You’ve probably come up with a unique idea for your own small business at least once in your life. It’s a wonderful thing to dream about doing something you know you’d be good at and try to think of different ways to turn this idea into reality. In today’s article we’ll talk about how to test a business idea in a short period of time and see whether you’re on the right track. Let’s get right to it! We all have business ideas. What most of us fail to do, though, is take action on these ideas of ours because we’re scared that they might not work. Of course, this fear is completely justified—bringing an idea to life takes a lot of time, energy, and money. That’s why people usually decide to simply abandon their plans and never realize them.
However, what if we told you that you could test that idea for your business without wasting too much time or money? By doing so, you’ll be able to see whether your service/product is worth investing in and, ultimately, launching. In today’s article we’ll talk about how to test a business idea in a short period of time and see whether you’re on the right track. Let’s get right to it!
Design a Test Website
First things first: create a website. It might sound like a lot of work, but the truth is that there are tools/apps out there that come with pre-built templates that will allow you to build a website really fast. Ucraft is one of the tools that can help you out and save a lot of your time in the process. You can create your very own website in no time at all! Ucraft lets you try out different colors, fonts, styles and images, and see what works for you the best. The best part about it is that you don’t need any coding skills whatsoever to do this—just drag and drop everything.
You can choose a template that suits your needs the best and then play around with different blocks to find that perfect combination. You can test different variations to see which one your audience likes the most. Use this website to communicate your value, spend some time drafting a concise and effective copy for it, and set up a KPI (e.g. an email registration) that’s based on your call to action. Test out CTAs, icons, designs—anything you can think of. It’s important to pretend that your idea is an already established business—this will make your website more convincing for your visitors. Once you’re done, it’s time to go out and get some traffic to your website.
Set Up an AdWords Campaign
Given the fact that you want to test out this new idea for your business as soon as possible, you shouldn’t rely on social media to drive traffic to your website. While social media promotion is a great option on any other day, it does take some careful planning and time, which is why you should run an AdWords campaign instead. Head over to AdWords and get ready to set up your campaign. Choose your target keywords and geo locations, and make sure to include the key product features in your ad copy. After all, you want your audience to know why they are valuable for them. Direct the traffic towards your website and you’re good to go.
Don’t forget to set your budget! It’s not a bad idea to have enough in your budget to get at least 100 clicks, but you don’t have to go overboard with bidding, seeing that this is a test run. After your campaign is up and running, you’ll need to pay attention to the CTR, conversion rate, bounce rate, exit rate and time on page. All of these will help you see whether your business would be successful or not. Naturally, setting up a good AdWords campaign is more in-depth and takes a lot more time, so if you aren’t familiar with the process we suggest that you check out our in depth PPC guide.
Get Feedback for Your Business Idea
Once you have your website and your campaign, you can go ahead and ask people what they think about it. Run your idea by those who have already dealt with a similar thing or ask around in marketing communities such as GrowthHackers or Inbound. This part of the process is extremely important because it will help you find out what you need to tweak and change in order to make your business as great as possible. In addition to your AdWords campaign, you’ll definitely get valuable information from different forums, niche websites, communities, etc.
Get the attention from the people in your industry and let potential customers give your business a try. Receive criticism well, because this is the only way for you to improve. Once you get all the info you need, start working on improving your business and don’t stop until it’s perfect. After that, go out and do it all over again. Rinse and repeat.
Pick a Productivity Tool to Get Organized
Seeing that you’re in a rush to get things tested out as quickly as possible, you might want to invest in a productivity app or tool to help you keep track of time and all of your tasks. There’s a huge variety of them out there, including Trello, Asana, etc. Remember, this is just a test and while saving money is important don’t forget that you shouldn’t waste too much of your time. That’s why you should opt to use some kind of a time-tracking app. This will enable you to have a clear picture of which tasks are more time-consuming than others and if you are losing time doing trivial stuff.
You can use apps like Toogle and Futurenda to keep track of all your tasks. What’s great about these kinds of apps is that they manage your agenda based on your tasks and events completely automatically. You can also get an estimation time of when your tasks can be completed and use that estimation to adjust your workload. Apps such as these ones will tell you exactly how much time you need for each task and help you get more organized and, thus, be more productive. It really is a must have even if you’re just testing out your business and especially if you have a tight time frame to do so. You can pick the one that suits your needs the most and start planning all of your business idea-related tasks! There’s no time to waste!
See How Your Business Idea Fared
After everything’s done, it’s time to face the music and see whether you succeeded or not. This is actually the scary part, but it needs to happen. Check how many visitors you got. Did you get more or less than you expected? Don’t be discouraged if the results don’t meet your expectations. You can always learn from your mistakes and try again. Create another test for your entrepreneur idea, but change things up this time around. Do something different. Pick another template. Make your copy more convincing. Create a better campaign.
You should always follow up with those who registered on your test website and see what they thought of it, what they need, etc. Use their insights to your advantage. In the end, if there wasn’t any interest in your idea, you saved yourself from wasting months creating something no one would have wanted. Do another test—as you can see, it doesn’t take up too much of your time.
Conclusion
Starting a business can be scary and difficult, there’s no doubt about it. That’s why you should never rush into anything and make sure that you test out your ideas prior to launching them. You can do this thoroughly or fairly quickly, like we talked about in this article. It’s up to you, but the way we described will definitely save you time and money.
The most important thing is not to give up on your ideas and keep on trying to find that one that will make you succeed! We hope this article will help you do just that.