Expand Your Market with a Bestseller - dummies

Expand Your Market with a Bestseller

By Alexander Hiam

Two powerful ways to expand your market (and business) involve introducing more products into the market, which can give you access to multiple new customer bases, and taking advantage of a product that’s especially popular, which allows you to piggyback sales of other products when customers are drawn in by your bestseller. The sections that follow highlight how you can go about accomplishing both.

If you have a bestseller on your hands — in other words, a product that outsells your other products by a multiple, which means it ought to sell at least three times as much as anything else — why not make the most of it?

Some marketing experts look for bestsellers to achieve sales that are at least ten times the norm; outstanding bestsellers can achieve a hundred or more times the normal level of sales for a product in their category. If you have just one bestseller in your line, growing your revenues and profits is a piece of cake.

How do you create a bestselling product? First, look for one. Don’t be content with products that sell moderately well. Keep looking for something that has more excitement and potential. Test many alternatives. When you find one that seems to have momentum (you’ll know it has momentum when early sales figures surprise you by their rapid growth), quickly refocus your marketing efforts on that product.

Make it the heart of sales calls and ads, feature it at the top of your website’s home page, talk to the media about it, and offer specials for new customers who try it. Bestsellers are found and made by marketers who believe in them. Be a believer!

When you have a product with bestseller potential, your marketing strategy should be to ride it as hard and far as you can. Write a marketing plan that puts the majority of your budget and efforts behind the bestseller and gives the rest of your product line as minimal a budget as you think you can get away with.

The bestseller will tend to lift all sales by attracting customers, so don’t worry about the rest of your products.

After you have a bestseller, you should see your profits grow. Use some of these profits to look for the next bestseller. Why? Because eventually your bestseller will lose its momentum. Your best bet is to find another bestseller, which may take a while, so you can have it ready and waiting in the wings. Test ideas and options, and be patient.

If you can’t find another bestseller, switch to another marketing strategy. You don’t have to have a bestseller to succeed, but it sure is nice if you can find a product that fits this strategy.