How to Launch Your Product Successfully in 5 Simple Steps
How to Launch Your Product Successfully in 5 Simple Steps
How to Launch Your Product Successfully in 5 Simple Steps
Simone Somekh

Simone Somekh

Nov 12, 2020 ‧ 6 MIN.

A successful new product launch means winning the attention of consumers and corporate buyers. It goes beyond just informing the public about your new product or business. 

Researching the markets wisely and playing to your strengths ensures the success of the product. 

However, building buzz for your new product is not a piece of cake unless you have a powerful and effective product launch strategy. The launch should be attractive and exciting enough to catch the eyeballs. 

If you plan to launch your product, you must proceed with a well-framed strategy in a step by step process. 

A planned product launch strategy will ensure that you reach your goals smoothly. In this article, we will discuss five simple steps on how to launch your product successfully.

Let’s begin.

new product launch guide

Step 1: Perform Product And Market Research

Research is the foremost thing to do before any launch. Many entrepreneurs do not find it of much importance, but this is one of the primary reasons for product launch failures. 

If you want to be sure about the success of your product, ask these questions to yourself.

  • How is your product going to help consumers?
  • How high is the demand for the product?
  • How is your product better than your competitors’?
  • What is your unique selling point?
  • Is your product pricing competitive enough?
  • What is your anticipated ROI?

Overall, you are answering the question – why should your prospects choose your product over others? 

Similarly, you can also prepare a set of questionnaires and survey people around you, like friends, colleagues, relatives, or even interview the public.  

Based on the data, you should define your product, USP, or Unique Selling Proposition. Your USP will help your product to stand apart from others leading to more sales.

Step 2: Find Your Target Audience

It is essential to find a specific consumer group for your product to narrow down your target audience. 

Prepare detailed marketing personas because this will help you identify the channels for marketing and prepare relevant content pieces that are useful for your audience.

Here are some of the best ways to find your ideal audience:

  • Look at your existing customer base using your CRM data and social media followers. You should note down the age, spending power, location, language, and interests.
  • Run small social media campaigns on channels that reflect the demographics of your target audience. For example, Facebook has 86% of audiences in the age group 18-29. 51% of Instagram users are female, while more than 70% of Pinterest users are female. Similarly, if you target the Gen Z audience, then Snapchat, YouTube, and Instagram are the top three platforms that you should use. When you run pre-launch paid campaigns utilizing a fraction of your marketing budget, you get a better idea of which channel has the potential of giving you the highest conversion rates. 
  • Conduct an in-depth analysis of your competitor’s social profiles and online data to identify their audiences. You can use social listening to track conversations related to your competitor’s brand and popular hashtags. 
  • Check your Google Analytics report to analyze the demographics and interests data. This will help you understand the kind of content you need to create or the paid media channels you need to target to reach interested audiences. You can find this report under Select Audience > Demographics or Audience > Interests.

Step 3: Select the Right Time

The launch’s timing matters a lot when you are expecting every stone to fall in place. 

Most of the time, you should launch your product as soon as it’s available.  However, if your competitors are releasing their product simultaneously, you can either choose to become a first-mover or a second-mover. 

A first-mover is when your product is the first to enter the market where you can attract eager buyers, but there is also a possibility of an adverse reaction. 

A second-mover is a safe strategy where you wait to capture all the adverse reactions and adjust your product accordingly. At this stage, the market begins to grow, and you can attract interested buyers. 

Step 4: Have a Powerful Marketing Plan

Product and marketing both are equally important pillars of a successful business. A good product without intelligent marketing is unable to reap success. 

Start from choosing your marketing goals and then proceed with selecting the channels and tactics to use. Obtain feedback and measure the success of your marketing campaigns at every stage. 

Here are some ideas for an exceptional product launch marketing plan:

  • Include your brand’s motto in your product promotion templates, texts, audios, and videos.
  • Educate the audience about your product or services by running paid ad campaigns for every buyer journey stage.
  • Run contests on social media to attract and engage prospects because it can make your product go viral.
  • Leverage the power of Search Engine Optimization to gain rankings in the search engines for your target keywords.
  • Launch a PPC campaigns for both branded and non-branded terms to bring visitors to your website.
  • Invest time in creating high-quality and relevant blog posts to educate and nurture customers.
  • Guide users towards the conversion funnel using remarketing strategy and native advertising.
  • Partner with niche influencers to spread the word about your product and raise your audience’s trust in your work.
  • Create powerful emails to reach customers regularly. You can use marketing automation to trigger emails based on user actions.

Taking these steps ensures that your product gets the desired exposure and reach.

Step 5: Prepare For Communication And Retention 

Communicating with consumers is an art. They must feel comfortable to ask any question regarding the product or the brand. Also, they must be satisfied when they leave the conversation. 

Your team should undergo a training program for communication or engagement to handle customer queries efficiently. Training will ensure that they know everything about the product to answer any questions through emails, social media platforms, or phone calls. 

Lastly, you should have a strategy in place for customer retention. Use automation to re-engage customers and leverage customer surveys to obtain feedback. 

Take every step to remove the bottlenecks from the customer journey and offer them memorable experiences. 

Always try to over-deliver and try to fix negative comments on social media as early as possible. Continue to build trust in your product by offering exceptional customer service.

How Revuze Explorer Can Help You Launch Your Product Successfully

Revuze is a platform that allows you to know where exactly your product lies in the competition. Revuze can be your secret weapon for a successful product launch.

Revuze Explorer pulls unstructured data from multiple online sources such as eCommerce websites, marketplaces, call centers, social media, and everywhere where reviews are gathered. It then processes and presents the collected data through different dashboards and reports to better understand your target audience, product category, and brand performance.

Some of the dashboards and reports that provide you with new data to drive customer-focused recommendations include:

  • The brand dashboard offers a complete understanding of key performance indicators and presents a sentiment analysis that lets you identify your product’s most specific traits. 
  • The emerging trends report, with the help of which you can spot both the positive and negative trends for your products, makes proactive adjustments. 
  • The competitor report lets you compare your top competitors based on reviews volume, star ratings, and sentiment percentage. This enables you to identify the strength and weaknesses of your competitors.

Revuze Explorer dashboard lets you effectively monitor your product launch’s progress to spot whether the audience likes your product easily. You can identify the shortcomings of your work within weeks instead of months. Any adjustments can be made for smoother product adoption. 

Bonus: How to Launch Your Product Successfully Checklist

  • Check your product thoroughly. Spot the defects and rectify them as soon as possible.
  • Research your audience and identify the channels to reach them.
  • Define your product, USP.
  • Always have a backup plan for every step of the product launch.
  • Train your support team to handle all your customer queries efficiently.
  • Develop a complete marketing map, beginning from pre-launch to post-launch.
  • Research and decide the product’s pricing structure after carefully considering the cost involved in manufacturing/development, shipping/delivering, and order fulfillment.
  • Provide your users with easy access to communicate with your brand or share feedback on the product via social media, emails, or phone calls.
  • Finalize a launch date and plan your pre and post-launch activities accordingly.
  • Have a strategy in place for customer retention.

Conclusion

A product launch is a process that needs close attention. You can’t afford to miss any element, be it minor or significant. Following the process step by step, as given above, will give your product an early momentum to reach your sales goals. 

 

Simone Somekh

Simone Somekh

Simone Somekh is a New York-based writer and editor who specializes in marketing and communications for B2B SaaS companies. He teaches Communications at Touro College and he is the author of an award-winning novel published in four languages.

Simone Somekh is a New York-based writer and editor who specializes in marketing and communications for B2B SaaS companies. He teaches Communications at Touro College and he is the author of an award-winning novel published in four languages.