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The successful exploitation of new ideas is crucial to a business being able to improve its processes, bring new and improved products and services to market, increase its efficiency, and most importantly, improve its profitability.

Marketplaces – whether local, regional, national or global – are becoming highly competitive. Competition has increased as a result of wider access to new technologies and the increased trading and knowledge-sharing opportunities offered by the Internet.

Despite massive investments of management time and money, innovation remains a frustrating pursuit in many companies. Innovation initiatives frequently fail, and successful innovators have a hard time sustaining their performance. Why is it so hard to build and maintain the capacity to innovate? The problem is rooted in blind innovation.

Start with the End in Mind

The first and the most important step is to identify what information is needed and how it will be used. A clear goal will help you find information effectively and comprehensively. One of the ways to do that is finalizing your information in a list which everyone on your team is able to see.

When identifying specific marketing objectives to support your long-term goals, it is common practice to apply the widely used SMART mnemonic. You will know that SMART is used to assess the suitability of objectives set to drive different strategies or the improvement of the full range of business processes. With SMART goals documented in Plans linking objectives to strategies and KPIs everyone is sure exactly what the target is. Progress can be then be made quickly and regularly reviewed, for example through an E-commerce dashboard and, if necessary, action can be taken to put the plan back on track.

Tap Market Expertise

First of all, don’t start your research project cold. A lot of experts are willing to advise you and help answer your questions about market trends, supply chain vulnerabilities, and so on. Talking to the experts can also help you focuses your research direction.

Have Customer Conversations

No amount of data will provide the same foundational context as having conversations with your actual product customers. There are some ways to contact your customers such as emails and surveys. Email marketing provides updates, promotes your business, and communicates any news or events. Surveys are the most simple, direct, and traditional way to ask for your customers’ feedback. What’s more, it will help establish customer satisfaction, which is also important. It ensures that you’re customers understand that you’re prioritizing their experiences by implementing a customer-centric policy. This means that you can easily remedy any problems and issues, while also retaining customers.

Not Everyone Is Failing

Not every company struggles with sustaining and innovating. For example, big shots like Amazon.com, Google, and Flickr all have Conversation Marketing down to an art form. They design their sites with their audience in mind, the market with the user’s experience as the focus, make feedback and conversations easy for their customers, engage with these conversations, and then finally, adjust according to their audience’s needs and wants.

Spera Case Study

Freelancers are projected to be 50% of the workforce in the US. Emperitas conducted 12 months of product-market fit research with Spera’s core users, freelancers. Spera is a fintech combining project management invoicing, and payments into a single platform so freelancers can focus on their skill and the work they love, not on worrying about getting paid. By researching, we know how to build a product which enables to solve the main pain points of the freelancer lifestyle, how to connect or approach with freelancers, the channel mix to use, and what kind of pricing model to follow.