Launching something new into the marketplace is a big deal. Whether you’re introducing a recent service upgrade or a physical product, how you launch can be the difference between success and failure.

No amount of clever marketing can make up for not properly thinking through an offering. However, a quality product that can make an actual difference to your customers will most likely be undermined without the support of a well-conceived launch strategy.

So, how do you go about developing a strategy that gives your product a fair chance in the marketplace? This article will explore a framework you can use. It starts with defining the product and creating internal understanding and then moves through the steps that successfully introduce your product to your audience. Along the way you will learn how to incorporate marketing automation and content marketing as core components that add a lot more value to the launch experience.

If you’re a B2B marketer looking to launch an innovative professional service, you might be interested in our companion article on this subject, How to Launch New Professional Services Effectively

Why Most Product Launches Fail

A quick Google search suggests that failure is actually the norm, rather than the exception. Figures on the percentage of products launches that fail range from anywhere between 75-90%.

If there was one definitive reason launches fail, there wouldn’t be Google Glasses or Betamax case studies for us to dissect. Each launch would be a spectacular success with no second-guessing required.

There are many reasons launches fail. Perhaps the company attempted to fill a need that did not exist yet or failed to educate the market on the need for its innovative product. Maybe it was just an ill-conceived idea, or a poor reading of market and consumer trends. Product price could be a factor, or it could be a matter of bad timing, with a competitor coming to market at the same time with a better product or more skilfully executed launch.

A universal problem, however, is a lack of preparation. Companies pour their effort into product development believing that ‘if we build it, they will come’ and fail to plan properly months in advance of the launch. The answer is to use an iterative launch framework that helps to define and refine what works for your company and your audience, and builds a predictable, repeatable process as you go.

Build Better Products

As already mentioned, a strong launch is built on the foundations of a sound product.

Instead of starting by coming up with an idea for a new product or feature and trying to find a market for it, work backwards. Understand your customers’ needs first and build products to answer them.

Do your homework - look at customer feedback on existing products and discern what features and benefits would appeal to them for upgrades or new products. Understand their pain, and uncover the real problem they need your product to serve.

If you are introducing features that support your core product, make sure you don’t end up with new bells and whistles that provide no additional benefit. Each feature or product improvement must improve retention, engagement, and monetisation of your core product without cannibalising another part of the product.

Craft a Strong Positioning and Messaging Framework

Set out product goals and objectives. Ask questions like: who is this product for, what does it do, and why is it different?

Test if you’ve done a good job of explaining your product by launching it internally first. If you can’t sell your idea to your colleagues and the sales team well enough to get them excited and eager to buy in, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to bring your customers along.

At Amazon, they accomplish this process of internal vetting through press releases that are centred on the customer problem. They describe how current solutions fail to alleviate those concerns, and then explain how the new product idea will solve those problems. If the release fails to interest the internal audience, it goes back to the drawing board until they uncover something that generates excitement.

Define Your Launch Goals

When launching a new product or service, most businesses want to get as many sales as possible in as short a time as possible. However, taking the time to focus on what else you want to achieve can help flesh out the product launch strategy and provides measurable indicators of success. Examples of launch goals include:

• Positioning: Clear establish or modify the consumer’s perception of your brand.

• Awareness: Increase the market’s awareness of your business and create a buzz around your brand.

• Prospects: Introduce the product to a specific number of potential users within a set period from launch.

• Differentiation: Set your new product apart from previous incarnations or competitors’ versions.

• Usage: Increase the number of individuals or businesses using your product on a regular basis, incorporating it as part of their organisation, or placing additional orders based on initial product satisfaction.

Create Your Initial Target Audience

Don’t launch to everyone all at once. Instead, start by defining an initial target audience and marketing plan to expose your product to more users progressively over time. This provides the opportunity to tweak your messaging and add more value to your product. It tests your assumptions, and validates answers to the important who, what and why positioning questions.

Your target audience can be found within your existing user base or defined audience. They might be early adopters, people who you have identified as being interested and invested in discovering new ideas. They might be people who have had previous positive experiences with your company or existing brand evangelists who are more likely to spread your message by word of mouth.

Mine your customer intelligence and use audience segmentation to create subsets based on common needs, interests and priorities. Laying this groundwork in early will help you to create personalised communications that speak to individual leads further down the line.

Map Your Customer Journey

Define how you will get in front of the people in your target audience and identify the key steps you expect them to take through your launch sequence.

Brainstorm everything you could do to achieve your goals. This might include landing pages, email marketing sequences, paid ads, referrals, blog posts, webinars, or any other strategies. Evaluate your list, rank and prioritise your ideas using an ICE score to quantify impact, confidence, and ease. This clears the weeds and uncovers a path that will take you from what you could do to what you should do.

If you’ve run marketing campaigns for launches in the past and have data available to inform your strategy, don’t forget to loop that in.

Create A High Quality Customer Experience

The next step is to create all of the content you need to engage your audience along the launch path you’ve just defined. Coordinate with the sales team and internal stakeholders to ensure a smooth customer experience at all levels.

All of your assets - such as landing pages, lead capture forms, FAQs, sales copy, slide decks, demo scripts, training materials, email copy, and blog posts - should be lined up ready for when you hit the launch button.

Here’s where the work you did on customer segmentation comes into its own. Every experienced marketer understands the need to talk to each customer’s individual interests, needs and pain points. Weave this understanding into every touchpoint along the journey and use advanced personalisation to take your content to the next level.

Over 78% of marketers only use the most basic personalisations to customise their messages. Give your launch content the edge by utilising a marketing automation platform that enables advanced personalisation strategies and dynamic content based on audience segmentation and deep behavioural insight.

Don’t forget to also create seed content that talks about relevant issues and ideas pre-launch and gets people thinking along the right lines weeks beforehand. Make sure these activities are tracked so you can gain additional insight into your target audience.

Using a tool like SharpSpring Social, part of the suite of marketing automation tools that 1827 Marketing provides, to manage your social media campaigns will allow you to monitor the conversations that matter, identify hot leads and brand advocates, trigger automations based on social activity, and create opportunities for informed engagement with your sales team - such as demos or video consultations.

Hone In On Your Ideal Customer

Once launch day has arrived and you’ve initiated your process you’ll have the data you need to start whittling your audience down to identify your ‘ideal customer’. It will become apparent who ‘gets it’ and truly appreciates your offering, while others won’t be an exact fit.

At this point, concentrate on nurturing relationships with your best candidates. These will be self-selecting. Invite people to opt in to finding out more by joining a waitlist and incentivise them to part with basic contact information with a compelling lead capture.

As you continue to develop your relationship, you can start to filter your list and gauge how interested people are. Behavioural triggers, such as click throughs on emails and which pages individual prospects have visited on your website, will provide vital data for lead scoring. Using progressive profiling on subsequent lead capture forms will garner additional valuable company information.

All of this enables you to engage the most interested people with detailed surveys or manual follow-ups to clarify information submitted, and introduce a more personal touch. At this point a webinar or one-to-one demos can be effective to convert leads into sales.

Evaluate Your Measurement Criteria

It is time to assess whether you are seeing the results you wanted to achieve with your launch plan. Is the target audience converting? Is there higher engagement with your marketing content, and is there better retention with new and existing customers? If so, you might just have a hit on your hands, and it could be time to take it to the next level.

Build from the Initial Launch

With success, start using what you’ve learned from the launch to add layers of users. As you define new segments of your audience, continue to further refine your process. Identify points of friction and seek to eliminate them.

Continue cycling through these steps in a controlled process until you hit a tipping point where you’re sure you can successfully launch your new product to the widest audience.

Like any framework, this is not a ‘one size fits all’ solution for launching. The tactics that work for other companies might not work for your audience. However, taking a phased approach and putting a strong emphasis on tracking allows you build and test processes that create a customised launch solution that will work best for you and increase your chance of success.

1827 Marketing combines creative campaigns that are aligned with your business strategy and brand, with marketing automation and AI assisted amplification tools to get the most out of every piece of content. We bring it all together with strategic planning, content creation, marketing automation and social amplification so you can experience a successful new product launch.