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Many of you have read my work, follow me on Twitter, and met me. Some of you have even given me advice.
It’s probably clear that we’re in heavy equipment, so there is no reason for me to hide the fact.
Something we’ve always wanted to improve is addressing market needs. Initially, we thought that the most expensive and heaviest items were where it’s at. It’s profitable, but we made a surprise pivot. We didn’t stop selling our core product. Recently, There has been a slight eyebrow raise that’s got us giddy.
We have a few popular YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram channels for a couple of our brands. On these channels, an engaged audience tells us what they want.
We accidentally introduced a new category because of our connections at conferences and conventions. We also listened to the audience.
What do you know? The new category is getting just as big as our primary product line.
I’ll explain the details in this article and how your business could completely surprise you.
Determining a Product Line for Market Fit
Our primary product line is heavy, hard to package, and expensive to ship. It will work for 6-12 months before needing replacement. Sometimes sooner, but that’s rare.
Don’t get me wrong. It will always be a necessary product category for us. However, we needed to expand our product line strategically.
We also manufacture this stuff right out of the factory, so our profit margin is good enough to continue the line.
Finally, considering our extensive media reach, we can sell almost anything, making the product we started with a core category we won’t go away.
Analyzing Market Trends
Our audience has money. Their work is hard, and there is a lower intake of people taking on hard labor work. For every one person joining the industry, ten are retiring. We’ve seen crazy hourly rates, so there is cash to spend here.
With a few polls, community posts, and social media reels, we noticed a trend. Our audience buys this product line for fun. They don’t always need these widgets but buy them just because they can.
This was a wild revelation. With our primary product line, you can buy when you need it. With the new product line, you buy it because you collect the best of the best.
It’s almost a contest among the audience (“My widget is better than yours”). I think we hit a gold mine.
Considering our reach, the engaged audience, and access to incredible widgets, we’ve got a billion-dollar web asset here.
We don’t have to push too hard. We organically have product placements in our videos while they’re being used and blog about them on our website.
Long-Term plans
For now, expanding our product line is strategically intelligent.
We have to be careful, though. We don’t want to dilute the website with fifty new product categories and harm our rapidly improving rankings.
We’re very smart about what we add to our website; when we do, it’s the best in the world.
For example, because of our reach, major manufacturers from Korea, the US, Germany, and Japan have reached out to add their products to our website.
We can ask for whatever terms we want. The 250k subs on our YouTube and social media channels have made us a powerhouse, not to mention our ever-growing search rankings.
Over time, we will travel worldwide to offer our loyal followers and customers the best innovative products to help them achieve their goals.
Leveraging Our 250k+ Audience to Understand Market Needs
On all of our channels within the two similar organizations, we’ve got more than 250k followers and subscribers, and they’re also growing rapidly.
We keep it simple. A video or a post asks the audience what they want to see, buy, or try. We get hundreds, if not thousands, of people to reply and tell us what they want.
There is no guessing.
We can gauge campaigns on our media and social channels by examining sales numbers within 48 hours of a post or video.
All the tracking in the world won’t give us exact data because I noticed people were going to Google and searching for our brand plus a keyword. These keywords were directly correlated with our marketing campaigns. Google can probably track this, and they might display it on GA4, but I am too busy to check right now.
Breaking Down Our Audience
When you start any business, it’s difficult to know your audience. Even if you’re from that field and think you understand, you know nothing until you try to sell to your target demographic.
We were no different. We’ve been in the same industry for many years. Initially, we thought we could target the market with the same pain points that we had.
With time, our audience grew. With a larger audience, we could ask:
- What do they want us to sell?
- What industry are they in?
- What are their pain points?
- Would they be interested in pre-ordering products?
- Would they consider X if we offered Y?
With this intelligence, the team could pinpoint what our audience was ready to buy for work and fun. This was powerful!
Before we knew it, the new categories started performing, as did our primary category, which the company started with.
Product Testing and Feedback
Along with the media director, we planned to launch products when we publish videos.
Our widgets fit organically in our videos; everything looks like a smooth sales push. Because of this, we’ve garnered a lot of trust from our audience.
Remember, manufacturers are trying hard to work with us because of our extensive reach. Knowing we can easily access any widget makes it easy to take a premium product to a market that trusts and adores our brand.
Here’s an example campaign (simple and beautiful) we’ll be running soon:
- Put all new products on the website.
- Prepare the engineer to write about the products. The article and the video will be published simultaneously on our channels.
- Prepare the video with a big surprise for our audience.
- Offer an extensive discount to move our audience onto our eCommerce website.
- Prepare a press release.
- At the same time, launch the same campaign on the social media accounts of our eCommerce website, which has a combined list of almost 40k followers.
- Send an email campaign with the same information and sale on the same day.
- Finally send SMS marketing promotions to the people who gave us their phone numbers.
We haven’t run an extensive campaign like this in the past, so this will be a massive test for us.
The team is excited.
Expanding the Product Line
We’re always looking to expand our product line.
When we started, we were wide-eyed and would take anyone. Now, we’re strategic. We only work with manufacturers who offer great margins, fast delivery, and, most importantly, a superb product.
You might wonder where we find these executives to give us such good rates and favorable terms.
It’s simple. Go to expos, trade shows, conferences, and events.
My community, the SEO industry, likes to stay behind their screens, make a good living, and leave it there.
If you want to hit 8+ figures, I can’t see you not meeting people and making new connections yearly.
I am not saying all SEOs and digital marketers can’t make 8+ figures. This isn’t a reality for most of us unless we get out there.
I took the insurance and made sure we got out there.
It’s working so far.
Final thoughts
I’ve learned a lot in the last two years.
Most of what you see online from X or blogs is true, but it means nothing until you try different ideas yourself with the team.
You’ll see a few marketers say this, and it’s true. You need to get your hands dirty, change the website, rip it apart and put it back together, remove bad articles, test different product page styles, and try your best to get quality backlinks.
We’ll continue to expand our new category, which will one day take over our primary winning category. It’s right in front of us.
To top it off, our social channels will only grow. This gives me years of insight without much effort (building up to this point was very hard and expensive, though).
Until next time, talk to you all on my next post.
