Innovation is key to staying current in the marketplace and keeping ahead of your competition. However, new product development isn’t enough. You must create an effective product launch marketing strategy to ensure success.
Every year, 30,000 new products are launched, and 95% of them fail every year. To remain successful in your industry, coming up with new ideas is only half the battle. You must release those ideas into the marketplace and ensure they’re seen and purchased by consumers. Your launch marketing strategy positions you as a leader in your field, attract quality leads, and generates revenue for your business.
Keep reading to learn how to create an effective product launch marketing strategy that delivers results.
Key Takeaways:
- A product launch is a combined effort to build interest, anticipation, recognition, and momentum for a company’s latest offering.
- Product launches fail because of poor planning, unfulfilled promises, and a lack of understanding of the features and benefits of a new product.
- An effective product launch marketing strategy can be accomplished in five easy steps.
What Exactly is a Product Launch?
From evolving trends to consumer needs, the marketplace is constantly changing. For this reason, businesses must always be working on new ideas for innovative solutions to consumer problems. Once they find an idea that meets financial and demand criteria, they can begin to strategize a plan to release the product to the public. The process of announcing, marketing, and building awareness and excitement around this solution is a product launch.
Whether it’s a hard launch (publicly released to the masses) or a soft launch (quietly revealed to a select few), a product unveiling requires the concerted efforts of multiple teams working together. From sales and customer support to event management and marketing for manufacturers, the entire company is responsible for building interest, anticipation, recognition, and momentum for the success of a product launch. While a product launch helps drive website traffic for manufacturing companies and leads to sustained revenue, it can also help raise interest in your other offerings.
Product launches fail because of poor planning, unfulfilled promises, and a lack of understanding of the features and benefits of a new product. A failed product launch loses sales and can damage your brand’s reputation. That’s why a product launch marketing strategy is essential to rolling out and selling new products for continued success.
5 Steps to a Successful Product Launch Marketing Strategy
A product launch is only successful if you get the right product in front of the right people at the right time. A product launch marketing strategy is essential to position your product in the marketplace and ensure you’re reaching the ideal target audience when they need your solution most. Follow these five steps for creating a product launch marketing strategy that delivers results.
Step 1: Build Employee Buy-In
Before you roll your product out to the public, you must first get the buy-in of your employees. Launching a new product is a group effort, and you’ll need everyone’s support if you’re going to be successful. You can accomplish this by creating the following documents:
- Sales guide: Educate and train your team so they understand what your new product is all about and why customers should want it.
- Internal email: Provide a product overview, why it should excite employees, and text that workers can copy/paste in their own external communications.
- User manual: By putting yourself in your customer’s shoes, you can create a useful tool that clearly explains the function and purpose of your new product.
- FAQ guide: Consider all potential customer’s questions and address them ahead of time.
These materials will help employees understand your product, the messaging required to sell it, and the answers they may need to convince prospects to buy.
Step 2: Conduct Research
To know the best way to market to your consumer, you must first identify who they are. Conduct research to determine whether people understand your product if the experience aligns with expectations and consumer behavior. This data can help you determine user intent and modify your messaging based on customer segments.
It’s also advantageous to understand your competitors. Research those companies to compare their price points, shipping options, and level of engagement. Read user reviews and monitor chat forums to see what people are saying about their products and find opportunities to outperform them. Review their content marketing for manufacturing companies. Learn from their mistakes and capitalize on their successes. Competitor marketing strategies can offer valuable clues to creating a successful campaign of your own.
Step 3: Build Suspense
Publishing teasers help to pique people’s interest and build anticipation about your upcoming launch. Curiosity will cause people to tune in to your marketing efforts and look forward to future announcements. Suspense builds exponentially. As more people begin talking about your product, word will spread, and even more, people will become excited about your new product.
You’ll know if your efforts are working when you see:
- You’re gaining more online engagement.
- An influx of people registering for email updates and text notifications.
- You’ve reached a certain number of product pre-orders.
Building suspense helps generate interest and confirms you’re on the right track with product positioning. The following video explains 10 strategies you can use to promote a new product or service launch:
Step 4: Optimize with Feedback
Once you’ve unveiled your product, it’s time to watch for customer feedback. Connect with customers on multiple levels through an omnichannel approach that includes:
- Creating a landing page on your website specifically for your new product.
- Initiating email marketing campaigns.
- Posting on social media.
- Implementing SEO basics for manufacturing and industrial companies.
- Targeting customers with push notifications.
All of these provide multiple opportunities for input, which can help shape the rest of your launch. Provide QR codes and direct links to make it easy for customers to leave reviews. Offer specials to entice people to share feedback. This shows your audience you value their opinion and helps you know whether your product launch marketing strategy is effective. Feedback and reviews can help you discover areas where you can improve the customer experience.
Step 5: Analyze Metrics
To accurately assess the success of your product launch, you have to look at qualitative and quantitative data to gain valuable insight. When a new product is in the introduction and growth stage, sales increase because people are excited to try this new item. You’ll know things are going well when:
- Profits rise.
- Your customers are ready for product updates.
- Awareness is high due to trials and demonstrations.
When you reach this point, it’s time to focus on long-term growth and sustainability in the marketplace. Metrics are key to revealing trends, shopping behaviors, customer demand, and whether you’re meeting consumer expectations. Use this data to make whatever adjustments are necessary to continue to build momentum and garner further success.
Launch Your Products with Confidence
Shanahan Strategies is an experienced marketing agency helping industrial and manufacturing companies strategize for sales growth and market share. We can help you create an effective product launch marketing strategy that builds awareness, drives traffic, and boosts revenue.
Contact Shanahan Strategies today to learn more about how we can help you meet your goals.
