4 Steps to Improve Your Product Impact

The term Product Impact can mean many things, including:
1. What is the carbon footprint of the product?
2. How does the product make an effect the consumer’s life in terms of productivity, emotions, connection and more?
3. How does the product deliver continued value beyond the physical thing or service?

For this article we define product impact as the relevant, important information delivered through connected packaging at the point of purchase and beyond.

Customers are directly influenced by the experiences they have with brands. Brand experience builds consumer awareness and often creates devoted, repeat customers. When your brand experience is dry or underdeveloped, customers won’t engage and the product impact is lost. It really is that simple.

Whether it’s emotional connections in content or promotions, the ultimate goal is to evoke positive emotions and feelings from consumers concerning your brand.

Crafting a positive brand experience to influence how audiences perceive your product requires a little strategy and setting some goals. This article will help you with clear steps on how to leverage the Real platform to define, implement and measure your goals, build engagement and ultimately drive success.

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1. Set your product impact goal(s)

Set product impact goals in alignment with your business’s current interest. Whether you’re building awareness as a start-up, offering discounts, introducing a loyalty program, providing special gifts and/or providing proprietary content, Real is ideally suited to deliver your message — because your message can change over time. Here are the most common ways in which Real is used with product impact to influence brand engagement:

Enhance Ownership
Give the customer something that will enhance their interaction and ownership of the product i.e. a complimentary product, how-to videos, a discount code, the list is endless!

Develop Trust + Loyalty
Give the customer something that increases your level of trust by stating or restating your Purpose, with a loyalty program, a money-back-guarantee, or a life-time warranty.

Increase Sales
Increase the number of products, services, and offerings sold with exclusives that compliment the product in hand. Just leveraging this knowledge can make your customers feel special in the process.

Brand Education
Educate the customer on a specific area of your business, i.e. your mission, purpose, production processes, or founding story.

Build Community
Encourage people to connect with the leaders of brands and other brand loyalists through social communities or forums. Here is an example of a brand doing this well for artists.

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2. Create the call-to-action (CTA)

A call to action (CTA) is a clear messaging phrase or standpoint that compels your user to take a specific next step. This next step should later directly back to the goal you set in step one. We encourage you to test and try different CTA’s to see what drives the most success. Real makes it easy to change your CTA to generate more product impact! Remember, to be effective, a CTA should be obvious and should immediately follow the marketing message.

Enhance Ownership to increase Product Impact

• Product Registration: Registration can beneficial to both you and the customer. You are better able to communicate important information regarding product updates or recommendations, activate warranties, track usage and maintenance issues, and aid during notifications concerning safety warnings or product recalls. But make sure you set a strong benefit for registering the product or service to your customer to increase product impact.
• How-To Videos : People shop on their phone or with their phone in hand. Show them how to use the product so they can see it in action. Make it impossible to resist your CTA when they see how the product is used by experts or other customers. We love MUDWTR’s video content.

Drive Repeat Sales to increase Product Impact

• Discount link for Real customers: It is proven that repeat customers are easier to get than new customers, however we seem to consistently reward new customers with discount codes. Think of a few ways you can reward your current customers to keep them coming back to increase product impact.
• List complimentary products: How can other products in your library enhance the product or service purchased. Make it easy for the customer to access WHY it is complementary to the purchase they already made.
  
  Note: Complimentary products are different from similar products. A complementary product is an item that is bought together with the main product.

Grow WOM Marketing to increase Product Impact

According to Nielsen, 92% of consumers believe recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising. How can you make this product impact easier with your CTA?

• Verified product review (on their site): People trust other people like them! Offer you users a way to provide a verified review and reward them when they do.
• Ask for feedback through forms or polls: The best way to improve your products and services is to hear directly from the people using them. Reward your customers for providing feedback.
• Share an experience with Our Brand: Customers love to envision how they will use the product or service, paint a picture using current customers as an example.
• Ask Us Anything events or forms: Create a space where customers can voice their questions, needs and concerns. Make them feel seen and heard.
• Follow on social media: The digital matrix is alive and thriving. Send you customer to a place where you consistently share information about your brand.

Promote Community Building with Product Impact

People desire to be a part of something bigger than just consumerism! Don’t just talk the talk, walk the walk and show how you are putting it into action. Show your customers how you are creating good in the world through serving and building communities.

• Donate to charity
  Show how you are involved on a local level and offer opportunities for your customers to donate or volunteer too.
• Register for a loyalty program
  Take your connection with your customers one step further and put your people first with added value. The most innovative loyalty program takes the focus away from getting customers to spend more and re-centers itself on creating value for them.

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3. Preparation

Now you begin to think about the HOW and what is required to put your goal and the associated CTAs into action to increase product impact. Below are a few suggestions of what could be needed. Please reach out to your Real Success Coach if you have any questions about your implementation tools, tactics and decisions. We are here to support you!

• Create consumer facing copy and landing for your CTA(s).
• Add CTA(s) to point of purchase and or consumer ownership areas.
• Create a landing page or destination that aligns with your CTA(s) where you consumers can implement the action.
• Adjust your packaging as needed, just remember to keep it smart and sustainable. Read how here.

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4. Measure success and iterate your product impact.

Monitoring the key metrics that align with your CTAs and goals help you: identify performance levels of each CTA and gauge the progress on achieving your goal. After you put in the effort to implement a great product experience, the last and most important step is to validate your efforts. Make use of Real analytics that show your project’s progress and refine and alter as needed.

• Monitor the results of your customer fulfilling the CTA with the Real Dashboard and/or your in house analytics.
• Share your goal with your Real Success Coach so we can help you find the right analytics and metrics in our dashboard. We are here to support you in accessing the information you need to track your goals.

We do not share or sell any of your information. We also do not collect personally identifiable information from your consumers or users of the Real app. To learn more about our privacy, please refer to our Privacy Policy here.

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Bonus: Design and content recommendations for product impact!

Here are a few product content creation best practices.

• Lifestyle over product imagery. Choose lifestyle images over product photos with white backgrounds that are often found on shopping sites. Lifestyle images can help make the emotional connection to your brand. Real is a great way to put your social media content into real customer hands.
• Prioritize video. The most popular and efficient content format, video is what users have come to expect.
• Show don’t tell. Steer clear of “advertising” type messaging that shout features and benefits. Add value for users by entertaining or educating instead and support this message with the product and brand priorities.
• Avoid one-size-fits all thinking. Diversify content format, channels, and messaging; content should work together not repeat each other across channels.
• Create varying levels of depth through content that connects. Explore the hero, hub, help model to create narratives that live across assets and channels.