How to Launch a Product to Market?
I’ve been asked this question multiple times, in different words, what marketing strategies work? Why do product launches fail? How to grab eyeballs? But before you ask all these questions, there is one most important question you need to ask yourself.
What do you expect from this Product launch? Do you want more sales? Get more leads? An increase in traffic, signups, good cosmetic metrics? Or do you want to increase awareness for your product? When you’ve decided on the goals, you can begin putting together a product launch strategy that delivers results.
The first and the foremost point is to Define your target audience. What is the age group, gender, location, interests of your target audience. What are the possible pain points of your audience? Why should they care about your product? Why should they even use that product? And the defining of target audience should be done mindfully, because that will shape up your product launch strategy. Use your past experience, conduct user surveys to understand the user need and mindset.
Once you know who your user is, establish your unique value proposition, What do you do that competitors don’t? Your value proposition is what will spark interest in consumers and influencers and drive conversions. The proposition should be such, that the users themselves fight for your product, like we see arguments happening all over for Apple and Samsung!
Your product might just be another version of a product that is already in market, but it is your duty to define that extra bit which differentiates it from the other brands. Fix the problem that your competitors were not able to fix and make your place in people’s hearts.
Now you need to find Influencers who will help you market your product. A well-defined target audience will make it easy to find them. Look for the bloggers, social media celebrities, and reporters that can help your product gain traction. Target them with good, valuable content and offers that benefit them as much as you. You can look for micro influencers as well, they have a good reach, and are in the budget of young startups.
Do not limit your reach only to platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, make an account on Tik Tok and start engaging your audience before the launch. You can find your users anywhere, and there are multiple platforms out there with extremely high reach, utilise all of them, as the customer acquisition cost will be lower as compared to the bigger platforms and your reach will be alot more targeted.
Once you’ve short listed your influencers, plan your content marketing — Product positioning. Play to your strengths. This means providing valuable content on the channels where your audience hangs out. It’s important to test and tweak different types of content and measure results. Depending on your audience, videos might be more beneficial than blog posts and social media might be more effective than media coverage.
Once you have all the above ready, you can go for a Soft Launch of your product, which means, launching it to a smaller set of audience, which will help you gain confidence in your product. A soft launch helps in fixing all the product gaps, and minute details which might have been missed during development.
After the soft launch, when you’re confident about your product and it’s flows, you can now hard launch your product with all the drumrolls and the strategy that you’d planned. Launch it to your whole target audience and enjoy the limelight!
And do not worry, if the first launch did not work for you! It is your own product and you can launch it as many times as you want with a new strategy and product positioning altogether. Nobody is prefect, but you reach perfection after multiple attempts.