Were your muscles in knots during your first product launch? Did you have weeks of sleep to catch up on?
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If your first product launch was utter chaos, you’re not the only one.Â
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Building and launching a new product is an exciting and challenging process. But as business owners and marketers, you must think creatively to build processes and make decisions.
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For companies looking to launch a product, joining together the moving pieces, such as creating a pre-launch strategy, focusing on customer research, and creating achievable and realistic product launch goals is essential.
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That’s why companies turn to designing and creating a product launch plan. A product launch plan is a document that encompasses all activities required to ensure a successful product launch.
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In this article, we discuss nine steps for crafting a practical and successful product launch plan that helps build anticipation and market awareness for your product.
9 Steps for crafting a successful product launch
Use these steps for crafting a successful product launch:
Define your pre-launch strategy
You might have various plans and significant goals during your product launch. With a pre-launch strategy, it becomes a little easier to accomplish.
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When creating a product launch plan, companies focus on pre-launch strategy as it helps identify which channels are helpful and how you make the best use of each of these channels to create your strategy. Besides using content marketing to increase your website traffic, try creating lead magnets to build your email list.
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When you send a single email regarding your product launch, attach a snippet or provide a brief description of the digital selling downloads or products you plan to launch. If you plan to use email for your pre-launch strategy, focus on using these best tips for selling digital downloads.
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Using platforms like Flodesk focus on informing thousands of email subscribers, so it becomes easy to get traction immediately after launching your product.
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Another great pre-launch strategy is collaborating with influencers, as they would help you spread the word about your product. It is a sure way to raise trust in your new product.
Start with customer research
The product plan focuses on a specific goal: the seamless launch of your product. For launching your product, it’s essential to get feedback from potential customers.
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Asking for customer feedback might seem challenging but conducting customer research is essential for knowing what customers think about your product features.
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Interestingly, customer research helps you decode customer experience with past products and what customers want in a product. If your customers were unhappy with a previous product, customer research helps you know why customers were unhappy with your product.
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Conducting thorough research helps you create a customer profile and allows you to meet customers’ expectations. It lets you know what might trigger customers’ interest, organize the launch and streamline the development of other products based on customer feedback.
Understand the whys behind your product
Like every other strategy you incorporate, even your product launch has a defined budget and limited resources. Even with limited resources, try to maximize your product launch’s impact.
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Understanding the whys behind your product is essential as it helps you create messages that speak about your product’s value proposition. Knowing the reason and motivation behindÂ
creating a product helps you create a high-level message.
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Diving into the whys of your product helps you create product launch campaigns that resonate with your target customers and attract them toward your product. Also, selling products and convincing customers becomes much easier when you know what you plan to sell.
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Knowing your products is essential as customers sense when you know what you’re talking about. So, show your customers that you’re a brand that is passionate and motivated towards providing high-quality products.
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Ensuring success in a product launch directly relates to how well you know your product.
Create achievable and realistic product launch goals
After completing customer research and knowing the whys of your product, it’s time to focus on creating achievable and realistic goals to complete your product launch.
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It’s critical to analyze and understand which product strategy might or might not impact your overall goal.
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To create actionable goals, you might require analysis. Use product analytics to understand which product, sales, and marketing goals you plan to achieve.
As far as possible, focus on creating SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, actionable, result-oriented, and time-bound. Such goals are easy to accomplish and help you stay on track with your product launch.
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Creating realistic goals is one aspect of creating a product plan, aligning each goal with a key performance indicator is another. It helps you track how far you have successfully achieved your goal and what resources you might require to accomplish those goals.
Choose and organize a product roadmap template
Having a roadmap template helps you visualize your strategy and save time. From a list of product roadmap templates, choose one that suits your requirement. For instance, focus on using a swimlane or a timeline view.
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After deciding on the template to use, focus on adding brand identity. Including brand identity in external and internal company communication is essential.
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According to research, 91% of professionals believe and agree that it’s essential for marketing materials to match the company’s branding.
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Branding is even more important as your product launch involves customers and employees.
Ensure you choose an attractive template and use visual icons to make your product plan visually appealing.
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Typically, icons are a poignant valuable tool for sharing and organizing information. Apart from adding a visual look, these icons eliminate the need to add long paragraphs. This makes the product plan even more appealing to the viewer, helping launch your product.
Keep the roadmap template content brief
After deciding on the roadmap templates, it’s time to fill them with the required content. A roadmap is essential as it represents a strategic blueprint of plans and goals of a product launch.
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So, when creating a roadmap template, ensure it does not provide in-depth information on every step you intend to perform. It shouldn’t be a detailed to-do list.
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You have other tools such as project management and employee management software to track the project’s and employee’s progress. Your roadmap template is not for tracking this progress.
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Also, when filling the roadmap with content, ensure it’s free from industry-specific jargon, as many people who view your roadmap might be unaware of these terminologies.
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As different cross-functional teams actively drive a product launch, business jargon might create bottlenecks in the communication and interpretation process.
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Ensure your content is such that anyone who sees the product roadmap understands it with just one glance. They don’t have to look over the template again and again to understand your product launch plan.
Add milestone highlights
Adding as much detail as possible in your product launch roadmap might be intriguing, refrain from this excitement as it will not serve any purpose. If you want to hold the attention of your cross-functional team members, make your template brief.
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With the attention span of humans lesser than a goldfish, there is no point in providing a large chunk of information. Your team members are likely to overlook such large walls of text as their eyes and mind are used to skimming and reading social media feeds – short, crisp, and sweet!
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To add milestone highlights in your product launch roadmap, use bold, italics, and different colors, and break sections into different sub-headings.
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Try underlining key phrases to show employees which milestone matters and why they need to ensure the timely completion of each milestone.
Build a review process and the timeline for each milestone
As your product launch plan ultimately ties to the release date of your product, ensure you have a timeline for achieving each milestone working backward from the date of product launch.
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Depending upon your customer’s need, the timeframe is six months or 12 months. Typically, during the first month, your marketing team focuses on the early stage of planning and research.Â
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The next few months get dedicated to product branding. And finally, your teams decide on an appropriate pricing model.
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After creating the timeline, reviewing the process is essential to know about any deviations from the original timeline. This ensures that everyone in your company knows when to complete which product launch-related work.
Include metrics you would track after the launch
While creating a product launch metric, one aspect is the product launch roadmap, and the other is tracking your product launch’s success.
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Tracking metrics ensures your cross-functional team knows what your team is achieving and how well they are accomplishing it.
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It also motivates your team to work toward optimal outcomes, which results in a successful product launch.
Product launch plan: The first one is a tough nut to crack
The more you start thinking in advance about your product launch, the better. While no plan guarantees success, you might consider adjusting the launch accordingly.
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Having a clear product launch plan helps you in a successful product launch.
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It helps you gain valuable insights into your customers, your team, and your goals – all of which help in successfully launching a new product and attracting the attention of potential customers.
