7 Tips for Planning a Successful Product Launch

So you’ve come up with the next big thing in your industry niche that will revolutionize the way your customers solve their problems. Good for you! But don’t get too ahead of yourself and start imagining all the sales, distinction, and success you’ll get from your product.

Before going to market, you need to build enough buzz and excitement so people will not only buy your product but will also happily spread the word about your big hit.

While every company, every market, and every product is inherently unique, there’s one thing that binds every successful product launch out there: an effective strategy right from the start.

Launching a product is a crucial point between development and going to market. Regardless of the type of product, you’re selling, you need to have an effective tactic to build buzz around your brand and your products, reach your targets, and hit the sales numbers you are aiming for.

In this blog, we’ll be taking you through seven of the most critical things you need to know and do when launching a product. If you’re ready to change your product launch game then let’s get started!

Reasons to Plan Ahead for a Product Launch

The goal of a product launch is to let everybody—from the people inside your company to your partners, to your customers—know about your new product. However, it’s more than just a way to raise awareness about your new product. It can be a profitable exercise that:

• Allows your brand to get noticed by the right people
• Lets influencers in your target market to get to know your latest offering up close
• Promotes interaction between you and your target audience
• Allows for increased revenue
• Opens up new opportunities in terms of business expansion

It’s important to deliberately plan ahead in preparation for any product launch. Debuting a new product isn’t always simple so you need all the prep time you can get before getting it out into the world. Here are four reasons why you need to plan before a product launch:

Identify Your Target Customers Early On

Before anything else, you first need to understand your audience. Thinking about who are target customers are and what they want helps you determine how to position your product, where it should be distributed, how it should be priced, and how you should market it after launch.

Develop Your Product Messaging Properly

A well-crafted product message includes a catchy tagline and a value proposition. It should highlight the product’s best features and the problems they solve. It should also resonate with your target audience well.

Determine the Right Promotion Strategy

A product launch is primarily about building buzz not only around your brand and your new offering but also around the event itself. Planning ahead lets you develop an overall strategy to educate your target consumers and build enough hype and excitement for the launch.

Identify Critical Success Factors, Dates, and Milestones

By planning ahead, you can determine measurable goals including revenue targets, channel availability, product availability, budget, positioning, and press activities.

Get You Foresight on Your Post-Launch Strategy

You can’t just launch a product and expect it to take off. You need to put a post-launch strategy in place to keep your target audience engaged and to address customer complaints and issues down the line.

Tips for Planning a Product Launch

As with anything you do in you running your business, spending enough time to plan a product launch will pay off often with great success. Here are seven of the most useful tips you need for a gainful product launch:

Focus on Your Buyer Persona

One of the most important things about launching and selling any product is getting them to the right people. No matter how great your product is, targeting the wrong people won’t lead to sales and growth.

When planning a product launch, you need to focus on your buyer persona. So ask yourself: “who is my ideal customer?” You need to have a clear idea of your target audience’s demographics, behaviors, challenges and interests, and preferences.

Once you know who your ideal customer is, you can plan your product launch around this avatar. This means:

• Positioning your product in a way that resonates with your target audience
• Picking distribution channels that are most convenient for your audience. Are your target customers more likely to buy online or through a physical store?
• Taking into account the income demographic of your buyer persona. The price of your product should fit their budget without shortchanging your business.
• Identifying where and how you should market your product including the right platforms to use, what tone to use in your marketing content, and whether you should appeal to your audience’s logic or emotions.

Conduct Outreach

On the other hand, one of the worst things that can happen to your product launch is to not get the audience turnout and the media and social media coverage you expect. If you don’t do enough outreach efforts at least 8 weeks before your product launch date, then you’re effectively killing your own business.

So before launching a new product, be sure to get the attention you need so you and your brand don’t fall into the void of obscurity.

Have an outreach plan that covers influencers in your industry as well as various publications, blogs, and websites who care about your solution and why they might feel inclined to share it. Getting featured by these people can help generate leads, drive traffic to your website, and generate buzz around your product.

Make a Marketing Plan

A marketing plan is as important as the product you are going to launch. Don’t fall into the trap of just getting your product out there. Even before your product hits the store shelves, you should have a marketing strategy. When the time comes, you’ll be ready with the right strategies to guarantee conversions and sales down the line.

Your marketing plan should include:

• An overview of your business’s marketing and advertising goals.
• A description of your business’s current marketing position.
• A timeline of when tasks within your strategy will be completed.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) you will be tracking.
• A description of your business’s target market and customer needs.

When creating a marketing plan, make sure that your product messaging emphasizes the product’s benefits to the user. However, your marketing materials should never exaggerate or overpromise. Instead, you should educate both your customers and your leads about your product, its advantage over your competitors, and its unique selling proposition.

Price Your Products Competitively

To successfully launch a product, it should not only be able to solve your customers’ problems but it should also come at a fair price.

Competitive pricing makes your product irresistible for your target customers while giving you enough profits with each sale. You can follow different pricing strategies based on how you want to market your products. This include:

• Keystone pricing,  a method of pricing retail merchandise for resale at a level that is double the wholesale price.
• Psychological or charm pricing which relies on the belief that an odd-numbered price can trigger emotional reactions in people
• Premium or prestige pricing which involves intentionally pricing products at round and higher numbers to give the impression of luxury and status.

You can also ensure that your products are priced competitively by experimenting with discounts, fragmented pricing, bundles, and the like.

It also pays to monitor your competitor’s pricing and to adjust your current price as needed.

Ask for Feedback

Prior to your product launch, it’s important to gather lots of customer feedback and use it to your advantage. Leverage various platforms including email, social media, instant messaging, and even phone calls.

Look for customer insight into things like:

• Your marketing strategy
• The product itself
• Pricing
• Some value-added services you can improve on
• How the product can be improved further

Don’t forget to analyze the information you gather and implement what needs to be implemented to show your customers that you listen.

Set Goals

As with any of your business objectives, starting with a clear set of goals is important when launching a new product. Start by asking yourself why are you launching this particular product. What is your overarching goal? Do you want to raise awareness, increase engagement, or improve conversions?

Make sure your specific goals are SMART—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. For example, you can shoot for:

• Clearly and effectively establishing a new name for your product or positioning your brand in a new light
• Building awareness and credibility for your new product ad your company
• Creating opportunities for sales and expanding distribution channels
• Cross-sell you new product to existing customers

Choose the Right Channels to Share Your Message

Outlining the right channels to be used in sharing your message is an important part of planning a product launch.

When seeking out platforms, go for the ones that your target audience is most likely to use. This ensures that you’re not merely throwing your messages out into the void.

It will also be helpful to pick one main channel and use email, social media, paid ads, and other channels to support it.

For example, you can hold a special event for your product launch and promote it to your email lists and on your social networking sites.

Alternatively, you can use a blog post or even a Product Hunt post to announce your new product. Again, it will be helpful to support your main product launch channel with email, social media, and ads to boost it.

Conclusion

When it comes to product launches, planning is key. You need to think things through and to be deliberate in designing everything from your target audience, to your product messaging, to the channels you will use. Furthermore, you need to have the foresight to think beyond outing your product out there.

With the help of the tips we’ve outlined above, your next product launch can generate enough buzz that translates into sales down the line.

Do you need any more tips and tricks to improve your business? The FreeUp blog has your back! Every week we publish new resources that can help you scale up your business in no time!