When it comes to managing a business, launching new products can be one of the most anxiety-inducing situations. The vast majority of consumer products that are brought to market each year fail to achieve notable success. Depending on the scale of your business, this can have a varied impact on your organization. For smaller companies, the organization’s success can hinge on the reception of a particular product or service, so the launch must be meticulously planned.
Knowing how to launch products successfully is essential for the survival of businesses, but developing launch strategies can be a tricky process. Here are some tips to help improve the odds of having a sensational product launch.
Focus on People Not Products
While selling a lifestyle rather than a product might sound like marketing jargon, it is one of the most effective ways to generate buzz around your new ideas. If you think of the most successful companies on the planet, they generally all follow the trend of focusing on the end-user rather than the product itself.
For example, consider Apple’s initial launch of the iPhone in 2007. Back then, one of the most successful salesmen in history, Steve Jobs, knew that most people didn’t care for the processing power or other specs of the device. As a result, when talking about the product, he focused on the elements that would alter people’s lives should they purchase the new iPhone. He sold the stylish nature of the phone and hammered home points about not needing to carry around a phone and MP3 player simultaneously. Ultimately, this contributed significantly to the product’s success, and you should try to emulate this with your launch – sell a lifestyle, not a product.
Develop a Product Management Framework
Product management frameworks cover all aspects of the launch process, from pre-launch planning to your launch-day strategy and post-launch analysis.
When honing your product management framework, it is a good idea to adopt an agile product development approach using services like Scrum or Kanban. These will allow you to develop your launch strategy and products iteratively.
Agile product development focuses on improving techniques and designs flexibly by setting small tasks and incorporating feedback into final designs before products are launched. This will allow you to release the best possible offering to consumers on launch day.
Overall, it is a great idea to incorporate an agile product development and launch strategy into your organization. This will give you the best chances of success by incorporating feedback into your final designs. Additionally, it can help ensure that all the cogs involved in product launch mesh together and work harmoniously and in unison when releasing a product. You can find more information about agile product management frameworks at Easy Agile.
Know Your Competition
A staggering number of new products go to market each year, and some of these will undoubtedly come from your competitors. Therefore, whenever you bring a new product to market, you have to ensure that it will stand out from the crowd in a saturated industry. To do this, careful research on your competitors is essential.
Try to get to know other companies in the industry. Consider their strengths and weaknesses and figure out how your product compares to theirs. Understanding the competition will allow you to measure where your business is lacking in comparison and help you to develop new strategies to close these gaps. Additionally, it will demonstrate where you might be ahead of the curve compared to competitors, which might open up an opportunity to sell your product more successfully.
You should make a list of the companies operating in the same niche as yours. Then see if they are currently selling a product similar to the one you plan on launching. If they do, consider the strengths and weaknesses of these products to develop a launch strategy that will demonstrate the value of your offering over theirs.
There is Beauty in Simplicity
When buyers are considering purchasing something, they appreciate straightforwardness and clarity. This is especially relevant when it comes to launching new products, as people will generally have little to no idea about the specifics of the offering.
As a result, you should create a clear and simple message when marketing your new product. This will allow consumers to understand the product better and enhances the odds that they will buy it. If you were to release convoluted and unclear marketing content to the general public, you might as well kiss goodbye to a successful launch.
When determining your marketing message, it can be helpful to develop a message map. This framework is widely used in marketing to help companies create compelling, concise, and relevant content for their target audience. Such maps range in complexity depending on the scope of a business or product but can be valuable for creating tailored content for different audience personas.
When putting together a simple message to sell your product, break your audience down into segments and set the overarching goals you wish to achieve regarding these personas. This will allow you to develop core marketing strategies and messages for each demographic and methods to disseminate this information in the most effective manner.
Collect Feedback Post-Launch
Your product launch journey isn’t over once you have released it to market. In fact, it is just beginning!
An essential part of any successful product launch strategy is adaptation and improvement. Therefore, you should assess what aspects of your tactics worked well and which could be improved. An excellent way to do this is to collect feedback from customers after your product has been launched.
Conducting customer surveys can help you tailor your marketing strategies and messaging to your target audience in the future. Overall, it is vital to building your launch strategy each time you release a new product, and the best way of doing this is to take a critical look at the prior process.
In Summary
Overall, launching a product is a complex and nuanced endeavor. However, by following the steps outlined above, you can maximize your odds of success both now and in the future.
