I need suggestions for marketing my product
We have developed this visual search product and managed to get a few clients in India.
It's a B2B business with very long sales cycles. The long cycles are very difficult to convert and moreover it's very hard to find any client outside e-commerce domain. We have built one of the best products in market and I would say we are rated A on technology and our pricing is very competitive but customer reach is something we are not very good at.
Help on following points will be appreciated:
- how do I market outside home country
- do you see any use-case for such product outside e-commerce? Where?
- what marketing tricks work for you for such b2b business?
- do you see any gaps in product? how can i make it more accessible?
- anything else which comes to your mind.
This sounds like a very interesting product! What's the success of the other players in your market? I feel like I've heard of a similar product somewhere.
You really need to decide on who your target customer is. It cannot be everyone. Look at ConvertKit (who've just grown to $12M+ ARR) in only a couple of years. They only market their software to bloggers and they make all that money!
I agree with the comment about Pinterest!! Are you able to get into a conversation with them about partnering up? Part of me feels like you'll have a hard time selling this to ecommerce business who are generally tight on cash as it is when the product isn't really an essential purchase for them, like purchasing ads or SEO (the list goes on).
But working closely with an app like Pinterest could be very interesting.
I'd love to know what decisions you decide to make.
This was a very tough space in past and not many competitors survived the high level of accuracy and performance required. Many closed down. There are a few competitors and all seem to be targeting e-commerce. As I mentioned below, we also can't find very compelling use case for other industries. That's why I posted question here to broaden our scope.
You are correct about our target customer. We were targeting big e-commerce companies but sales cycles are too long and very hard to convert. Hence, we are going for small businesses via shopify and woocommerce. Let's see how it works out.
The budget on ecommerce companies part is right as they are tight on budget, they rarely spend on this. Pinterest app already has this tool and we are not feeling we will be able to convince them to replace their in-house tech.
Thanks a lot for elaborate response anyway, I will keep posted.
Hmm, if I'm being totally honest with you dude it does sound like you might find it very difficult to make a decent income from this business. I just can't see a reason why businesses would pay for this technology when it's not a priority AND that Pinterest already uses the same tech. Pinterest has a user base of 175 million (you can't compete with that).
I wish you best of luck dude and I genuinely do hope it works out for you, but if it's tough, there's no shame in ripping it up and starting again.
I appreciate your inputs. We will think through it. It's not like we are not able to find e-commerce companies who need it. Especially now that amazon has it integrated in their app, every other company wants to do it. It's just that longer sales cycles are very tough.
Anyway, we are going to give it a good time before we call it a day. We don't think the scenario is that bad yet.
Not sure if it’s a route you want to go, but I can imagine a lot of WooCommerce users would be interested in this.
If you developed a freemium/premium add on for WooCommerce, you could open a pretty wide market for yourself. Pricing could be based on search volume.
There’s probably many uses for image recognition in general. Doesn’t have to be ecommerce products. Just being able to search servers, stock photo sites, recipe sites using an image would be useful. I often use Google’s upload image search to find the original version of a photo.
Having that as a pure product search is definitely something I would use.
Also, this would be pretty awesome for Pinterest!
Thanks for elaborate response. We have already developed plugin for Shopify and going to launch it in April. WooCommerce is also in pipeline and should be out by May.
We have thought about stock photo sites but can't come up with a compelling use case. Can you give us bit more details?
I don't understand what do you mean by pure product search. Can you elaborate on that?
Pinterest app on iOS already has upload and search feature. I think they already developed it. But I will look for people similar to pinterest who might not have this tech in house.
I think the key to figuring out how to market this is first understanding the use case. What type of companies are currently interested in using this product and what do they see as the benefit?
As per our understanding, e-commerce companies are benefitting from this product
I have posted this question exactly to expand our scope. May be some people with different experience can point to different direction.