Product Launch Types: How to Launch a Product Successfully

A product launch is the first phase in a company’s marketing strategy for new goods and services. After months of prelaunch planning, the sales, marketing, and product teams start their marketing campaigns to advertise their new wares.

On a product launch day, a brand might hold an in-person event, reach out to potential customers directly, or promote the new product’s availability through social media. Product launches also kickstart sales, whether as preorders or real-time sales.

After you and your team settle on a product positioning statement, you might have a better idea of how wide-reaching you want the launch itself to be. Consider these three basic product launch templates:

1. 1. Full-scale launch: If you want your new product to have as wide a reach as possible, consider planning full-scale launch activities as opposed to anything more muted or restrained. A full-scale launch debuts a product to as wide an audience as possible, generally by utilizing a multipronged marketing strategy. On launch day, you might hold an open webinar for anyone interested, start a massive social media campaign, and advertise widely in both digital and traditional media about your new product.
2. 2. Minimal launch: As you plan out the finer points of your marketing campaign, you might decide you want to initiate a subtler, more targeted product launch plan. In this case, you can more strictly define your target market, eschewing wide-reaching events and advertising for a more direct approach. For example, you might directly contact current users about a new product or product update rather than try to garner new customers. Decide on key metrics you want to hit in your campaign and execute your strategy to meet those benchmarks.
3. 3. Soft launch: Every company’s product launch checklist is different. If you want to launch with as little fanfare as possible, a soft launch might spread merely by word of mouth or a simple email campaign. Even though you might restrain your outreach in this approach, it can still raise enough awareness among key influencers and stakeholders to generate a successful, if smaller in scope, campaign.

A product launch is the first phase in introducing your new good or service to the wider public. Keep these tips in mind as you implement your new product launch strategy:

• Coordinate with relevant teams. A product launch requires input from numerous stakeholders and collaboration among many different team members. The product development team designs and creates the actual goods or services, and the marketing team decides on appropriate messaging. Meanwhile, the sales team develops a strategy for utilizing that messaging to appeal to as many customer personas as possible. All of these teams must work together at every phase to get ready for launch day.
• Define your target audience. When you know which demographics you hope to appeal to specifically, it becomes much easier to decide on which type of product launch you want to pursue as well as how to best execute it. Perform adequate market research to ensure you create an ideal customer experience in both the product itself, the launch day proceedings, and throughout the entire sales journey, too.
• Maximize awareness. Do your best to maximize awareness among your target audience, no matter how large or small you define it to be. Work with the product managers to ask which features of your new wares to foreground in marketing material. Use appropriate channels to reach your target demographics. Make it as easy as possible to get from your ads to your actual e-commerce landing page.
• Prepare to adapt. After the launch, odds are you might receive a fair amount of customer feedback about issues with your new product. Rather than let this discourage you, just take it in as yet another step on your product roadmap to total success. It’s nearly impossible to launch a perfect product straight from the get-go. As you hear from more customers, take in both the positive and the negative to improve new iterations of your product in the future.
• Test the product. Identify as many pain points in your product as you can before taking it to market. When you test your goods and services, you ensure new features and products are as pristine and functional as possible before actually launching and selling them. Set up customer support channels to help with any other bugs and mishaps postlaunch, too.
• Time the launch appropriately. When crafting your product marketing plan, consider your company’s workflow, where you’re at in the product life cycle, and more before deciding on a launch date. Ideally, time the launch when your marketing team has the most time to prepare, your product team can take care of as many flaws as possible, and customer interest in a new product is highest.
• Work on a sales and marketing strategy. Even the most stellar products need just as terrific of a go-to-market strategy to achieve as much success as possible. Craft a sales and marketing strategy tailored specifically to your target audience that’ll impact them on launch day and linger in the days, weeks, and months after, too. This might include social media outreach, online and in-person events, press releases, and more.

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