Building A Product Strategy (4 Reasons To Use Web Scraping)
When I was young, my sister and I used to sell necklaces made with Scrabble tiles at our local art fair. Obviously, being young girls involved in crafting helped us sell a decent amount of different designs, mostly to moms of daughters. During the art fairs, I would often wander around and check out the other booths. Some artists would simply sit in their chairs and let you look around while others were eager to discuss their work and draw you into their world. No surprise, those who were more engaged were the most memorable.
While an art fair may seem like a distant world from business, passion and communication are valuable skills no matter what you are doing or selling. Especially in the time of Amazon and other online retailers, these skills will help you stand out among the crowd. If you are selling a product, a great product strategy is necessary for success. Thankfully, web scraping can help you quickly gather and organize information. With all this newfound information and time, you can use your unique skills to develop a product strategy that will yield great success.
If you are already familiar with the basics of product strategy, use the table of contents below to find out how to incorporate web scraping into your process.
Table of Contents
What Is Product Strategy?
A product strategy is a detailed plan that explains what a business or individual hopes to achieve with their product. This includes who the product serves, how it serves them, and the general themes that will guide your work and marketing. Sometimes confused with a product plan, a product strategy differs because it is more focused on creating goals than simply stating a product’s purpose. A product strategy should create a shared understanding and vision for the work ahead, making the company or small team more cohesive in its mission.
Product strategies are important for both new products and current ones. For new products, you can explain why this new thing is necessary and why it deserves a place in the market. For current products, it is crucial to explain how your product is different or better than other similar products on the market. Again, this is used more for team building and creating a shared vision than a simple business plan.
What Is Product Strategy In Marketing?
In order to make a great product strategy, you must consider user insights, clear objectives, competitive analysis, and market analysis. User insights range from one-on-one interviews to analytics and surveys. This helps to create a sense of the consumer’s mindset as you embark on new projects. This is essential information for marketing because in order to communicate an idea you first need to understand what ideas appeal to consumers in a given market or target audience. Having clear objectives helps you and your team stay on track. Without a shared vision and understanding, you risk encountering fracturing conversations that can make the goals of the project less clear.
Competitive analysis is essential to understanding how to beat the competition. By collecting data and analyzing competitor strategies, you can take what works and understand what doesn’t so you don’t make the same mistakes.
Market analysis includes complementary products, changing laws, and possible disruptions. Obviously, a new product strategy will encounter a challenge at some point and preparing for possible setbacks and disruptions help you tackle them creatively when they arrive. All these tools help you in the marketing process by creating a clear vision for your work, leaving you more time for the fun, creative side of things.
4 Ways Web Scraping Helps With A New Product Strategy
Web scraping is a process of automatically extracting and organizing data from a webpage. While this is all information that can be collected manually, using a web scraping tool saves tons of time. For more information on the basics of web scraping, read here. Below are four different ways you can use web scraping to create the perfect product strategy.
Bringing a new product to market
A product development strategy outlines the process of bringing a new product to the market or updating an existing one. New product strategy includes everything from the concept of the product to receiving feedback on a prototype. It is important to note that product development strategies map out each step of the process while also allowing for change and feedback. Because the business world is unpredictable, it is more important to focus on guiding philosophies when creating a product development strategy so your team can better navigate challenges. Web scraping can be used to grasp the market you are entering, which helps you define goals. When you scrape competitor websites and product review sites, you get an understanding of what is missing in the market and what establish consumers in the market are looking for.
Differentiating your product
A product differentiation strategy details why your specific product is better or different from the competition. The most common product differentiations are price, performance/reliability, and location/service. If you are able to successfully differentiate your product, it can create brand loyalty and even support a higher price point. Even if your product is not truly different in a functional way, an enhanced design aesthetic can even be enough to create a strong product differentiation strategy.
Since it’s impossible to quantify “cool”, a detailed product differentiation strategy is essential in explaining what tools (advertising, design, etc.) you will use to display how “cool” a product is compared to the competition. Using a web scraping tool on social media profiles is a great way to get a sense of what aesthetic consumers like, who they follow, and what kinds of content they post. This insight into what your target market defines as cool ensures you are developing a differentiation strategy in line with those preferences. Read here for more information on leveraging the power of social media.
Finding the perfect place in the market
A product positioning strategy details how your product will be received in the market by consumers. You must understand how each audience in the market thinks of and relates to your product to be successful.
Start by explaining how each target market would ideally respond to your product. If your product is already on the market, compare your ideal response or position to your current one. By understanding where the gap lies, you can create a strong product position strategy to go from point A to point B.
Again, scraping social media and product review sites is essential for this step. It is an easy and quick way to get lots of honest feedback without the manual labor of focus groups and extensive surveys. Instead, when you scrape product reviews and social media posts, you quickly collect tons of different opinions.
Naming your product
For any product, the name is likely the first thing consumers interact with and respond to. This is why creating a solid product name strategy is essential. This is especially important for tech companies whose name becomes part of the process. Lots of tech companies take a master brand approach where each product is named simply under the larger umbrella of the brand name, like Apple Watch. The name itself is simple yet strong.
In the process of testing different names, web scraping can help you understand the associations a word or phrase already has. When you scrape sites like Google, you can see the top results for each keyword you use. This way, you can avoid using names that already have strong associations with other products or a different thing altogether.
If you’re lucky, your product name may go through the process of genericization where the brand name becomes the commonly used word for the product itself. Here is a list of examples.
Scraping Robot Can Help You Create Custom Scraping Solutions
Custom Solutions
While Scraping Robot offers many modules, they are ultimately limited. We know how unique each product and its path to the market is and that often requires unique solutions too. Whether you need to expand a current module or build a custom scraper, contact us to get started. A custom scraper can help you aggregate content, monitor the competition, analyze customer sentiment, generate leads, and manage supply. Scraping Robot’s custom solutions can help your product strategy, but they are also built to assist you every step of the way once the product goes to market. Therefore, web scraping can be an essential part of your journey no matter what step you are on.
Conclusion
Bringing a new product in this crowded world can be overwhelming. Without a new product strategy, it is almost impossible to succeed. By creating a strong product strategy, you create a shared vision, understanding, and goals for you and your team. No matter if your team is big or small, being on the same page helps you navigate the inevitable bumps in the road. With web scraping, you can gather tons of useful data that help you understand the market you are moving into and help you avoid mistakes. With both personal vision and useful tech on your side, you are sure to be a success.
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