5 Strategies to Expand Your Range of Technical Products

1) Diversify within your niche

Competition becomes less fierce when you can carve out a niche for yourself. By exploring variations or complementary products within your existing niche, you can find opportunities to leverage your expertise.

For example, if your company specializes in mobile apps, consider expanding into related areas like app security solutions or user interface design tools. Another approach is to consider your customers and find ways to diversify your products to create a niche to service them more effectively.

What are their pain points? How can you expand your current offering to better meet their needs? One last niche approach is to look for niche markets you aren’t serving. Is there an audience you haven’t considered who might use your products differently with some fine-tuning?

For instance, if you have an app designed for creating blueprints for product design, might that same tech be used to create something like floor plans for architects or maybe even be changed to suit the needs of B2C customers versus B2B users (or vice versa)?

2) Incorporate new technologies

You can stay at the forefront of technological advancements by integrating new solutions into your tech stack. Whether it’s incorporating AI, blockchain, or other emerging tech, these additions can open innovative possibilities for your business.

Evaluate how these technologies can enhance your offerings or create new technical products. For example, can AI improve workflows in your workforce management software? Can it help improve algorithms for your app’s tracking and monitoring feature to improve reporting?

It might be something like creating a customer service chatbot from your CRM. You might develop a more intuitive graphic design tool from your e-flyer template platform to create other marketing materials like sell sheets or sales presentations.

It’s all about innovation and considering the problems you can solve for customers by combining new technology with your expertise.

3) Modular technical product design

A modular approach to technical product design uses different components or features combined to create customized solutions.

Instead of having one-size-fits-all products, suddenly, your customers are getting exactly what they need and at a price they can afford. You can also expand your customer targets by creating more personalized solutions.

When you adopt a modular mindset, customers leverage your building blocks to create their own solutions for a more personalized customer experience without the costs associated with customized SaaS.

4) Collaborations and acquisitions

You might be in a position where you can start considering acquisitions to create a more robust tech or new product offering. Instead of investing in research and product development, you can seek startups that have the right ideas but lack the capital to expand at the pace they had hoped.

An offer to purchase their tech might be just what they need and enables you to leverage the ideas of up-and-comers who have the product design angle but lack the business finesse to succeed.

You can also consider partnering with other brands and collaboratively expanding your tech product offering using each other’s strengths to create hybrid solutions for your customers.

While acquisitions provide instant access to new products and expertise, collaborations open doors for unique, bespoke product offerings.

5) Vertical and horizontal expansion

You can choose to expand vertically or horizontally to increase your product offering. Vertical expansion offers products that cater to different stages of the value chain, such as software companies creating tools for software development, testing, and project management. It’s all about creating new things.

Horizontal expansion, on the other hand, introduces products that target a new audience or industry while still leveraging your core features.

For example, if you provide cybersecurity solutions for financial institutions, you might expand to offer similar solutions tailored to healthcare or manufacturing sectors. You create industry expertise that enables you to broaden your appeal on the wings of your past industry successes.

When to use horizontal growth:

• To create an opportunity in new markets
• To expand your offering without changing your tech fundamentals
• Entering a new geographic area
• Entering a new industry.

When to use vertical growth:

• To create an opportunity based on your current products
• To grow within your existing market share using your brand recognition and customer loyalty

To expand your range of technical products, you can diversify your niche, incorporate new technologies, adopt modular product design, or find opportunities for collaborations and acquisitions.

It all depends on whether you are looking for vertical opportunities to leverage your established brand to create new products or horizontal expansion opportunities to reach new industries, locations, or marketing arenas for your existing products.