4 Strategies for a Successful Product Launch

Pivot International  |   January 17, 2017

I’ve written on this blog before about why so many product launches fail. But today, let’s talk about the ones that succeed.

How do successful product launches differentiate themselves? How do companies prepare? What strategies do they use to ensure that there is, in fact, both a market for and an interest in their product?

There are many answers to these questions, but for now, let’s focus on 4 main strategies that can help you create a successful product launch.

1. Research your market AND create buyer personas.

Market research is vital, of course, but if you’re not focusing on your buyer personas as well, then you’re missing an important piece of the puzzle.

When you conduct your initial market research, with focus groups, surveys, or whatever methods you elect to use, you’ll get a good overview of whom your product appeals to and what they like about it.

After this point, however, it’s time to create buyer personas. These are highly specific outlines of individuals in your target market whom you’ll be appealing to.

If you have existing products for which you’ve already created personas, compare these new buyer personas with your old ones. This will help you understand more about how your products differ from each other, and consequently, how you may need to approach the marketing process differently.

2. Create and refine your messaging.

When you’re launching a new product on an unsuspecting public, it can be tempting to go into every detail of how your product works, what it does, and why people need it.

However, that is exactly what you don’t want to do.

When you’re launching a brand-new product, your goal is simply to grab people’s attention for a few seconds so you can hopefully hook them into wanting to learn more. Exhaustive lists of features are not the way to do this.

Instead, you want to create a succinct tagline and a few sentences of copy that answer these questions:

• What problem does your product solve?
• What is its value proposition?

Once you’ve got this messaging together, share it widely within your company so that everyone is on the same page. As you move further along in the pre-launch phase, you can refine and adjust the messaging as you receive input from colleagues, potential customers, and others.

3. Map the customer journey and create assets to help them move smoothly from one step to the next.

As you’re putting together your launch plan, one of the things you must consider is how customers are going to purchase your product. After all, that’s the goal of launching a new product: getting people to buy it.

In order to make sure that customers can make that purchase easily, you need to map the customer journey. That means looking at each step a customer will take in order to get to the purchase decision. Will they find your product on a website? See it in a retail store? What do they need to know before they buy? What obstacles to purchase are there?

Once you’ve mapped these steps, you can begin creating the assets that your customers will need to get them to purchase. That could include videos, print assets, website forms or pages, blog posts, and much more.

4. Listen to your customers early and often.

With any product, there will always be early adopters – and these customers are often some of the most vocal. Listen to them wherever they communicate, be that on social media, via your website, or through in-person comments at retail locations.

But listening isn’t enough. You’ve also got to adapt your product to their needs and desires based on what they say. If a feature isn’t turning out to be useful, then consider changing or scrapping it. If they want more options, look into what it would cost to offer them.

Successfully launching a product is never guaranteed, but there are steps you can take to make a successful launch more likely. If you lack the resources to launch the product yourself, or just need some help getting it off the ground, you can also partner with a product development firm that offers marketing and business development services.