To most business owners, there is nothing worse than seeing their big product launch or the launch of a new service turn into one big flop. With all the hard-earned money and dedicated hours you’ve put into making sure that this is what your market needs, it can seem strange that it didn’t turn out to be the kind of success you had in mind, after all.
Luckily, this doesn’t have to be the disaster you might think it is. In fact, many of the most successful businesses out there have had to work their way back up after experiencing something like this - and, believe it or not, it might have been exactly what they needed.
Here is a handful of ways to turn your fiasco into your reason for success after a failed product launch. That way, you’ll be able to bounce back much stronger than you were before - and definitely a lot more experienced.
First: Understand what went wrong
Naturally, there could be many reasons to why exactly your product didn’t take off the way you’d anticipated. Before you get started on fixing the problems, you need to understand why it wasn’t a hit in the market - and if you, perhaps, focused on the wrong kind of market.
If this is the case, you might not need to fix the product at all but rather come up with an entirely different strategy and hire a marketing agency to take care of it for you. It’s not as if this is just good news, though, as starting from scratch in terms of marketing means that you need to invest a bit more money into it but at least you won’t have to re-do the product.
If it’s not the market you miscalculated as much as the product, you’re going to have to think about what they expected from the product.
Next: Fix the product
When the latter is the case, you simply need to get back to the drawing board and try to think about your product or service in a different way. Don’t just do this without asking for help, though, as you probably don’t want to waste even more of your precious time and money.
Start your journey to bouncing back by asking your customers for help. They are the ones who didn’t really enjoy the product that much, and they’ll be able to let you know what went wrong - just make sure to offer them an incentive to do so.
Let them know that you’re looking for ways to improve, send out a few questionnaires, and promise them something tempting in return. A gift card, for example, or a free month of services might do the trick.
When you got all of their feedback, you simply need to tweak your product and start marketing it again when you’re ready to re-launch. The important thing is to own up to your mistake and let your loyal fans know that you’re really looking to improve and that you appreciate their help. Without them, you wouldn’t be where you are today, after all.
