A Step-By-Step Guide to Launching Your New Product

May 5, 2019 - 12 minutes read

Here’s how to launch your new offering the right way.

As an eCommerce business, regardless of your niche or industry, there’s little doubt that you have a product range or service to revere.

But while you may have your staples – best selling products that you’re well known for – you still need to launch a new product once in a while to grow, evolve, and remain relevant year after year.

Studies suggest that 63% of consumers like it when brands offer new products. Moreover, the same study found that 69% of customers expect brand innovation to enhance society.

If you’re seen as an innovator, an industry leader, or a brand that’s committed to regularly dazzling your prospects with brand new offerings, you’re likely to expand your commercial reach, grow your audience, and boost your bottom line.

If you have a brand new product or service that you’d like to unleash on the public, launching it the right way will be integral to its success.

Whether you’ve developed a new and innovative consumable from scratch or are looking to add an entirely new range to your online store, here’s a step-by-step guide to launching your new product to help steer your success.

“If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” – Tony Robbins

 

Conduct your research

 

With your new product – or product range – firmly in place and ready to go, the first step to a successful launch is conducting your marketing and competitor research.

Gather your team and develop a research strategy, assigning different people to different roles before coming together and consolidating your discoveries.

To get a well-rounded view of the landscape surrounding your niche and gain the knowledge to develop content, communications, and a launch strategy that resonates with your audience and gets noticed, you should do the following:

  • Hone in on various social media platforms or blogs and explore the pages of competitors that have launched similar products or solutions. Identify strengths in their content that you can emulate (in your own way, of course) and see if you can spot gaps or weaknesses on which you can capitalize.
  • Explore the pricing and product descriptions of competing products or services and mystery buy items to analyze the consumer journey. From this information, you’ll be able to identify ways you can optimize your pricing, user experience, and promotional strategies to help make your launch as successful as possible.
  • Conduct social media polls, consumer surveys, and focus groups, plus drill down into your existing consumer data to gather as much intelligence you can about your audience’s thoughts, feelings, preferences, and pain points.

 

Focus on the people rather than the product

 

Expanding on our previous point: to enjoy a successful product launch, you should focus on your consumers rather than the product itself.

Yes, your product or product range will no doubt be awesome and have a host of USPs or unique features that you will want to shout about.

But when launching or promoting a product, the most successful brands address their audience on a personal level, focusing their communications on how their products will affect them and how it will address their personal pain points. You should do the same.

Apple’s late Steve Jobs was excellent at this form of consumer-centric marketing. Explore his efforts, and you’ll get the inspiration you need for product launching success.

These resources will also help you define your target audience and help you develop a successful content marketing strategy:

 

 

 

Reach out to influencers

 

Once you’ve conducted your research, defined your audience, and developed your content marketing strategy, reach out to digital influencers in your niche to help you promote your product and spread the good word come launch day and beyond.

At present, 49% of consumers rely on social media influencers to make purchasing decisions. Moreover, 94% of marketers feel that transparency and authenticity are the key drivers of influencer marketing success.

Source the most valuable influencers in your niche in advance of your product launch and focus on forging an organic, mutually beneficial business relationship.

Once you’ve built a rapport and worked out a few details regarding your product promotion, you will reap the rewards of having your product naturally and positively reviewed by industry influencers with droves of highly-engaged followers ready to spend money.

To help you in your quest, here is a small library of influencers according to popular online retail niches:

Now, get out there and start building those bonds – one social media influencer at a time.

 

Create suspense

 

If you create suspense about your new product or offering, you will generate interest.

To do this, you should start releasing social media posts, teaser blog content, and guest publications. You can also ask your influencers to boost your content or create a little suspense of their own.

Creating and milking the feeling of suspense leading up to your product launch will bestow your campaign with the following benefits:

  • Boost consumer engagement leading up to your product launch.
  • Create an authentic buzz surrounding your brand and your new offering.
  • Assist the performance of the content related to your new product.
  • Offer the opportunity for your new product to “go viral.”

For inspiration for your suspenseful product promotion efforts, check out these examples of viral marketing in action.

Oh, and  watch this video out to see how Apple does suspense marketing (a masterclass in setting people up for a “big reveal”):

 

Take pre-orders

 

Prior to the big launch, you should take pre-orders from people, encouraging them to commit to your product or service before it’s officially released to the public.

While rolling out your suspenseful content and working with your industry influencers, create and share a landing page or email subscription option to encourage pre-orders from potential customers.

Not only will you ensure that your product sells reasonably well, but upon launch day, there will likely be more social media discussions and user-generated content surrounding your shiny new item – or items.

 

Hold an experiential event

 

When it comes to officially launching your product, taking an omnichannel approach will prove most effective, which means holding an experiential event.

By hosting an official product launch event, you’ll be able to generate a physical buzz, inviting people to talk to you about your new offerings in person while giving them a chance to interact with your range of offerings in a tangible sense. Doing this will also give your online launch marketing efforts a boost.

Take Social Media Marketing World, for instance. To promote its brand as well as the new products, solutions, and services of its affiliates to the public, the conference invites social media marketers to attend from far and wide to interact with its insights and offerings.

As a social media marketing service, the brand focuses on the networking aspect of its events by building hyper-connected content centered on the event, hosting keynotes speeches, digital networking spaces, and tech-driven table talks.

As a result of this initiative, around 40,000 marketers attend this event each year.

You might not have the budget of Social Media Marketing World, but this is a shining example of how to bridge the gap between the physical and digital worlds with your product launch.

 

Encourage feedback & testimonials

 

Today’s consumers trust the opinions, reviews, and testimonials of their peers above anything else. When you get good reviews about your new product, you should reach out to your consumers to publicly thank them and ask them for any feedback they might have for you.

Display positive reviews proudly on your social pages and online store and gather any feedback from customers that will help you refine, develop, and evolve your efforts to make sure that your next product launch is even bigger – and even better.

What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the world.” – Simon Sinek

Launching a product is a challenging but undeniably rewarding feat.

Follow these steps, trust your instincts, believe in what you have to offer, and let your creativity run wild to make sure your product launch is a roaring success. And remember – always focus on the people and how your offering can help them; never the other way round.

We wish you the very best of luck.

To help you boost your product’s social media performance, explore our comprehensive guide to Instagram marketing success.