The Challenges of Marketing a Unique Product

As the field of marketing has transformed from simple word of mouth to digital battlefields of data and statistics, many unique products have lost a bit of their edge during the ever-evolving marketing phase. There is no doubt that the market is always ready for a new product or service that is specifically designed for a certain audience, but such a competitive environment can oversaturate the market to the point of dulling the audience’s perception of a product or service.

Confusing Product Knowledge and Marketing

Whether you’ve invented the latest Nobel-worthy invention or a new type of gum, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be able to sell it properly. Being an expert on something isn’t the same as being able to sell it. This doesn’t mean that all knowledge you have on a product or service is wasted during the marketing process; they can actually be used to augment a marketing strategy. But the key to marketing a product or a service is by looking through the customer’s lens. You want to ask yourself whether your approach is tackling what the customer has in mind or not.

Ignoring the Commercial Department

No matter how unique a product is, it still has to obey the laws of the market. To maximize efficiency and range, you have to consider where your next commercial is going to air. For instance, if you are advertising your product in Toronto, you need to make sure that it’s relevant to your Canadian audience and those who reside in Canada first. When tough times are ahead, a small and focused commercial department can help you weather it out. Having a marketing team shouldn’t mean that you ignore bolstering the marketing skills of other collaborators. Small businesses often forgo the effort to convert all employees into functional salespeople within their own range. Once your employees get a sense of how certain products are sold, they’ll be able to help you strategize efficient approaches.

The Wrong Audience

This is a pretty common mistake that entrepreneurs of niche and unique products can make. You need to draw a line between your own appreciation of the product and how other people will see it. Not finding your target audience can waste a lot of resources, especially if your product or service is designed to be unique with a small segment of customers. Usually, this problem is caused by the lack of data or analysis that can help you define your customer segment. As an entrepreneur with a unique product, you want to make sure that you’ve figured out the ideal audience for your marketing endeavors.

Lack of Engagement

From your perspective, it’s not uncommon to think that a unique product can simply market itself because interested consumers would simply snatch it from the market once they get wind of its existence. But the problem here is that it may be too early to expect such a link to exist without the necessary engagement with the audience first. You need to hear out your customers, advisors, and anyone else with thoughts on how to improve anything in your campaign.

Pricing Issues

A lot of marketing strategies have been foiled due to confusion or complexities caused by pricing issues. While your personal opinion for the price of your unique product matters, it should never precede over a customer-based pricing strategy. Before you look into competition’s prices, make sure you’ve got all your professional expenses covered. As a new business, you’re looking to get as much attention from customers as possible. A popular strategy for pricing revolves around finding the minimum price that won’t either make you profit or cause losses. Once you find the minimum price, move your focus onto adding “flair” to your products to make them stand out against your competitor.

Miscoordination Between Marketing and Sales

New businesses that may not have a lot of history in selling unique products, which can be evident by the lack of coordination between the sales and marketing departments. If your marketing department is eager to initiate a campaign, but the sales department clearly won’t be able to handle it or provide certain prices, this plan will most likely backfire. It’s easy to get dragged in resource-consuming campaigns just because they look good on social media or other platforms, mistaking its effect for commercial success. A direct link between marketing and sales should be established to ensure that both departments can maximize their efficiency.

As the marketing strategies develop to counter certain challenges, new issues will arise with time once the competition locks in. There is no easy way out of some of the challenges that can meet you while you’re trying to market for a new and unique product. But as long as you’re focused on the audience, you should be able to overcome any obstacles.