Selling Chocolate Flavored Sausage – How to Market a Startup Product

It’s estimated that over a 150,000 new products are introduced every year. The vast majority of these fall by the wayside quickly, some are just silly (chocolate flavored sausage) and a small, small percentage of startup products actually beat the odds and become popular and financially lucrative.

Whether a product succeeds or fails has at the end of the day, more to do with the benefits of the product, and the public’s interest in it. With marketing one can only draw attention to something. They cannot actually make the product better. If every internet search no matter what it is leads to chocolate flavored sausage, if you tell people chocolate flavored sausage will change their lives, if you sell chocolate flavored sausage for less than normal sausage, and if this inane product is on every commercial every 15 minutes on every channel – you’re still not going to sell many of them.

However, if you have a good product, marketing it can make all the difference:

Benefits

A surprising number of those introducing a product miss some of the core benefits of it. There was an individual selling a specific item in the “postcard” niche for example – it turned out there was an entirely better way of selling this thing he had, and it had nothing to do with postcards. Make sure you do not become so fixated on what a product originally was meant to be that you miss what it has, or could become.

Competition

With over 150,000 new products each year, there is a very good chance that someone has come up with something at least a little similar – if not kudos. But before you release your product, exhaustively look up other things that might be close. Make sure yours is an improvement or that it can fit into an alternative niche or you may be wasting your time.

Internet

It is the cheapest and easiest way to market a product. It is also the least understood. First a website is a must; next you need people to find your website. This means you need to learn what SEO is, and how it is used (FREE HINT: Spamming a specific set of keywords not only doesn’t work, it annoys your target audience). Learn how to ensure your site is getting the Search Engine attention it deserves, and make sure all content leading to your site is professional, interesting, and keeps the benefits of what you are selling somewhere at its core. This often means hiring a professional – but do the research because a lot of “professionals” really aren’t due to the relative novelty of the entire industry.

Social Media

There was once a theory in advertising called “Alpha Kids” – and it went something like if you could get the coolest kid in class to eat your Fruity Pebbles, the rest would follow. Turns out they overestimated how well this would work, but it is still used to an extent. It works to an extent for adults too. You can have a Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc, and you can increase awareness. What you can also do is annoy people. So, use social media, but do not overestimate its impact. And don’t make your product anonymous with spam via these outlets – no one wants an update on chocolate flavored sausage every ten minutes via Twitter.