Eight Things To Know When Launching a New Product
At some point during their career, marketing professionals will have the opportunity to launch a new product or service. It’s an exciting time and one that has the potential for tremendous success, and incredible failure. Launching a new product requires a different marketing approach than, for example, managing a maintenance or promotional campaign. There’s a number of moving parts and each must be orchestrated carefully to ensure the launch is successful.
Throughout my career, I’ve been fortunate to be involved in 12 launches. In some respects, you’re moving into the great unknown since the new product doesn’t have a history to build on. Likewise, it’s an opportunity to forge a new path that attracts new customers and revenue streams.
Here are eight things marketers should remember when launching a new product.
1. Product Launches Require a Unique Marketing Plan
While most marketing plans fall into two categories — sell or build awareness — launching a new product has its feet firmly planted in both. With an existing product, you already have a customer base. New products do not, so the number one goal is to rapidly build awareness and drive purchases.
Most marketers will claim they already have a customer base and the goal is to convert customers from the old product to the new one. If the old product generates healthy sales and profits, and is not a target for elimination, this strategy only leads to cannibalized sales. You should know where the new product fits into your overall product line and the target customer who will purchase it. Then it’s time to start building your marketing plan.
New product marketing plans are significantly more aggressive and come with larger budgets since your goal is to ramp up awareness, which means you’ll be pushing out marketing materials at a greater frequency to make a big splash.
2. Understand the Communication Channels
You probably have identified your current customer’s primary communication channels. You’ll continue to use these because you want to reach this target market. You may even get your message in front of potential customers via these channels. However, with a new product launch, you not only want to reach current customers, but potential customers, as well. This is why second and third-tier channels are attractive because that’s where the new customers might be located, and with a larger budget, you can afford to use these channels. Remember, the goal is to build awareness that leads to purchase. If you’re using the same old channels, you’re not extending your reach to new customers, which means you’re not expanding your customer base.
Another important task is to take the time to review the channel’s audience composition, its language style, sponsored article options and advertising opportunities. Don’t fall into the trap of using cookie-cutter messaging. You don’t use the identical message format on Twitter as you do in an email, so don’t get lazy. Each channel has its own strengths and it’s up to you to leverage those strengths. Customize the message for each channel.
3. Test Your Messages. Test the Product.
Very few products that stumbled at launch have succeeded. You only have one shot launching a product, which means it’s mission critical that you test your key messages to make sure it resonates with your current and potential customers.
Marketing research is inexpensive insurance, so recruit a handful of customers to provide feedback. Gather some in a room, show them the product and start asking questions. Present variations of your marketing message and get their feedback. Be sure to keep notes of the responses. Do the same with non-customers. If you can, set up a camera to record the group. You’ll be surprised at how much you miss during the initial meeting. Reviewing the video afterward gives you an opportunity to review body language, and who’s nodding in agreement (or shaking their head) when someone else is talking.
4. Review the Plan, and Review it Again
Developing a marketing plan requires a great deal of thought, research and time to create. Don’t be surprised if you go through five or six drafts before you arrive at a workable plan. One of the most effective activities to build a solid plan is to ensure that other members of your team have the opportunity to provide input at every step of the development process. It’s very easy to stay trapped in the groupthink bubble, so you need to allow your team to serve as a devil’s advocate and find weaknesses in the plan. Every plan has sections that can be improved, added, or jettisoned. Having an environment where people are encouraged to provide honest feedback will only lead to a better plan. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the depth and quality of the feedback. If you skip this part and ignore the holes in the plan, it will only come back to bite you.
5. Don’t Ignore Public Relations
Distributing a press release shouldn’t be the only item on your PR checklist. For several weeks leading up to the launch, you should have been in contact with the journalists who cover your industry. In fact, you should already have established relationships with the journalists who cover your industry. There are many ways to get them involved, such as: offering personalized demonstrations, and making your CEO and key engineers available for interviews. Journalists love going behind the scenes and talking to the people who built the product, and this is an excellent time to make it happen.
6. Unleash Your Employees on Social Media
The explosion of communication within social media channels means more audience fragmentation. What worked last year may not work this year. While there are established and dominant social media channels, new ones are popping up daily and some grow to be popular in a short time. Understanding what social channels your customers use allows you to effectively leverage those channels. The fragmented audience using a particular channel may be the market you’re targeting, so you should be there, too.
You’d be pleasantly surprised to know that your fellow team members are probably very active on social media, and may have thousands of followers. These followers, subscribers and friends have a common interest in your product. Some of your best salespeople are your team members, so check if they’d be willing to send out a message to their followers.
For example, one of your software engineers may have a large number of other software engineer friends who are Reddit users. If your product is a B2B solution that can help this demographic, you should encourage a product posting on Reddit since it may turn some of those users into new customers. The same can be done with your design team, operations and other departments.
7. Work With Your Partners
Effective partnerships are a two-way street. Your partners have just as much at stake as you do. One of the things that drives partnerships is the fact that new customers for you can also lead to new customers for your partners. Understand what communication channels your partners have available, and find out if they’ll include your new product announcement in the next newsletter or email. Leveraging partnerships can help expand your message deep into markets you may not otherwise be able to reach. To do so, means you’ve expanded your audience by a magnitude.
8. Set Goals. Establish Metrics. Constantly Measure the Progress
If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you measure your progress? You don’t drive your car down the road without looking at your dashboard to check your speed, engine temperature and fuel levels, so why would you do the same thing with your marketing plan?
When creating the marketing plan, you need to include your key metrics. You can separate these into various levels, such as critical, primary and baseline. The availability of sophisticated measurement tools, many of which are free or low cost, means you can review metrics in near real-time. Once the product launch is underway, you’ll know quickly if the strategy is working and you can make the necessary corrections to the elements that aren’t delivering, and understand what is working so you can continue to build on them.
On February 1, JotForm launched JotForm 4.0, a major upgrade to its flagship online form building product.
