| Author |
Title |
Knowledge
Level |
Provided
By |
| Jeff
Dobkin |
Finding
Markets for Your Product or Invention
|
Novice
to Intermediate |
 |
Finding Markets
for Your Product or Invention
by Jeff Dobkin
Jeff Dobkin is the author of
How To Market a Product for Under
$500 and
Uncommon Marketing Techniques He is also
a speaker, writes response-driven sales letters, engaging web content,
persuasive catalog copy; and exceptional direct mail packages. He
also is a marketing analyst for direct marketing packages, ads,
catalogs, and campaigns. To place an order, or to speak with Mr.
Dobkin call 610/642-1000. Visit him online at
www.dobkin.com.
Have a new idea or new product? Here’s how
to find the markets for your invention, and what to do when you
find them.
But before I show you how easy it is, and the best
tools available to find your markets, take a piece of paper and
write down all the markets to which you think your product or
invention would sell. A market is any group of people you can
define that has the potential to buy your product. Narrow it down
as tightly as you can. This is step one: Figure out exactly what
group or groups are the most likely to need,want, and be able
to purchase your product. You’ve got to define exactly who
your market is before you’re able to figure out how to reach
it.
The tighter the specifications to find your markets,
the lower your marketing costs will be. If you are selling books
to middle school teachers, most of your money will be wasted if
you advertise to all teachers. Your market is teachers, grades
7 through 10. Any material you send to anyone else just shows
up on the red side of your balance sheet under “expenses.”
Let’s take a few examples. Your task would
be simple if you developed a new camera lens for Canon’s
line of professional cameras. Find a list of all the owners of
Canon professional cameras and you’ve done all the homework
you need to do—you’ve just found your entire market.
Your advertising would have no wasted expense when you mail to
them, because every person in that list is a potential buyer for
your lens. If this list isn’t available (and a list this
tightly qualified usually isn’t), your market could be found
in the readership of several magazines whose subscribers are a
group of people defined as Professional Photographers. Although
there is some wasted expense in advertising to this group, it
is still pretty easy to find this target market.
Suppose you’ve invented a new tripod to hold
any type or brand of camera. Here, your task of finding the specific
markets—groups of prospects most likely to purchase your
product—is more complex. Surely if your tripod is of good
quality, the professional photographers market is a good place
to start. But how about the consumer photographic market?
The consumer market is much broader, as well as
a little more elusive to reach: consumers don’t all read
the same dozen or so photography trade magazines the pros read.
Since there is a large number of consumers you must reach with
the message that your new tripod is available, it’s vastly
more expensive. Still, sales can be brisk, and you can make big
money with a consumer product if you’re good and focus tightly
on the camera market. Camera? Focus?
Maybe your tripod could also be sold to the video
camera market, which is a totally different group of professionals
and consumers, who own a different classification of products,
who need your tripod. These folks read a totally different group
of magazines and shop in vastly different stores and catalogs.
But these folks, these video camera owners—they have a lot
of money. Now you’re going to have to choose which market
is better for tripod sales. Who are the more likely users—or
better yet, the more likely purchasers?
Hey, how about sales of your tripods to back yard
astronomers to mount their telescopes? Or how about selling to
the security market, where people need sturdy stands for surveillance
cameras? Hey, how about…well, you get the idea. These are
all separate and distinctly different markets. All the people
in these markets can be reached through the magazines they read,
but each group reads a completely different set of magazines.
Now you’re learning about the finesse of marketing. Think
about all the market niches where your products would sell. In
a minute you’ll see how to reach them.
Take another example. For a while I owned a company
that manufactured I.D. tags. It wasn’t too exciting, but
we did some nice numbers—we placed about 25,000 pounds of
mail a year into the mailstream. For a quick study of in-depth
marketing, take a one-minute look at where we marketed our I.D.
tags.
First, the pet industry was a big market for us—we
marketed pet I.D. tags to the owners of 54 million dogs and 57
million cats, give or take a few million. In a completely separate
industry, we made emergency medical I.D.—personalized identification
bracelets and neck pendants for the medical community, specifically
for the subspecialty markets of people with diabetes and people
taking heart medication.
To the child care industry, we sold I.D. tags to
parents, to lace onto their child’s sneaker so young children
would have some sort of identification on them. To the running
industry, we sold them as runners’ sneaker identification
tags. We marketed through runners’ magazines and through
race directors of marathons.
Besides these industries, we marketed our product
to laboratories and laboratory equipment manufacturers as permanent,
indestructible name plates for equipment.
To the machinery industry, we marketed the same
product as valve tags; to the luggage industry, as baggage tags;
and to golf bag manufacturers and through golf and pro shops,
as golf bag identification. To the woodworking industry, we personalized
plaques for woodworkers’ custom cabinetry and hobbyists’
handmade wood projects. To zoos, we marketed our I.D. tags as
name plates for animal cages; to the equestrian industry, as horse
halter, tack, and saddle identification tags.
To medical and veterinary doctors, we marketed the
same I.D. tags as identification tags for their stethoscopes;
to art museums, for photo and picture nameplates; and to the commercial
fishing industry, as identification tags for lobster and crab
pots—as required by law. So what other markets did you say
your product fit into? By the way, we manufactured only five shapes
of tags and offered only one style of engraving.
Here’s the Plan
Think of all the markets where your product can
be sold, then rank them—starting with your primary market
as number one. Exactly what groups of people will be most likely
to buy your product? As you can see from the examples, if you
came up with only one group, you can probably go back and find
several more.
Figure out all your markets, then find all the magazines
that go to these markets; then, finally, create and send a press
release to all those magazines. A press release is a one-page
document you send to magazines describing your product and its
benefits. The magazine then publishes it for free. Simple plan,
isn’t it?
From the response you receive from your press releases,
you’ll be able to see exactly which markets have the most
interest in your product. If you’re not familiar with writing
press releases and sending them to magazines for free write-ups,
see the article in this book on writing press releases. Or buy
my first book, How To Market a Product for Under $500 (ISBN 0-9642879-2-7),
and read the first chapter: almost fifty pages on writing press
releases and how to submit them with the best possible chance
of having them published. OK, so I plugged my book, sue me. It’s
a great book.
Step 2: Finding Your
Markets
There are several great reference books found in
most libraries that list all markets and the magazines that are
sent to each. All the reference tools are easy to use, and you
will be able to use them after this five-minute introduction.
The main players are the directories of magazines.
Big, thick, 1,000- to 1,500-page books of easy-to-use information.
The best ones are Burrelle’s Media Directory/Magazines and
Newsletters, Bacon’s Newspaper/Magazine Directory, the Oxbridge
Communications National Directory of Magazines (also their National
Directory of Newsletters and the Standard Periodical Directory),
and the SRDS (formerly Standard Rate and Data Service but now
officially called by just their acronym) Business Publication
Advertising Source™.
Each of these directories has a similar setup, with
easy-to-use features. Why do I say they’re easy to use?
In the front of each book the publishers have a single page of
instructions. From this you can understand that using these marketing
tools is quite easy—quite a contrast to using your VCR,
for which you received a 30-page instruction manual! All the directories
group the entire universe of people into about 90 to 110 distinct
markets or industries, and they’re all listed alphabetically
by subject in the market classification section: two or three
pages that are found in the front of each book. How convenient.
If you can remember the alphabet, you can perform the marketing
function.
Examples of industries you can look up would include
everything from accounting, banking, firefighting, or heating,
to tourism, veterinary, or woodworking, to name just a few. Any
profession or industry you can think of has one or more magazines
published for it, and larger industries may be served by hundreds
of magazines. All the industries and markets and all their accompanying
magazines are listed in these directories.
For example: If you were marketing a product to
the motorcycle industry, you’d pick any directory and look
up “M” for “Motorcycles” in the market
classification section. Then you’d turn to the main section
of the book—the magazine data section—where all the
motorcycle magazines are found in a single location under “M”
for motorcycles. There you’d see all 38 magazines sent to
the motorcycle industry, along with their data: circulation, ad
costs, publisher, phone and fax numbers, and other miscellaneous
information.
Another way to use these books to find the markets
you’re researching (and the magazines that serve them) is
to know the name of any one magazine sent to that particular industry.
Each reference book has an alphabetical title directory; if you
know the title of a magazine, look it up there.
While American Photographer would be listed under
“photography” in the market classification section,
in the title index you’d look under “A” for
American, and scan down to American Photographer. The directories
then show you the page in the magazine data section where the
magazine is found. Turn to that page and, lo and behold, American
Photographer is grouped with all the other photographic magazines.
Fast and easy; and you thought marketing was hard.
Nope. Just time consuming: some industries have dozens of specialty
magazines, and the lucrative markets have even more.
While the lawn and garden supplies industry may
have only a dozen magazines, the computer industry has over 450
magazines that go to every niche of the computer market. Man,
those computer geeks must like to read. But you don’t have
to worry about reading all of the magazines now. You only have
to read them if you’re going to place an ad in one. Right
now, you’re just going to be exploring the markets with
press releases.
Finding a single market would take you about five
minutes, if you’re a slow reader. Once you’ve found
the markets you’re prospecting to, and you see all the magazines
sent to those industries, you’ll have a pretty good idea
of how you can reach your prospective buyers through those magazines,
and of how large each market is.
Here’s an optional step, but I recommend it.
If you think your product will really fit in well in a particular
magazine, call the magazine publisher and ask for a media kit.
It’s free. Ask for a couple of recent samples of their magazine,
too. Media kits contain the magazine’s ad rates and are
always sent free to potential advertisers. If you’d like
to get the annual directory the magazine publishes, ask for a
sample of that, too.
There’s never a charge for any of this material
if they think you’re serious about advertising. If the directory
is normally expensive, here’s your chance to get it free,
by mentioning how you may take out an ad in it and would appreciate
a sample copy for evaluation. This is also a great way to get
the directory if it’s published at a different time of the
year and is no longer attainable through normal channels.
If you don’t want to call, you can also write
to the publishers and ask for a media kit. Use business stationery
so they know you’re a serious player and have the money
to place an ad. The magazine publishers are pretty good about
getting their promotional material right out—it means revenue
to them to have an ad come in, so they strike while the lead is
hot.
The media kit contains all the hype about the magazine
and why you should spend all of your advertising money in that
publication. All kinds of information about the industry are also
included. While most of this package is usually fiction, there
are always some industry insights that will help you with your
marketing.
Now that you’ve found the magazines that serve
the industries compatible with your product, create a press release
and cover letter and send them to the magazines with a photo of
the product. In about three months you’ll start to receive
inquiries from the readers of the magazines who saw your published
press release and are interested.
This article is © Patentcafe.com
Jeff Dobkin is the author of
How To Market a Product for Under
$500 and
Uncommon Marketing Techniques He is also
a speaker, writes response-driven sales letters, engaging web content,
persuasive catalog copy; and exceptional direct mail packages. He
also is a marketing analyst for direct marketing packages, ads,
catalogs, and campaigns. To place an order, or to speak with Mr.
Dobkin call 610/642-1000. Visit him online at
www.dobkin.com.
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Marketing Resource Center
