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In this series of 5 blog posts, I am going to go through the five steps you need to follow to make products that sell like crazy on Etsy.
The five steps are:
- Create a customer psychographic profile to understand why your customer will want to buy your product
- Use your customer profile to create a product press briefing BEFORE you create your product.
- Take photos that are better than your competition.
- Find keywords that are relevant to both your product and customer.
- Write a description that uses your customer profile to sell to their emotional reason for buying.
This post is the 2nd step in the series for creating products that will sell on Etsy.
The first step was to identify your perfect customer, found here.
Before moving onto this second step, you really must identify at least one perfect customer, or your niche, to be able to target your products. So don’t move on until you have completed the first step.
Step 2. Use your perfect customer profile to create a product press briefing BEFORE you create your product.
Creating a product press briefing might seem like a strange sequence to do things. You might think you are working backwards, well you are! But it makes sense honest.
After identifying your perfect customer, writing your product briefing BEFORE creating the product helps you to focus on what your customer wants so you can create products that sell. This saves you wasting time, effort and materials creating something that doesn’t hit the mark.
Writing a product press briefing before making the product is an approach that is widely used at Amazon to design and develop their products.
“We work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it.”
Ian McAllister
What is a product press briefing?
The idea is that you are going to write an internal press release announcing a finished product. Centre it around the customer’s problem, how current solutions don’t work, and how the new product will blow them away.
Continually work on the press release until you have come up with something that really resonates with your customer.
Once you have the press release, this should be what you use to design and create the resulting product.
No deviations.
No need to add in anything extra.
After-all if they were necessary, they would already be included in the press briefing.
Working in this way helps you focus on what your customer wants rather than what you think they want. If you know and understand your customers, this should save you a lot of wasted time creating products that don’t hit the mark.
Here is a template for you to start defining your products.
How should I fill in the product press briefing?
Here are some tips for completing the product press briefing:
- Keep it simple.
- Use 3-4 sentences for most paragraphs.
- Concentrate on making sure you meet the needs and desires of your perfect customer profile.
- Don’t use Geek-Speak. Keep the language simple so that anyone can understand it.
Only once you happy with your press briefing should you move onto creating your product, or test product.
And your product, or test product, should meet your press briefing.
Don’t add extras to your product. Extra functionality, is often termed scope-creep, and will overly complicate your product. You will also be in danger of wasting time and not meeting your customers’ needs.
I do understand this is tricky to apply to a craft-based product, but the concept still applies.
Only create products that will meet your perfect customers’ needs. Whether that is a delicate necklace to make a bride feel beautiful and special on her wedding day, or the gran who wants to knit something fun for her grandchildren.
All these customers have a desire that they want to fulfil, and if your product doesn’t meet the brief, you are not meeting your customers’ needs.
If you are ready for the next step, go to How to Take amazing photos“.
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