How to Make Good Digital Products and Why They Fail

In today’s fast-changing digital landscape, achieving success involves creating and refining new products. Many new products are introduced with high hopes, but unfortunately, many of them fail. While embracing risk and learning from failures is essential for successful innovation, it’s also wise to seek strategies that increase the likelihood of success in product development.

Great digital products take time to come together. They result from meticulous product discovery, evolving into sophisticated creations with exceptional value. These products offer delightful experiences, are user-friendly, and boast appealing designs, enriching users’ lives. Ultimately, we all want to build a digital product that makes a lasting impact, holds value, and offers assistance.

What are the essential components that contribute to the success of a digital product, and what should be steered clear of?

ENSURE YOUR DIGITAL PRODUCTS TICK THESE 9 BOXES

1. Research is the first foundation

Valuable validation of your product idea is essential. Compare your beliefs with outcomes and remain receptive to significant shifts in your core assumptions.

2. Define your product’s users

Identify your primary focus user groups. Keep in mind that creating a product for everyone is not possible. It needs to be tailored to the right audience.

3. Product that matches the needs of users

Customers pay only for products that provide solutions to their pain points. Find that discomfort and offer a cure.

4. Focus on tests and feedback on usability

The goal is to identify any areas of improvement in terms of user interface, user experience, and overall usability so that the product can be optimized to meet user needs and expectations more effectively.

5. Strategy for marketing and sales

Think about the model of business that suits you best. How are you going to communicate with customers? How will users pay for the service or product?

6. Identify the advantages of competition

What sets your product apart and convinces customers? Are there unique selling points that distinguish you?

7. Look and Feel

The image should align with the product’s category and pricing. Customers form opinions within seconds. Therefore, ensure the right impression to avoid confusion.

8. Product quality is the key

Quality plays a vital role in the usability of your product, especially when providing paid services or high-value items. Therefore, it’s worth allocating resources for quality assurance testing.

9. The right time to launch

After your product has already been thoroughly tested, it’s time to pick the right time for launching. You might want to consider a couple of things:

• The “seasonality” of your niche (when products are typically introduced to the market within your specific industry).
• Holidays (including the sensitivity before, during and after).
• Weekdays (Monday, Friday and Weekends might not be better choices for some products).

FOUR REASONS BEHIND NEW DIGITAL PRODUCTS FAILURES

While there’s no guaranteed recipe for product success, there is a clear formula for product failure. The failure formula involves ignoring one or more crucial aspects of your product strategy. Take mobile app development, for example; although it’s a massive market, you might notice that you only use a small fraction of the apps available on platforms like the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. This highlights the fact that many apps lack innovation.

Let’s look at those factors that could stop us from the product’s successful launch.

1. Need more unbiased market and audience research

Unbiased market research should not be overlooked as a crucial step to tap into your target users’ expectations. It’s essential to separate your personal opinions from the research. Next, we would need to ensure these things are in check:

• Use random sampling practices: This allows all possibilities to have their chance of representation.
• Prefer open-ended questions in the questionnaire: This helps limit the result to specific directions.
• Consider approaches prioritising customer-centric research: The goal is to address your customers’ challenges and enhance their loyalty and trust in your brand.

2. The product doesn’t live up to its promises

Stay true to what your products can do! It might seem obvious, but some brands try to make their marketing more exciting by making promises they can’t fulfill. Making big promises might attract initial customers, but once they find your products can’t do what you said, they’ll start spreading the word, and things could turn bad fast.

When you introduce a new digital product, there’s a period of learning and adjustment. Instead of obsessing over its appearance, focus on gathering customer feedback and continuously enhancing its quality. Remember that customers appreciate being heard, so if you make changes to the product based on their feedback, they’ll likely stick around.

3. Lack of product awareness

There are signs that indicate that your product needs a product awareness-boosting campaign. For example, your product is not shown on the Google Search Page, or there is internal misalignment between the Marketers/Creative team and the actual product’s identity.

Introducing your product to the market requires a crucial step: creating awareness. The goal is to make your target audience aware of your brand’s new solution that can address their issues. By highlighting the value and reasons behind your product, you achieve this objective.

In this digital world, people spend almost 7 hours/day online, 60% of that time under social media. This fact, for instance, helps you understand when your customers are online so you can effectively spread awareness.

4. Simple margin rules make a bad pricing policy

Among the elements in the marketing mix, price holds a significant role because it’s the sole factor that generates revenue – everything else is cost.

Many times, even if companies devise a strategy to achieve a minimum acceptable margin or better for all products, and while setting an overall margin target might seem wise, it frequently leads to complications. Companies often find themselves either pricing specific offerings too low, missing out on potential revenue, or pricing others too high, restricting the flow of funds.

Instead, businesses should grasp the value their offerings deliver to customers compared to alternatives. Prices should be set based on this perceived value.

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