New products are being developed and launched nearly every day across industries. However, an equally large number of products face the risk of failure at launch. This number can be checked or at least reduced. The marketing team needs to have enough insights (read data) at hand to analyze the market as much as they analyze the product’s features.

Marketers can leverage data analytics to improve the chances of success for new products. Following are the key tips to achieve better insights during product development:

  • Gather data from different sources: It’s important that you have access to sources of data for efficient decision making. Data could be internal or external. Limiting to any one of these could limit your insights and scope of market possibilities.
  • Internal data: Since a new product might not have any historical sales information, you can rely on a similar product line with historical sales data. Looking at how that product line has progressed and has been received by the markets, you can predict the success rate for the new product.
  • External data: External data can be obtained from a variety of sources and may be semi-structured. Google trends and other sources can let you decide how demand pans out over a period of time. Offline data like market reports or salesmen on the field can feed you back with relevant data.

It is important for the business leaders to be able to decide which data to gather and how to integrate it with your decision making applications. Big data remains an important technology that helps integrate structured, semi-structured or unstructured data on a common platform even in real time and help the decision makers take the right call on time.

Are you utilizing your data rightly? Is your company leveraging analytics and harnessing the power of data?