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Taxonomy is the classification system you use to organize your website. Taxonomy is a hierarchy for organizing your offering and assortment to make it easy for your website visitors to find what they are looking for on your site. You can think about it the way a retail store does footprints and planograms. Your taxonomy guides your customers through your website to help them find the products they are looking to purchase.
Beta testing your products and services before you go to market is important for both customer-facing (B2C and DTC) and business to business (B2B) brands. Beta testing your products and services allows you to identify and resolve potential pain points for your customers. Beta testing can be expensive, depending on the structure of your testing and the length of time you decide to test your products.
Your assortment is made up of the products and services that you offer your customers. Some industries require frequent product line adjustments, but most large products and services companies review their assortment annually. Through the product assortment review process, you can determine which products and services in your offering no longer meet the needs of your customers, which items are your best sellers, and where you might be able to alter your pricing to maximize your profit on your current offering.
If you have an idea for a product that you would like to take to market, you can get started by creating a prototype and testing it with your potential customers. Showing the product to friends and family might be fun, but in the end, your customers will be the ones to make a purchase and will offer the best feedback to optimize your products for sale. Once you have created a prototype and adjusted it for feedback, test it again. You do not necessarily need to test your product for years, but you might go through three or four iterations of your product before you launch it to the market.
A niche is defined by Merriam-Webster as "a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted."
A lot of people talk about finding a niche for your small business, but it can be difficult to do. Narrowing your business scope to deliver one great product or service line to one specific group of core customers can be scary.
A quick intro to Silver Shade Group:
Most of my blogs will contain general information about marketing or answer common brand, product, and digital marketing questions, but for today, I offer a little about me and why I started (and am qualified to run) this company. I am a marketing and branding professional with 15 years of industry experience. This year, I decided to create a company to formalize the consulting work that I was already doing. In addition to marketing consulting, I own an arts & crafts subscription box company called Twined. I built that business from the ground up and learned many lessons along the way.
