I have a great innovative product, How do I make people aware of it?

[Cruiser]

Ok, so here is the situation.
A couple of years ago we started working on a new concept for a product, let's call this kind of products "P".
Ps have not changed in decades. Ps are a product in the personal care section for children.
We are positively sure our product offers a great improvement and concrete benefits over all the others Ps and we believe our P, lets call it "O", is going to render all other Ps obsolete.
We also know that there is one main competitor, let's call it "X".
If you google "Ps" or "what is the best P?" you are pointed to "X" 99% of the time.
There is a reason for that, X has been in the market for many years and they have a very good product (even if they cannot offer what we are going to offer).
There are plenty of mother's blogs and posts recommending X.
We know that X does not sells on retail stores, they mainly sell through Amazon.
Our selling price is going to be the same as X.
From Shipping info, we know how many units of X are imported a year.
Our objective is to replace and replicate what X is doing.
Sooooo, How do we achieve that????
We have contacted PR and Marketing agencies and their prices are outrageous. We will end up giving all the profit to them if we go that way.
We thought about a Kickstarter campaign, not that we need the money to start production but more as a marketing campaign, but ended up deciding against that.
We believe that a combination of Amazon ads/ Google ads/ Influencers should be the way to go but since it is our first rodeo we are not sure and we don't really know how to do that.
Thanks for the advice!!!

 

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[YoungBroward]

If your product is much better than X you shouldn't have a problem with becoming as big as them. You need to make a MVP and landing page. Then drive some traffic to that page and look at the conversion rates.

 

[Cruiser]

If your product is much better than X you shouldn't have a problem with becoming as big as them. You need to make a MVP and landing page. Then drive some traffic to that page and look at the conversion rates.

YB: What is a MVP?? forgive my ignorance

 

[YoungBroward]

YB: What is a MVP?? forgive my ignorance

minimum viable product. You honestly don't even need to have one. You can get a 3D rendering of the product made. Before you even spend money on that I would join a facebook group for mothers of young children, and ask what they think of your innovation.

 

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[Cruiser]

Something that I forgot to mention is that we expect that as soon as we put our product out there, people are going to start copying it, even if we own the patent.
X is so well regarded that knock-offs selling for half the price of X are not selling as much and X is still the best seller in Amazon.
We want to establish our brand quick, in the few months we have before copies arrive to Amazon. Does it make sense?

 

[Cruiser]

minimum viable product. You honestly don't even need to have one. You can get a 3D rendering of the product made. Before you even spend money on that I would join a facebook group for mothers of young children, and ask what they think of your innovation.

We have validated the interest on our product already, and have zero doubt about that. We are already prototyping in China and are very close to starting production.

 

[peterb0yd]

Not an expert by any means, but as someone that will be launching a software product in a month, I've been thinking hard about my own strategy. Cheapest route is to buy books on sales funnels and copy-writing. I'm reading "Marketing Made Simple" by Donald Miller. It's a dead simple formula for creating a sales funnel. His businesses are doing rather well I'd say. I've been following him for a while.

I also bought these books: "Ca$hvertising" which is recommended everywhere, and "Confessions of an Advertising Man" which was highly recommended by a buddy that's a co-founder of a successful software startup.

I've also been considering a course on marketing and growth. That same friend mentioned above recommends Brian Balfour's courses on growth (https://brianbalfour.com/). Just know that these courses will run you around $1k to $2k. You'll learn a shit load and save a lot of time, but you'll have to be willing to put in the time and effort to see results.

 

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[Bekit]

We are positively sure our product offers a great improvement and concrete benefits over all the others Ps and we believe our P, lets call it "O", is going to render all other Ps obsolete.

There are plenty of mother's blogs and posts recommending X.

If both of these things are true, reach out to all the mommy bloggers with a free product in exchange for them to write an article sharing their opinion.

Do this in a coordinated manner so that the internet blows up with a ton of articles that are all gushing about, "Oh my goodness, I used to use X, and I thought it was the best, but now that I have discovered O, I'm never going back!" This will naturally send a strong signal to Google that the answer to "what is the best P?" is now different than it used to be.

I would suggest that you build a massive list of all the mommy bloggers and reach out to them all within a short time frame so that from the point of view of your potential customers, O is suddenly everywhere they look.

Additional ways to support this:

• Google Display ads
• Google Search ads for queries like "What is the best P"
• Facebook ads
• Amazon ads
• Print ads in niche publications
• Joint deal with a tangential product that's not a competitor - e.g. Coupons for O inserted in the packaging for N, which people would buy around the same time they would buy P
• Affiliate links for the mommy bloggers so that they will get a % cut of any products that sell if readers buy through their link
• Mommy YouTubers (send them the product for unboxing & review)
• Write up a new product announcement (in press release style, google the guidelines) and send it out through prweb.com so that it might get picked up in the news media. Include high-quality product & brand photos and make sure you insert a link to your product page. You might get some SEO value out of this, but in most cases they'll give you a nofollow link. Still, it doesn't hurt to try. Even if they remove your link completely, there's still value in a brand mention.
• Write up a few sample variations of the kind of article you'd hope the mommy bloggers will write for you so that if they agree the product is great but don't have a lot of time, they can just paste in your text and go. Offer to them that you can give them swipe copy if it would be easier for them, and then if they take you up on it, send one of the sample articles.
• Have the person who is the "face" of your brand write up a nice, heartwarming story about the product and get it published on multiple guest blogs and podcasts. [Again, build a giant list of potential blogs & podcasts where you'd like to appear and do strategic outreach.] I suggest the following structure: (1) I had problem A. (2) I thought about solving it with P. (3) But I wasn't happy with P because of [___ reasons]. (4) So I went on a journey to try to improve on P. (5) I ran into so many [___ obstacles] that I had to overcome. (6) Finally, I came up with O. (6) Yay! Now my life is [description of the transformation after solving the problem].

Further thoughts on succeeding at this:

• Find the quickest way for people to grasp the advantage of O. If the value skew you've come up with is obvious from a photo, then plaster the photos all over the internet. If it takes a video, make a video and a gif. Use these in your ads. If it takes more explanation in words, focus on copy that is punchy and gets the point across in as few words as possible.
• If you cannot afford the marketing for the product without losing all your profit, then you might not have it priced correctly to be a sustainable business. If your exclusive reference point is "We must set our price the same as X," yet "O is so much better that it will make X obsolete," then you might get away with a higher price. Focus on LIFETIME customer value of acquiring a customer when determining your marketing budget. Obviously, without knowing the product, I can't speak definitively to this, but just food for thought. Every product will need some marketing. Set your margins to include funding for at least some marketing, even if it's just grassroots at the beginning.

 

[Cruiser]

Not an expert by any means, but as someone that will be launching a software product in a month, I've been thinking hard about my own strategy. Cheapest route is to buy books on sales funnels and copy-writing. I'm reading "Marketing Made Simple" by Donald Miller. It's a dead simple formula for creating a sales funnel. His businesses are doing rather well I'd say. I've been following him for a while.

I also bought these books: "Ca$hvertising" which is recommended everywhere, and "Confessions of an Advertising Man" which was highly recommended by a buddy that's a co-founder of a successful software startup.

I've also been considering a course on marketing and growth. That same friend mentioned above recommends Brian Balfour's courses on growth (https://brianbalfour.com/). Just know that these courses will run you around $1k to $2k. You'll learn a shit load and save a lot of time, but you'll have to be willing to put in the time and effort to see results.

Thanks Peter, I will look into that

 

[Cruiser]

If both of these things are true, reach out to all the mommy bloggers with a free product in exchange for them to write an article sharing their opinion.

Do this in a coordinated manner so that the internet blows up with a ton of articles that are all gushing about, "Oh my goodness, I used to use X, and I thought it was the best, but now that I have discovered O, I'm never going back!" This will naturally send a strong signal to Google that the answer to "what is the best P?" is now different than it used to be.

I would suggest that you build a massive list of all the mommy bloggers and reach out to them all within a short time frame so that from the point of view of your potential customers, O is suddenly everywhere they look.

Additional ways to support this:

• Google Display ads
• Google Search ads for queries like "What is the best P"
• Facebook ads
• Amazon ads
• Print ads in niche publications
• Joint deal with a tangential product that's not a competitor - e.g. Coupons for O inserted in the packaging for N, which people would buy around the same time they would buy P
• Affiliate links for the mommy bloggers so that they will get a % cut of any products that sell if readers buy through their link
• Mommy YouTubers (send them the product for unboxing & review)
• Write up a new product announcement (in press release style, google the guidelines) and send it out through prweb.com so that it might get picked up in the news media. Include high-quality product & brand photos and make sure you insert a link to your product page. You might get some SEO value out of this, but in most cases they'll give you a nofollow link. Still, it doesn't hurt to try. Even if they remove your link completely, there's still value in a brand mention.
• Write up a few sample variations of the kind of article you'd hope the mommy bloggers will write for you so that if they agree the product is great but don't have a lot of time, they can just paste in your text and go. Offer to them that you can give them swipe copy if it would be easier for them, and then if they take you up on it, send one of the sample articles.
• Have the person who is the "face" of your brand write up a nice, heartwarming story about the product and get it published on multiple guest blogs and podcasts. [Again, build a giant list of potential blogs & podcasts where you'd like to appear and do strategic outreach.] I suggest the following structure: (1) I had problem A. (2) I thought about solving it with P. (3) But I wasn't happy with P because of [___ reasons]. (4) So I went on a journey to try to improve on P. (5) I ran into so many [___ obstacles] that I had to overcome. (6) Finally, I came up with O. (6) Yay! Now my life is [description of the transformation after solving the problem].

Further thoughts on succeeding at this:

• Find the quickest way for people to grasp the advantage of O. If the value skew you've come up with is obvious from a photo, then plaster the photos all over the internet. If it takes a video, make a video and a gif. Use these in your ads. If it takes more explanation in words, focus on copy that is punchy and gets the point across in as few words as possible.
• If you cannot afford the marketing for the product without losing all your profit, then you might not have it priced correctly to be a sustainable business. If your exclusive reference point is "We must set our price the same as X," yet "O is so much better that it will make X obsolete," then you might get away with a higher price. Focus on LIFETIME customer value of acquiring a customer when determining your marketing budget. Obviously, without knowing the product, I can't speak definitively to this, but just food for thought. Every product will need some marketing. Set your margins to include funding for at least some marketing, even if it's just grassroots at the beginning.

Thanks! Lot's of good advice here.
-When reaching to Infuencers/ Bloggers, do I have to pay them to review my product?
- We do have money for marketing but PR/Marketing Agencies are charging over 5k a month which we find ridiculous. We will have to do it ourselves I guess.

 

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[Bekit]

-When reaching to Infuencers/ Bloggers, do I have to pay them to review my product?

It's something you'd probably negotiate on a case-by-case basis. Bigger influencers probably have standard policies for the compensation they expect from brands that are soliciting that they review a product.

 

[Cruiser]

Are PR agencies worth it? I mean, they charge a lot of money but maybe they get a mcuh better access to media and influencers than if I approach them on my own