Create a buzz about your products, especially if you provide special offers.


• Give you an idea of how much inventory is required when you take orders and start shipping.

Directly Search Keywords in Google

Type your target keyword in Google and view the results that come up. Are they from different companies? If there is no single company dominating the search results with multiple listings, then you have a competitive advantage. Additionally, using an SEO (search engine optimization) tool will also tell you the authority of the domains that are ranking.

I used the keyword ‘iPhone deals’ in Google to check the type of content that is currently occupying the top position. The objective was to get an idea about what I would be competing against:

This is one way you can analyze your competition. Check out a few specific critetia:

• Do your competitors have a strong social media following?


• What are your competitior’s product reviews?


• How long have your competitors been in the business?

Trusting the Customer’s Intention

Market research often questions potential customers and whether or not they aim to buy a product. Often, customers say that they are interested in buying the product, but fail to purchase it.

In particular, market researcher has found a positive correlation between the intention and actual purchase behavior. They found that those who indicate that they are most likely to purchase a product do have a higher probability of purchasing it than those who said they won’t.

However, the most important finding is that from a new product perspective, intention studies work far better for existing products than new ones. This is because, consumers are familiar with existing products and are also likely to have an understanding of using them. So, their specified intentions are more firmly based.

Game Theory and Conjoint Analysis

There’s more you can do now than just passively hoping that customers will buy your product. Why don’t you use forcasting methods at the design stage to increase your product’s chance of success?

The combination of game theory and conjoint analysis helps to predict how customer preference for a product depends on its different attributes such as packaging, pricing, and so on. This combined approach enabled the manufacturer to design the package and price of the product in ways to maximize the chance of its acceptance by consumers.

Validate Location

It is important to know who your customers are. If you notice, sometimes products and trends can be very specific to geographical location. You need to find out whether or not your target audience and those who are searching for the products live in areas where you’re able to sell them.

Research Photo via Shutterstock

The post How to Evaluate Market Demand of Your Products Before Selling Them appeared first on Small Business Trends.

Source: Small Business Trends

How to Evaluate Market Demand of Your Products Before Selling Them