New Product Adoption: Strategies for Success

Launching a Product That Creates a Brand-New Market

First, let's consider the case where you've created a product that doesn't exist yet. 

Most likely, potential users have no idea who you are or what your business does. You may have inadvertently even started a whole new industry!

How should you approach driving product adoption in this situation?

Step 1: Understanding Your Target Audience

According to Silicon Valley legend, Steve Blank, an astonishing 50% of startups fail because they created something the founder(s) fell in love with – not something that people actually needed. 🤦‍♂️

To make something that customers will want, you have to deeply understand the needs of those customers. And, despite the array of marketing analytics tools we have at our disposal in the modern world, the best way to get to know your audience is to speak to them directly.

Cindy Alvarez has developed a method for how best to do this – it's called Lean Customer Development. 

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I strongly recommend that you read her book, but here's a quick summary:

• Schedule one-to-one calls with as many potential users as you can, but at least 100.
• Ask them lots of open-ended questions and listen actively, taking copious notes – especially whenever they get emotional.
• Don't focus the conversation around your solution, because otherwise, you'll bias them towards it.
• Focus instead on understanding the problem as they see it, and exactly how the problem is painful for them.
• Ask them what solutions they have already tried, as opposed to asking them whether they would hypothetically try your solution.

Once you start to see patterns, create personas as a way of summarizing those trends and building them into a concrete model that represents the kinds of people that you are looking to serve.

With a good understanding of your customers' needs, it should be reasonably straightforward to craft compelling copy that articulates how your value proposition can help your personas solve the problem you've identified.

Important: customer development and persona work should never stop. Too many startups run out of resources because they did this work once at the beginning of the process and then forgot to update it. 

Step 2: Building Anticipation

Customer development and product development should happen hand-in-hand until you reach a point where you have evidence that you're building something that really resonates with people, as a way to solve a pressing problem they have.

This is the point where you should start to think about releasing your product publicly. 

To build anticipation for the launch date, here are a few strategies to try:

• Create a designated newsletter for the launch and tell your audience they can sign up to be notified when you launch. Bonus points if you drip-feed them emails hyping up the upcoming launch.
• It's common on social media to give a countdown to the launch date. You might consider teasing certain product features with images as the launch approaches.
• Can you pre-sell your product? This is a good initial source of revenue, and it's a way for those early enthusiasts to build excitement as they get closer to the day when they'll get their hands on your product.

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Remember the hype around Harry Potter book pre-sales?

• If you're a SaaS product, consider starting a Product Hunt campaign to amplify the hype around your launch. Famous names like Notion and Loom got their start in this way. 

Step 3: Educating Your Audience

If your product is completely unique, there's a very good chance that your offering won't be immediately intuitive for a large proportion of customers. And customers won't adopt what they don't understand.

This highlights the need to educate your early customers about what you're doing and why it's valuable. I've found that this is particularly true for products that are highly technical. 

Some good ways to educate your audience include:

• Writing detailed blog posts (or, in some fields, even academic journal articles!) that clearly articulate why what you're doing is valuable.
• Going on popular podcasts in adjacent industries and speaking with influencers with a large following.
• Attending events where your target audience typically hangs out. This strategy is great if you're just networking casually, but it's even more effective if you are a speaker on stage.

Where exactly you focus your attention should be heavily influenced by your customer development calls. If a large percentage of your audience mentions a particular social media site, podcast, academic journal, newspaper, conference etc, that's where you want to be going to educate your audience. 

Step 4: Distribution and Accessibility

There are tons of marketing channels that you can use to get your product into the hands of early users. Some of the most popular ones are:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC), such as Google Ads, Microsoft Ads or LinkedIn Ads
• Amazon – particularly relevant if you're selling an e-commerce product
• Social media, particularly Instagram, in creative, wellness or influencer-led niches
• Short-form videos, such as Tiktok, Reels or Shorts
• Podcasts, provided you target one that's listened to by your audience
• Traditional media, such as newspapers, journals, television and radio

As we mentioned under the previous section, you should be led here by your customer development research. Wherever your audience is already hanging out is where you want to be going to find those first few customers.

There will inevitably be some experimentation that happens in these early stages. But once you've found one channel that works, it's advisable to double-down on it just so that you don't spread your limited resources too thinly. 

It's also often faster to distribute via an existing audience, either one you've built already or someone else's, as opposed to building a new audience entirely from scratch. 

Entering an Established Market

We've discussed the steps you need to take if you're launching a completely new product and want to get it adopted.

But what about if your product is instead disrupting an existing industry? How should you proceed in this instance?

Step 1: Competitive Analysis

In the research phase of entering an established market, as well as conducting customer development interviews with potential customers that we mentioned above, it's essential to analyze your competitors' offers.

You're doing this in order to understand what customers need and expect in your industry, and to be able to differentiate your offering clearly from what's already out there.

During your analysis, consider the following factors in particular:

• Which features or service lines do your competitors offer? Which ones do they not offer?
• Conduct a SWOT analysis to see where your competitors' strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are.
• Which factors are your competitors stressing as their key differentiators that would make users adopt their solution? Do their arguments for why they are different seem plausible to you?
• What is the nature of the target audience that your competitors are going after? In particular, note whether it's B2B or B2C, the age and gender of the target customers, or how large their customers' businesses are (in the case of B2B).
• Which marketing channels are your competitors using? Which channels are they not using?

You'll find a lot of this data on your competitors' websites, by Googling around or by using analytics tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. But try also if you can to speak to your competitors' customers – who likely have a more objective take on their offering. 

You should conduct this analysis on a regular basis, perhaps once a quarter, to ensure that your understanding of the market is still accurate.

Step 2: Customer Acquisition Strategies

All the distribution strategies mentioned under Step 4 of the previous section are worth exploring here.

But since you're entering an existing industry, you should also reflect on where your competitors are already getting customers from. 

Put another way: what are the standard places to go to in order to get customers in your industry? Very likely, that's where you're going to want to focus your customer acquisition efforts, too.

For example:

• SaaS businesses most often get traction from SEO and LinkedIn Ads.
• E-commerce businesses often find customers on Google Ads, Instagram and Amazon.
• If you're a freelancer, you're likely to get gigs on Upwork and from niche job sites in your particular industry.

Step 3: Differentiation and Positioning

Positioning your offering in a way that differentiates it from the competition is probably the single hardest thing to get right in marketing. 

It requires an intimate understanding of what your competition is doing to address your customers' pain points, together with a careful explanation of why your offer is more compelling.

This requires all the skills that we've mentioned under customer development, together with a lot of market research and excellent copywriting. 

A famous example of a company that has absolutely nailed its positioning is McDonald's.

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McDonald's describes its mission as "making delicious, feel-good moments easy for everyone." Seems simple enough, but there's a lot of positioning wisdom behind that statement that we can unpack:

• "Easy" suggests convenience. The company doesn't want access to tasty food to feel like it's a struggle or takes a long time.
• "Everyone" suggests a wide base of consumers. In turn, this implies that access to McDonald's food is fairly inexpensive.
• "Delicious feel-good moments" suggests that the company wants to provide pleasurable, tasty food. It's less about the food being healthy and more about it being enjoyable to eat.

Put this together, and you have McDonald's positioning itself as an affordable, convenient, tasty fast-food option that's available to just about everyone. 

Step 4: Pricing Strategy

Although it's essential to not only compete on price, you do want to ensure that you get your price point right when you're trying to get your product adopted by an existing market.

Two of the steps that we've already discussed can help you achieve this.

Firstly, look at your competitors' pricing. Beyond the amount they're charging, make sure that you look at how they're charging, such as by MAUs, per month, per seat, etc.

Secondly, your pricing needs to align with your positioning. To continue the McDonald's example above, it would be futile if MacDonald's wrote a positioning statement that emphasized "easy for everyone" and then charged $500 per meal.

Beyond these two pointers, be sure to consider the following factors:

• Use a price anchor to make your target price seem reasonable. For example, a restaurant that sells small portions for $4.50 and large portions for $5.50 is likely to see a lot of larger portions being ordered because the price anchor of $4.50 makes it seem like a good deal.
• Consider your costs in creating your product or service and what sort of margin you'll need in order to be profitable. If you don't have cost data yet, look at benchmarks in your industry.
• Reflect on how much price fluctuation there is in your industry, whether due to seasonality or demand. For example, real estate prices historically fluctuate more than the cost of software.
• Consider the location of your target market in your pricing strategy. You want to ensure that your price is affordable for people in that area – or, conversely, high enough to be taken seriously. 
• Is there a way that you can bundle your products or services together? Everyone likes a deal, and it feels good to pay one price for a set group of products (perhaps with a freebie thrown in) or a set scope of services. 

Enhance Product Adoption Through Customer Experience

Whether you're building something completely new or disrupting an existing industry, you can boost your product adoption rate by making your customer experience seamless and intuitive.

There are three ways of doing this:

1. Improve your onboarding
2. Add a knowledge base to encourage self-serve support
3. Build feedback loops into your product

Let's look at each one of these in turn.

Onboarding for a faster and deeper understanding of your product

Before a user can adopt your product, they first have to understand what it does and why it's valuable. The process of customer education that takes place through onboarding can help with giving users this awareness.

For example, it's common to give new users product walkthroughs when they sign up for the first time.

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These walkthroughs highlight key features, often with the help of a checklist that shows the user what they need to do in order to use your product, step by step.

Just make sure that your walkthrough is segmented, rather than generic. In other words, make sure that it shows each user features that are relevant for their specific use case, not an general overview of your product that could be suitable for anyone.

Once a user has been through the product tour and experienced value from your product, they are said to have "activated." This is a major milestone on the journey towards becoming a regular user and adopting your product.

Even later in the customer journey, you can still use UI elements like hotspots and tooltips to make secondary features easier to understand and adopt:

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Our product, UserGuiding, will let your product managers create walkthroughs, checklists, tooltips, and hotspots – without having to code.

‍You can check it out for free here.

Knowledge base for self-service support

When customers use your product, they're bound to have questions, particularly as they're getting to know your product before adopting it.

The conventional way to deal with such questions in the past was to have your users talk to a customer support agent. This was time-consuming for the customer – and an extra expense for your business.

So, a better approach is to create a comprehensive knowledge base that your customers can search at will to find answers to frequently asked questions.

You can add a variety of resources to your knowledge base to cater to different needs. These might include articles, images, videos or even code snippets. 

A knowledge base typically lives outside your product, on a designated part of your website. But to make it even easier to access for your users, you can also embed it into your app's resource center.

That way, customers can find answers to their questions in-app, in the specific context in which the question arose, in a matter of a few short minutes.

Such a smooth customer experience is bound to increase your product adoption rate. 

Feedback loops for insight into pain points

It's inevitable that you won't get your product flows completely right the first time you build them.

To speed up your learning about what your users need, and to funnel that knowledge to your engineers as quickly as possible, it's intelligent to build feedback loops into your product. 

For example, you could use in-app NPS surveys to get users to rate particular product features:

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You could then follow that up with a qualitative survey to get some more data about why users gave the score they did:

In most cases, it will be your product team's job to look at this data, analyze it, work out which features to prioritize in the product roadmap and then brief engineering on what needs to be built.

Ideally, your entire team is working in a customer-centric fashion. That is to say: everyone is focused on listening to the customer's needs and helping them solve their pain points as smoothly as possible.

Ultimately, customers can't help but adopt products that they feel understand their needs well and are responsive to feature requests.  

Measure and Optimize Product Adoption

Let's assume that you've followed all the guidance in this article so far. Now you want to see if the actions you've taken have led to more users adopting your product.

Which metrics should you use to track your progress?

Product Adoption Rate is the obvious one to start off with. This can be calculated by taking the number of active users, dividing it by the total number of users, and multiplying by 100.

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You can measure this on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and then track how it changes over time. 

Time-To-First Key Action is another good one to track. Here, you're measuring the amount of time it takes a customer to start using a particular feature. 

Most of the time, the quicker this happens, the better. 

But not always: consider the case of a user who gets to the main feature in record time because he skipped the product tour. This probably isn't ideal.

You can also track the percentage of users who performed a key action. This could be:

• Completing the product tour
• Fulfilling the criteria needed to count as having activated
• Trying out a new secondary feature

You can get this data from product analytics tools, or you can also use onboarding tools like UserGuiding to specify product goals and then track users' progress towards them.

Whichever product adoption metrics you choose, it's wise to track them on a regular basis – perhaps once a month.

If what you're doing is working, and your metrics are moving in the right direction, keep going.

If not, it's time to look at the feedback you got from your users and iterate accordingly.

Wrapping up

Having read this article, you should now have a roadmap to get your product adopted by users – regardless of whether your product is something completely new or an innovation in an existing industry.

Whichever of these two cases you fall into, you'll need to ensure that your customer experience is smooth if you want your users to adopt your product for the long-term.

If you need help with making your customer experience more seamless, we invite you to take a look at UserGuiding. You can use it to:

• Build product tours
• Create hotspots and tooltips
• Create surveys and send them to users in-app
• Build a knowledge base
• Create a resource center in-app and connect it to your knowledge base

Best of all, you won't need any code to make this happen. This means that even your non-technical product managers will be able to contribute meaningfully towards product adoption.

But don't take our word for it! You can try UserGuiding here for free and see what you make of it.