Marketing Your Inventions

You’ve just come up with the latest inventions to wow investors and customers alike; the only problem is that you don’t know how to bring those inventions to market. If you are confident that your inventions are worthwhile and that there will be a hungry audience with deep pockets looking to take your product off your hands en masse, the first step is to break out all the stops and conduct as much market research as you can.

Market Research

Marketing your inventions begins with your customers. Who are they and what problems do they face that your products will seek to solve? What prices will your customers comfortably pay to obtain your inventions? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself. The answers will form your overall marketing plan. First, let’s begin with finding your customers.

Identifying Your Customers

They say that you should always go where your customers go if you want to learn more about them. Today’s social marketing allow you to do just that. Use the search functions built into the various social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and pay attention to the conversations that people are having.

The goal is to catch people talking about products similar to your inventions. Even if you can catch potential customers discussing problems that your inventions can help solve, that’s great, too.

Other ways to conduct market research include conducting polls and creating threads on popular forums and conducting market research in person with focus groups. The more information you can glean from your target market, the more effective you will be at marketing your inventions to that audience.

A Price Your Customers Can Afford

Marketing your inventions requires you to come up with a price the market will actually bear. The right price is subjective, but all the research you conducted should give you an idea of a price point to use. You can also study your competitors, and are encouraged to, in order to come up with a viable price to charge for your inventions. Even if your inventions are completely unique, you can usually find competitors in the same industry that give some insight into how deep your customers’ pockets are.

Unleash Your Products Onto the World

If you have aspirations of being an inventor among inventors, you are encouraged to use social networking, physical networking, video marketing, image marketing, podcasting and blogging – every avenue you can think of – so that you can reach as many on and offline population centers as possible. The more people who know about your product the better, especially if you’ve done your homework to develop a super-targeted marketing campaign that really speaks to your prospects’ hearts and desires.

If you are really ambitious, you are encouraged to attend trade shows for investors where you can meet dignitaries in the field and make connections that could pay off later on.

Paid Advertising

Use paid search engine marketing, such as pay-per-click ads, and mobile advertising to target potential customers of your inventions while they are on the go. Don’t stop there, however. You can then put ads in newspapers, magazines and purchase air time on the radio to let an even wider audience know about your new inventions. Even though the world is going digital, that doesn’t mean that the traditional forms of advertising no longer work. It’s best to experiment with all methods of marketing and advertising until you find out what works and what doesn’t.

Crowdfunding

Many people choose to market their products while simultaneously fundraising, which you can do on sites like Kickstarter. These crowdfunding sites allow you to fully explain your inventions so that your audience gets excited about what you’re offering. This makes these types of sites invaluable for investors trying to get their inventions off the ground.

Keep Learning and Evolving

Even with strict attention and constant effort, your inventions may not take off right away. In fact, it would be odd if they did take off in a massive way first time out of the gate. Even with meticulous research, you may need to nurture your audience and introduce your inventions bit-by-bit before they truly make an impression. The important thing is to never become discouraged. Envision success in your mind and have confidence that your inventions will make a major impact when the time is right. With the proper research, the right price and a highly-targeted marketing campaign, your inventions could go on to change the world as we know it. Your customers are waiting. Put your inventions right in their hands.

Image Source: Matt Thomas on Flickr