What is a Product Launch?

In an oversaturated market where strategizing your next move seems futile, making space for your product or service to fit in and outclass the competitors is daunting. The constant influx of advertisements and pre-launch marketing campaigns from rival brands hamper your efforts to make an impression on the audience.

As a startup or SME, earning a spot on the podium for your upcoming product or service starts with an impeccable product launch. A product launch sets the stage to introduce your new offering to the market and build sales momentum once it officially releases.

While most businesses direct their attention to setting up an exquisite launch event, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. A product launch is not just a one-time event rather, it’s a comprehensive strategy that lays out the groundwork before the launch and tracks success after it.

Are you aiming to make your mark in the hyper-competitive market? Here’s all you need to know to execute a successful product launch.

Introduction to Product Launch

A product launch is a company’s coordinated approach to introducing new or updated products to the market. More than just a one-time event, a product launch circles everything around product development, customer acquisition, and product optimization based on user feedback.

Well-planned launches ensure an upcoming product or service is workable and perfected according to the market standards ahead of the official deadline. The process involves several teams, including product development and marketing teams, sales team and customer support staff, and the event management department.

Each department must align on a unified approach and collaborate to maximize the success potential of the launch - build anticipation in the audience, promoting user adoption and brand growth. A well-performed product launch fulfills the following tasks:

• Inform and educate the target audience about a new product.
• Create a buzz and anticipation in the audience to boost early sales.
• Promote brand recognition in the market, and ensure customer loyalty.
• Register interested customers and accept pre-orders from early adopters.

What is Important When Launching a New Product?

Introducing your product in the hyper-competitive market, where startups are launching cutting-edge products every year, and large-scale corporations are leading the business with their compelling marketing strategies, is an enormous undertaking.

As a young enterprise, time is the most determining element in the success of your launch. Given the complexity of the process and the extent of the workforce involved, it is ideal for kickstarting your preparations 4 - 6 months ahead of the product launch date. Every launch strategy must follow through the following stages of product development:

Identifying Target Audience Needs

Everything about a product launch starts with audience research. Identify your target audience - people who are most suited to purchase your product. Use demographic segmentation to narrow down the audience groups so that you can direct your marketing efforts to the right people.

Once you figure out what your audience needs, it’s time to send personalized emails and ad copies to capture their attention. Present your product in a way that addresses their needs and compels them to place their order.

Pitch Your Positioning to the Stakeholders

Conceptualize whether your upcoming product provides the proper solution to the audience’s needs. When developing the concept for your product, define the problem at hand to determine how well its features address your customers’ concerns. Employ product validation methods before the launch stage to see if your concept is fit to tackle consumer requirements.

Once the company has defined its position regarding its new product, it should present the idea to everyone involved, setting a unified objective for the entire organization. If the concept receives approval from the management and marketing department, it means the product idea is credible enough to drive sales.

Ensuring Product Market Fit

Most companies provide samples and free trials to industry representatives in order to gather their opinions and feedback about the product. These professionals gauge the credibility of your concept and evaluate whether it conforms to the market standards.

Acquiring expert opinion before the official launch allows development teams to tweak and upgrade the product based on user feedback. Beta testing also assists marketers in finalizing their promotion strategies that generate a better response.

Preparing Product Launch Plan

To make a product launch-ready, you must perform the following steps:

• Conjoint analysis: Assess the value your potential customers are willing to place for the key features of your product or service. Competitive analysis helps marketers understand the USPs of a product that will drive purchase decisions.
• Product pricing: Figure out what customers are willing to pay in exchange for your product or service. Conduct in-depth market research to determine what your competitors charge for a similar service. Set an optimal price point that ensures a sizeable profit and market share.
• Advertising strategy: Create a buzz and anticipation in the audience that helps user acquisition and build sales momentum before the launch day. Tell your brand story that propels the audience to align with your cause.
• Communication channels: Determine the appropriate channels to connect with your customers and market your brand. These channels mainly include email and social media outlets.

Types of a Product Launch

Companies utilize different launch tactics to introduce their product depending on the product type and their prescribed budget. Launching SaaS products and other web-based software incorporate marketing techniques different from tangible product releases. Let’s understand the three types of launch events to determine the right one for your product:

Minimal Launch

Normally, perceived as the beta-testing phase, in which an upcoming product is released to the members of the target audience. It serves as an austere solution with its core features and functionality, allowing early adopters to provide feedback on its performance.

Sometimes, minimal product launch events are also organized to release smaller products, especially in case of incremental changes or upgrades.

Soft Launch

When products are released without prior marketing exercise to create anticipation in the audience, it is termed a soft launch. These products are often launched under special circumstances with a restriction on who can review the product. It also underlines the upcoming products that are sold to larger enterprises before the official launch.

Full-Scale Launch

Launch events are organized after months of planning and preparation in product development and marketing campaigns and are directed toward an already anticipated audience. They are available for the general public to purchase, aiming to make an impact with boosted sales.

4 Stages of a Product Launch Strategy

Every upcoming product undergoes a series of development and marketing steps, actions, and concerned professionals before it’s fit for launch. A comprehensive launch strategy is vital to stay on track for maximum traction and positive business growth. Learn the four stages of an ideal product launch scheme:

Preparation

Study the market dynamics, audience demographics, and consumer inclinations in your niche before finalizing the concept for your product. Analyze credible surveys and review statistics to ensure the need for the product you’re about to develop.

Discover the key stakeholders in the field and learn how they tackle the consumer’s needs, what their product offers, and their pricing structure to offer a better package. Capitalize on the unaddressed loopholes and gaps in the market and brainstorm to develop an effective solution.

Pre-launch

Once a comprehensive groundwork for product development is laid out, you must prepare the market and the audience for your upcoming release. Formulate a pre-launch campaign checklist, listing all effective marketing practices to build hype and generate leads before the final launch.

If executed properly, a pre-launch schedule helps raise brand awareness and build an email list of prospective clients and a pool of interested customers ready to purchase from you.

Leverage social media platforms, build PR kits for mainstream media, and create web resources to gain credibility in the eyes of your audience. Many startups use referral strategies to propagate the news of their arrival while the product is still in the development phase.

Launch

Regardless of the hype you generated during the pre-launch phase, the launch could be an absolute failure if your product is not impressive enough to back up the initial claims.

A product should not only befit the pre-launch excitement, it must also meet users’ expectations and ensure a better user experience after the launch. Customer satisfaction and positive client testimonials are the only things that will steer your business forward.

Post Launch

Even though the primary goal of a launch plan is to execute a successful product launch, the process doesn’t end there. If you want to establish brand credibility with your audience and lead the company towards successive growth, actively monitor your KPIs after the release.

Track how your existing customers interact with the product, educate them, and address their pain points (if any.) While your customer support staff interacts with clients, direct the sales teams to monitor the sales trend to see if the target is being met.

Get on board with the development staff in case the product requires any improvements or changes, according to the initial user feedback.

Tips for Building a Successful Product Launch Strategy

While there are plenty of successful launch campaign examples to look up to, every product comes with unique challenges. Considering high market saturation, imitating successful business strategies won’t guarantee success unless you infuse your creativity into the launch plan. Here are some effective tips for attracting more attention to your launch.

Create a Product Launch Checklist

Preparing for a product launch is an entire ecosystem involving developers, product marketing team, sales departments, and customer support staff. Every individual in your company must work in collaboration for a common interest - and a running checklist ensures everyone stays on the same page.

A properly curated checklist distributes project tasks to their relative departments and keeps the entire process in check with an overarching timeline. Checking completed tasks from the list keeps concerned teams on track, making sure nothing falls through the cracks as the launch day nears.

Though the content of a checklist varies from business to business, the following elements stay more or less the same:

• Defining the target audience
• Identifying competitors in the niche
• Creating a product launch timeline
• Determining the right marketing channels
• Setting key performance indicators for the post-launch phase

Improve Customer Satisfaction

What makes a product kickoff, even in an oversaturated marketplace, is its unique selling points - features that make it a better contender in the market against competitors. The key is to portray your upcoming product in a way that helps people understand how it can solve their problems.

A product launch plan should address the following questions to fetch in prospective clients:

• Is your upcoming product important for its prospective customers?
• What makes your product the best contender in the niche?
• What specific pain points does your product address?

Instead of filling out the answers, conduct market research and gather user feedback from industry representatives. Learn how they perceive your product and optimize it in case of any discrepancies.

Actively interact with your customers to have a better insight into their experience with your product. Ask them what features excite them the most and any possible pain points they might have faced while using the product. Tweak your product based on customer reviews to improve user satisfaction and ensure a higher customer retention rate.

Set Up Waiting List for Pre-Orders

One thing to help you acquire customer feedback and maximize user acquisition is a pre-launch waiting list. It allows interested people to register on your platform for a free trial experience or early access once the product launches.

Introduce a referral strategy, allowing people to have priority access to the product by referring it to their network. Being one of the most effective marketing strategies, word-of-mouth programs bring organic traffic. This will not only multiply registered users on the platform but also generate hype before the product reaches the launch stage.

Many companies accept pre-orders at discounted rates, enticing more users to get on board - people who are otherwise shy to invest in new products.

Launch Before the Set Deadline

Every day your product stays in the development phase is another day your competitors are advancing their market share. Instead of waiting for months and spending valuable resources on perfecting peripheral features, release your product as early as its core USP is developed and tested.

Launching the activated version of your core product to the market allows you to cater to the audience, ensure higher user acquisition, and gather their response.

Marketers can use customer response and their behavioral data to identify and address the shortcomings in the product management. These early adopters are more likely to advocate and promote your product online to their friends, ushering organic traffic to your platform.

Any delay in the product launch process can diminish the hype you built with the pre-launch marketing campaign. The disinterested audience is more inclined to turn to your competitors to address their needs, undermining your credibility.

Organize a Launch Event

With the nitty-gritty involved in perfecting a product right from the development phase, executing a successful launch event can be overwhelming. Most businesses plan their product launch with a theme that resonates with their niche to commemorate the event for their audience.

Before you set the theme for your event, keep your target audience in mind. Identify their needs and preferences to devise a launch strategy that suits them. If you aim to generate buzz and anticipation through social media, leverage influencer marketing. Collaborate with influencers that align with your niche and harbor a relevant audience.

Run simple hashtags related to the launch to encourage customers to interact with your brand and spread the word. As more people learn about your launch event through social media posts, they are likely to publish post-event follow-ups to keep the buzz alive even after the launch.

Remember to utilize media coverage for your marketing campaign to popularize your event in the masses. Besides, acquiring airtime on mainstream platforms portrays a sophisticated brand personality and develops credibility with the audience.

The Role of Product Launch Plan

In today’s world, launching a product-centric startup is much more challenging than introducing a new product to an already distinguished lineup. An inexperienced workforce and limited budgets make it difficult to formulate and execute an efficient launch plan.

Ideally, constructing a solid product launch plan starts while the product is in the development phase to achieve optimal results. The pre-launch stage allows marketers to set the stage before the big reveal and test different promotion strategies along the way.

With no constrictive layout to follow, perhaps the message you intended to portray at the beginning might transform into something different. However, carrying a flexible launch plan often causes businesses to drift from the original schedule, resulting in delayed launches.

A staggering 45% of product launches miss their supposed deadlines, mainly due to snags in the development process and reiteration during the beta testing. Decision makers are more likely to subvert their primary marketing approach mid-way to the product launch in the wake of internal and external dynamics.

Most business professionals suggest setting a flexible launch deadline for your upcoming product, providing sufficient time to follow through with any impediments. Secondly, to keep your arrival trending among the audience, focus your marketing campaigns toward a full-scale event instead of tying it down to a specific ‘launch day.’

How to Measure Product Launch Success

From young startups to large-scale corporations, every business is required to enumerate realistic and measurable goals for future product launches. The pre-defined goals enable companies to measure success with the prospect of the new product and their performance in relation to the competitors. Here are three ways effective ways of tracking the success of a product launch:

Measure User Engagement

Although well-instated marketing tactics drive traffic to your platform during the launch phase, they aren’t the right metrics to gauge a launch’s success. Once the media spotlight and hype fade away, it depends on customer-focused incentives to retain incoming traffic.

An effective way to improve user engagement on your platform is by measuring the coverage of products and identifying which features are used mainly by the customers. Determine their access rate and interaction period with different features.

As the marketing head, direct your product team to improve and fine-tune those highlighted features to ensure excellent user experience and higher engagement.

Gathering Feedback

Most key performance indicators for a product focus on measurable quantities as they are easier to interpret. However, soliciting customer feedback provides a deeper insight into customers’ experience with your product. Knowing their response, you can also analyze how well your email copies and social media ad posts were received by the audience.

A product marketing manager looks through customer interviews, testimonials, focus groups, and surveys to understand and evaluate their responses. Bigger corporations employ dedicated customer support departments to inquire about their experience with the new product and ask for feedback.

Which KPIs and Metrics are Important When Launching Products?

Pre-defined launch goals or otherwise known as key performance indicators KPIs translate a company’s description of success into readable figures. Calculating KPIs such as revenue, total sales, incoming traffic, and customer retention rate allow marketers to designate whether their product launch campaign has brought promising results.

In the business world, success is relative. Since every business or product differs, the metrics used to track success also vary. For instance, the revenue milestones set for an e-commerce store will differ from the objective of a SaaS product. Nevertheless, some KPIs are inherent to studying every product launch, enumerated as:

• Launch campaign metrics - An inherent part of any product marketing campaign, launch campaign metrics track lead generation from different promotional channels - emails, social media, and website landing pages. They track incoming traffic onto the website and identify channels that drove it.
• Product adoption rate - Part of the product launch focuses on identifying how a particular product resonates with the customers. Metrics employed to track user behavior with a product include user trials, the extent of usage, and the user retention rate on the platform.
• Market Impact metrics - Mesuring the market impact of a product enables businesses to assess their performance relative to their counterparts. These metrics include generated revenue, acquired market share, and customer acquisition rate against competitors.
• Consumer feedback - Qualitative feedback from internal audiences and customers facilitates businesses to develop and refine their products to meet industry standards and client preferences.

Conclusion

A product's success is aligned with the latest market trends and consumer expectations, marking excellent user experience and customer retention. When developing a launch strategy for your product, every department must be on the same page with a cohesive strategic vision to set appropriate milestones.

While the development teams fine-tune the product, have your own marketing team and customer support staffs outline the approach to amplify user acquisition. As a startup working toward your first product launch, the process can be overwhelming.

If you’re looking for a platform to automate your product launch plan from the pre-launch marketing phase to tracking success post-launch, Prefiney.com is a perfect choice.

FAQs

What is the definition of product launch?

The steps and strategies employed to introduce a new product to the market and attract potential customers. It demands a coordinated effort of product management team, marketing to set up a comprehensive launch strategy that guarantees success.

What factors should I consider before launching a product?

Before launching a product, conduct in-depth market research, including the target audience, competitors in the industry, and effective marketing channels to promote the upcoming launch. The launch process also demands an effective mechanism for handling customer inquiries, feedback, and complaints.

What are some tips for executing a successful product launch?

The key to a successful product launch is building hype around the product or service before its release through teasers, sneak peeks, and publishing other promotional materials.

Gather feedback from beta users about the product and make sure it’s market fit before the official introduction. Stay in touch with your customers, resolve their queries, and value their feedback to achieve customer satisfaction.