How to Validate Your Business Idea

Aspiring entrepreneurs are everywhere around us. You will find some who have been nursing their ideas for months or even years and then there are those who come up with brilliant business ideas every Monday morning.

However, most are held back by the frightening statistics that speak of the businesses that do not make it past the ideation stage. It, therefore, makes sense to first validate your business idea before going ahead with setting up the business.

Landing Pages

A landing page is solely built for the purpose of marketing and it is often a standalone page. The logic behind creating these pages is to advertise your value proposition and see if there is any traction for your idea. Following are certain things about landing pages that make them great marketing tools:

It is not necessary that your product must be ready before you build such a page.

It doesn’t take a programmer to create such pages.
However, you must inform your visitors that the product has not yet been launched if you are developing a landing page without an operational business. You must also make a provision for them to share their contact information with you.

If you have been able to build a large database of emails then it indicates that your idea is going down well with consumers. However, if the landing page has not been able to attract many visitors it is a sign that there may not be much demand for your product.

Create a Landing Page

You do not need a coding guru or a computer whiz to create a landing page. Programmers aren’t the only resource that entrepreneurs have these days to design impressive websites.

There are various tools that are now commonly available online such as Squarespace or UnBounce which allow you to design landing pages in the simplest ways by using a drag and drop interface.

If designing them yourself is a challenge you can make use of the pre-designed templates. While some of them are free of cost, there are also those that charge a nominal fee but offer unique design templates in return.

Ideally, in the stage of validating your business idea, you mustn’t spend a lot of resources and time on the design aspect. Your focus must be on advertising your product. The copy that you write should be such that it communicates effectively how your product will benefit the market that you are targeting.

You can also think of smart innovative techniques to gauge how much your visitor likes the product. For example, Buffer created a pricing page and hid their email capture behind it. It was a successful strategy to measure the level of interest that visitors showed in the product.

Direct Traffic with Google Ads

Creating a landing page to validate your business idea will not make much sense if you are not able to attract traffic to your website. There are some ways you can go about this.

You can use search engine optimization but that can be a time-consuming process. Since you’re merely validating your business idea employing this strategy can delay the setting up of your business as it is sure to take up a lot of time.

Another viable option is to run a Google Ads campaign. You can also advertise your product on social media platforms but running a campaign on Google can be a lot more successful as it processes nearly 3.5 billion searches every single day. You’re more likely to find your target audience by holding such a campaign.

Google also allows you to bid on keywords that are related to your offer. Each time a user performs a search on Google for the keyword that you have bid for, the user will be able to see your advertisement.

Following Up

From the visitor’s data, you will gain a fair understanding of how your demographic is reacting to your page. Your business is definitely solving a problem if target customers are biting.

The next step you need to take is to determine whether the people who have signed up for the product will really buy your product or not. To understand this you may have to follow up with the leads to learn more about their commitment to your product.

If they still seem interested then you will have a list of potential customers who are ready to buy your product. Thus creating landing pages is a relatively inexpensive way to validate your business idea.

Jumping directly to the step of setting up business operations is a rather unwise move just like not securing your assets by writing a Will using a free Will kit.