Launching a product or a new service takes a lot of hard work. Various departments in your company will have to come together to work as a team to ensure that launch day goes as smoothly as possible. Marketing will have all hands on deck trying to push the story of your product out into the general public so that it catches as many people’s eyes as possible. The product team will be busy trying to ensure that the product is completely faultless and ready to go. And that is just two examples – all your other departments will be busy with various jobs and tasks as well! You, as the business leader, will have to stay on top of all this and liaise with the various departments.
There’s a whole lot to organize ready for your product launch, and it is imperative that you are able to stay on top of everything. It’s a bit like spinning a lot of plates at once! If one of those plates were to drop, it could be bad news for your whole launch. Don’t worry, though; organizing a big launch doesn’t have to be quite as daunting as this sounds. Planning well in advance and staying as organized as possible is all it takes. This final product-launch checklist will ensure that you don’t forget anything before the big day!
Focus On Buyer Personas
Before you do any work on your big launch, you need to figure out who are the kinds of people who will buy your new product. Once you have an idea of the different kinds of people who might be interested in the product, you need to then create several different personas. These should be reflective of your target audience. Think of each persona as an individual and ask yourself questions that can help you get to know each persona as well as possible. What kind of challenges do they face in their life? How do they usually shop? What are their main goals? These questions will ultimately help you figure out the best way to market to your target audience.
Finalize Brand Identity
Before you start to create your marketing campaigns, though, you need to work on and finalize your brand identity. For instance, you need to have a good idea of what the new product will look like and the type of branding that is going to represent it. By doing this, you will be able to finalize any packaging design online so that you know your product is going to look good no matter where a potential customer sees it. Finalizing the brand identity also gives your marketing and design teams the chance to play around with different campaign ideas to see which marketing methods will fit in best with your product.
Manage Your Social Media Channels
(Image source: SlopeMedia.org) In the run up to launch day, you need to have all of your social media team ready to start filtering the news through about your upcoming new product. You will need to create a buzz around your new product so that people are interested about it and will go out and buy it once it is available. The best place to create a buzz these days is on social media. The majority of people now have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and they use these platforms to follow their favorite brands and companies. Once you have a large number of followers, all of the interaction between them and your brand will help push your company to a wider audience. And then, more and more people will start to learn about your new product. It’s important that your social media team are always trying to create shareable content so that there is a great chance of your posts going viral and creating a whole lot of excitement!
Work On Press Releases
It’s always good to try and get some press regarding any upcoming products. After all, whenever a newspaper or magazine writes an article about your company or your product, it’s like getting a free advertisement in their pages! The only way you are going to get any attention from the press is by sending out some press releases. The press release needs to outline your story and explain why it is worthy of column inches in the newspaper or magazine. So, you need to find a good angle for the story! There are loads of great guides to writing press releases online, but if you are struggling to get into a local newspaper, you might want to outsource this to a PR company.
Consider A Soft Launch
It’s always a good idea to test a product by carrying out a soft launch. This is when you launch the product, but only to a very small section of customers. After a couple of weeks, you then ask these customers for their feedback on the product and other aspects of the launch, such as the marketing campaign and price. This then gives you a chance to see what customers like and what they don’t, as well as which bits of the launch campaign work and which didn’t do so well. If you find that there are some things that need to be improved, you can then go back to the drawing board and try to iron them out before it’s time to go for the hard launch.
Set Big Goals
(Image source: Pixabay.) It’s important that you set ambitious goals for you and your company in the run up to the big launch of your new product. These goals should help you all stay on track. Plus, as you will have certain goals and targets to achieve, they should, hopefully, help all of your employees stay motivated as there is a clear objective for them to work toward. So, as you can see, a lot of hard work and determination can help you take your new product very far. Make sure you can check off everything on this checklist before launch day, and you know you are good to go!
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