Sweat is dripping down your face, it’s 11:59am, and it’s 1 minute before your product sales page goes live. You’ve spent weeks pouring your heart out giving amazing pre-launch content — now it’s time to cash in. The clock ticks 12:00pm, you blast out the email letting everyone know it’s live and then…nothing…no sales are coming in…your shopping cart order page is empty

What went wrong?

I can almost guarantee, that if you launch a product and it flops it comes down to 1 of 2 things: no market research or a bad offer.

In Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula, he talks about surveying the list, and finding out what people want. However, doing market research and coming up with the right product launch offer is a lot more involved.

The reasons launches flop is the content they put out is not relevant to the market they are targeting, and they didn’t craft an offer that was based on their target customers emotional wants.

How To Do Product Launch Market Research

The first place to start is the survey to your list. But now you need to take that information and expand on it.

You need to create your target customer profile. This is the person whom your whole launch aims to please. This person must be narrowed down to an age, sex, and daily life ritual. This person needs to be the biggest need base within your market space (i.e. you want the customer profile you create to be the biggest sub-segment of the market you are going after).

You do this by going to www.QuantCast.com and looking up the industry leading sites in your niche. So say you were in the stress relief market. Go to Google and type in stress. Then take the top 3 ad sites and the top 3 organic sites and plug them into QuantCast (one by one of course).

Look at the demographic data and decide amongst several things: What is the age of the client you want to target? What is the sex of the client you want to target? What is the income level of the customer you want to target?

After you’ve mapped that out, the next thing you need to do is come up with the daily ritual i.e. the pains and problems they deal with on a regular basis. The reason for this, is so when you do your product launch, the pre-launch phase will address these pains and problems! Hence people will actually read your emails and buy when launch day comes (provided we get the offer right which we’ll get into a little later).

So looking at QuantCast again, we now put on our detective hats and we look at a different part of the data. We look at the sites they also like to visit the searches they also like to do. We then reverse engineer this data to come up with real life pains and problems.

So one of the top stress websites when I searched Google for Stress was www.medicenenet.com. Looking at the sites people are also visiting will let us determine the types of problems they face.

The top 2 sites are medterms.com and ovariancancer.com. This raises an immediate flag in my head. Obviously stress is too broad a topic, and I need to pick a subsection. 2 good subsections I should go after would be school related stress, and disease related stress.

So then it’s a matter of looking at sites that follow the niche topic you choose. Look at the sites in QuantCast and the site itself. Reverse engineer the problems people must be having (since they are visiting that site), and also what they want (by the types of products sold on those sites) and you can piece together a customer profile for your launch.

You can further compound this research by looking through Google Groups, Twitter, Facebook Groups, MySpace Groups, Forums, and Blogs related to your niche.

You want to come up with a name for your customer profile and make it crystal clear what their daily pains and frustrations are, and also what they are aspiring to achieve. This is what your product launch content needs to address, as well as the offer.

The Right Product Launch Offer

Having done your research right will let you know what people like to buy. If you find the types of sites your prospect visits are service based sites, then thats a sign that your product should be service oriented. If you find they are visiting digital download based product sites, that’s a sign your product should be in that form as well.

The product launch offer should first match the type of product your prospect is after in the first place. The next thing is the name. The name should encompass a result the prospect wants. Naming your product is a big deal and a lot of time should be spent planning it.

So say I went after the school related stress market. From my research I find out that (and I’m making this up), most of the students experience information overload right before an exam. Well I’d want to use those words in my product name, so I might call it “Information Overload Stress Killer — Eliminate All Stress Caused By Too Much Information Before Exams”.

The point is that the name implies a result the prospect wants to begin with. The name itself drives the sale.

Putting together the type of product people want, and fitting it to a specific demographic based on in depth market research is what will allow you to reach those 5-10% conversion rates on your product launches.

Remember: the success of your launch is 90% about what you say, rather than how you say it!

Tags: launch a product, product launch, Product Launch Market Research, research a product launch