One of the best ways to develop new business ideas is to look at growing trends. However, identifying trends and putting together a business plan is harder than most people think. In fact, a lot of people will incorrectly attach to trends and create a business that doesn’t represent the trend. Instead, the business will often fail, it will be a waste of money and it won’t reach the level of success that you hoped.
So how can you develop business ideas from growing trends? How do you create something that manages to captivate your intended audience?
With the right approach, it’s entirely possible to look at recent trends and create a fresh business idea that can grow into a global phenomenon, but it requires you to follow a few important fundamental rules in order to truly take advantage of an emerging industry.
Understand the Trend Before Trying to Utilize It
It’s vital that you approach a trend by first understanding what about it makes it so popular. Perhaps you’ve noticed that people are becoming more conscious about their health, so they’ve started to purchase more healthy foods. If this is the case, then there’s a good chance that you can adapt to this trend by offering healthy meal boxes. However, you also need to understand why people are becoming more conscious about health and not just try to take advantage by copying other people’s ideas or just offering a product that people want.
Simply taking a trend and offering a product rarely ever works. You need to think more carefully about why people want the product, how long the trend will last and also what about the trend people care the most about. Many trends are simply born from social media excitement and will rarely last long enough to be worth creating a business for. However, some trends which are created due to legislate changes or something that affects the entire country can be an excellent choice for a new business or a new service.
A good example of this is the new laws surrounding California’s cannabis use or the changes introduced by the GDPR that came into effect in 2018. For a change such as the cannabis laws, it became profitable to open up dispensaries and create new cannabis-based products to supply the growing market that was becoming more visible. As a result, a vape wholesale business became a valuable partner that could help new dispensaries and cannabis-focused business flourish in the industry. For GDPR implementation, compliance advisors and consultants became lucrative business ventures because of how important it was for businesses to meet their targets and still be visible to EU customers.
In short, taking advantage of a trend involves understanding it fully. You can’t just hope to latch onto a product or service trend that is becoming popular on social media–you need to fully understand it before you decide to try and take advantage of it.
Have an Agile Team Capable of Capitalizing on a Trend
One of the most difficult things about utilizing a trend is being able to capitalize on it faster than other businesses. Not only do you need to be fast with developing a new product or service, but you also need to make sure you have the marketing power to spread it around the world and also ensure that the product is a high-quality one or else your customers will see it as a rushed attempt to piggyback off a trend.
Not everyone has a manufacturing plant that they can adapt to create a new product and not everyone has the budget to market a new service as soon as they conceptualize it. In fact, it could take several weeks before you’re able to draw up a comprehensive plan that is able to capitalize on a trend. This is why it’s important to build an agile team of employees that excel at adapting to new positions, new subjects and new products.
An agile team will allow you to quickly shift gears and take advantage of trends. Flexibility is an important concern because it allows your employees to handle multiple roles in the workplace in order to take advantage of a trend, and it’s also important to have connections. Whether it’s networking with influencers that can help you spread the word or having a good partnership with a manufacturing business that can create a prototype of your product, it’s vital that you seek out solid connections so that they can essentially become a part of your agile team.
To conclude, growing trends can be difficult to capitalize on if you don’t have the team for it. Make sure you’re developing good relationships with your partners and grow an agile team of staff so that you can take advantage of a trend as soon as it surfaces.
Understanding When It’s a Trend and When It’s Not
In addition to the first tip of understanding a trend, it’s also important to notice when something is a trend and when it’s simply just a fleeting idea. This is where collecting and analyzing data can become an important part of the development process. Simply seeing something grow in popularity on social media does not mean that it can become a viable business idea. It could mean that a product could be created to satiate that growing customer base, but unless you have something to hook those customers in the future it’s unlikely that you’re ever going to keep them as loyal shoppers.
As such, it’s vital that you learn to identify if something is a trend or simply just a passing idea. Social media can be a great place to see what shoppers want and what they’re unhappy with so you can get ideas on how to upgrade existing products and services. However, taking a few collected tweets to investors is not going to work. You need quality research and data to prove your points and to show that your idea is worth investing in.
This is where creating a small trial run can be a good idea. Creating a test product that offers customers what they want could help you identify if it’s an idea worth investing in. alternatively, you can also look for sets of data that have already been published, such as in recent infographics with reliable sources and sets of data that can help you make business-related decisions.
The worst thing you can do is attach your business to a trend that ultimately isn’t going to be profitable in the next few months. You don’t want to invest resources into something that simply isn’t going to stick, and even if you have an agile business that can take advantage of passing trends, you always need something to help your customers remain loyal to your brand. Without this staying power, it’s going to be very difficult to have repeat business.
Final Words
The bottom line is that you need to understand trends inside out and have the right team of professionals as part of your company before you can develop business ideas from growing trends. It’s harder than it sounds to latch onto a trend and grow it into a business idea, a product or a service. The best types of trends to take advantage of are ones that affect many people, such as the GDPR changes or legislative changes that could pave the way to entirely new business concepts. Simply looking at social media isn’t enough when it comes to building a business from a trend.
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