By Owen Fay . Posted on February 15, 2022If you just launched your new project or have been in your industry for years, you know that the market is very competitive. With high competition, it can be hard to create and sell products that beat out the competition.
A product that hasn’t gone through a testing process to understand how it will be received is a lot less likely to succeed. Marketers and designers can use concept testing to understand what the audience thinks of the product and reduce the risk of a failed product before launching it to the market.
Concept testing is a great tool that businesses can use to optimize any part of their business, read through this article to learn about some of the main benefits of concept testing with Poll the People.
Will the Concept Actually Work?
Concept testing provides for the identification of problems and the ability to fix them before a product launch rather than after. The sooner concept testing is undertaken, the more flexibility there is for creating and customizing a product that customers truly want and need. – actionable.com
Market research allows us to understand if a new business or idea will gain any traction in the market. Just because a new concept feels, looks, or sounds good to you, your boss, or colleagues, doesn’t mean the market will agree with you.
A concept is only successful if consumers think it is a great idea, concept testing lets you understand if your opinion of the concept matches the opinions of the user. The purpose of concept testing is to maximize the impact of the product or service in the market.
The process takes elements of the business, like a logo or even an entire product, and presents them to the user before launch. It helps you in determining if your concept will be liked by the public or not.
In simpler words, you are asking the customers for their opinions and feedback on the concept and then using the insights to create the best product, service, or concept possible. It will make it easier for you to optimize the features, price, and usability of the business.
You’ll be able to take all of your ideas and understand what works great, the ideas that have potential but need changes, and the ideas that aren’t worth your time and money.
Eliminate Bias
There is always a risk of biases in the creation of a concept. Concept testing and taking the decision out of your hands is a big benefit of the concept testing process.
There is no denying the fact that if you created a concept you will have a strong opinion about it. When you run a test, you try to get an opinion from the people who are actually going to buy your product, and this helps in eliminating biases in decision making.
You’ll gather statistically significant feedback and you will have the confidence that you are choosing the best version of a concept.
Concept testing cuts through the politics of business putting all opinions on the same level, uniting everyone behind a concept that has a chance because you have data to back it up.
Through concept testing, you prioritize the needs of the customers rather than your own opinion and suggestions.
Businesses tend to become more flexible and understanding when they effectively communicate with their audience. Bias in new concept development can be one of the hardest things to overcome, if you test the new ideas you give the power to the consumer.
Gain Confidence in Your Ideas
Concept testing provides you and the business with actionable feedback that will help you optimize any part of your business. New businesses, products, or features can be hard to put into motion because you don’t know if they will work.
Usability A/B testing allows you to gather data that lets you prove that the concept will be received well. You can take the qualitative and quantitative data and present it to a boss, business partner, or anyone else to validate the concept. This rational approach makes it easy to make decisions on big changes.
Identify the Best Features
Concept testing allows you to keep the right features and eliminate the things that don’t work before bringing them to market. Find the best parts of every concept and start working on them, rather than putting all the time and effort into features that the audience doesn’t like.
The explanations users give to their decision will show you what the best parts of your concept are and what features might not be necessary.
There are cases when a feature might have potential in the market, but due to lack of testing, it will fail. To have a great concept that people buy and use, identify the best features through testing, and focus on them moving forward.
Understand How to make it Profitable
At the end of the day, every business is chasing profit, it might take a while to get there but being profitable is always the goal. The cost and profit must be handled side by side with the help of concept tests.
The work doesn’t end with choosing the right concept, you need to make sure the pricing strategy is effective enough to convince people to spend money on the concept while also producing revenue for the business.
In most cases, when a business uses concept testing to identify the best idea they are more likely to be profitable because you already know people like that concept.
Concept testing is a great tool to protect your business from selling something that is not profitable. The procedure is simple enough.
When you choose the right concept design, you promise to meet the needs of the customers. Fulfilling the needs of the customer’s results in higher customer satisfaction, leading to profit and a long-lasting business.
Constantly Optimize Concepts
One of the best parts about concept testing with Poll the People is that the platform is less expensive than most competitors and tests finish in about an hour. You are able to constantly optimize the business by rolling with the best concepts and ideas.
Concept testing identifies the issues in the ideas and allows you to fix them before the product launch, rather than after it is launched in the market. There should be flexibility in creating and customizing a product. Through concept testing, you’ll be able to get instant feedback on your ideas.
The feedback will allow you to constantly make changes to optimize the product. An added benefit of consistently testing elements of your business is the audience might give you new ideas that you might have never thought of.
You will be flooded with feedback and insights, by using them you can improve the efficiency of your product or service.
Find the Target Audience
Let’s suppose that luckily you choose the right concept to launch in the market without testing it, but what if you aren’t focusing on the right audience? This is the reason it’s important to find the target audience for your product before launch.
Once you test your concept, you get a clear picture of who will use your product and who won’t. A platform like Poll the People lets you choose the audience the test is presented to and will help you understand if your target audience is the right one.
Concept testing will help you understand who will and won’t buy your product, what demographics, and what groups you should be going after once the concept does go to market.
Define Your Communication Approach
Setting the value proposition for a business is one of the most important steps in creating a great business. The brand image, including name, logo, messaging, and overall design are all things that should be tested before sending them out to the world.
These important business decisions should not be a guessing game. Concept testing allows you to understand the audience and effectively communicate the value to the consumer.
Testing things like messaging will tell you what the audience responds to and what will grab their attention once the business is live.
Communicating what the business offers and why people should care are so important to success, concept testing lets you find the best way to communicate with the audience.
Reduce Overall Risk
Every business and every product has risk that is unavoidable, succeeding in business is impossible without taking risks. The trick is to minimize the risk and only take calculated risks that have the best chance of succeeding.
Invest your time in a risk management tool, like concept testing, regardless of what business you are running. It takes a lot of effort to balance risk and reward, so you need to understand what level of risk you are comfortable with.
Eliminating risk isn’t possible, but there are many ways to minimize it, and concept testing is one of those ways.
Conclusion
Concept testing has a lot of great benefits but is still an underutilized tool. If you or your business want to understand your audience and create the best concepts before bringing them to market, start concept testing.
Poll the People is a great platform for minimizing risk and helping you find the best concept possible. With this platform, concept testing is done within a matter of minutes not days.
It allows you to reduce the risk of wrong decisions, turn feedback into insights, and quickly test new concepts.
Poll the People has a dedicated panel of thousands of people to help businesses get the feedback they need. It provides you with real data to make validated decisions. If you want to learn more check out the blog or sign up to start optimizing your business.
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