Everything a Marketer Should Know About Product Launch

Every company believes its product or service is the life-changing answer for its customers. That’s exactly why it’s crucial to position the product according to this belief. To make sure the customers are going to have this big impression, marketers need to understand their responsibility to come up with a great plan to communicate the great solution the company had developed – that’s when the product launch plan comes in.

A Product Launch is when a company decides to release a brand new product in the market or an existing one with new updates included. It involves efforts from the entire company to accomplish this, but especially from the marketing team members. Those professionals are the ones with the appropriate skills to communicate to the market the product’s benefits and qualities.

In this article, you will learn the most valuable topics a marketing professional should know to plan a marketing strategy and make a big commotion out of the launch

To have successful product management, the first thing you should have in mind is knowing the pain-points, desires and wishes of the customers. Putting yourself in their shoes is an important step to understanding their expectations and defining the topics the marketing campaign needs to cover to be extremely appealing. With the appropriate tone of voice and approach, an empathetic connection between the product and the target audience will be created.

Go beyond the average demographic and geographic analysis and consolidate it with insights about their preferences, behaviors, inspirations, influences, and lifestyles. All this collected data will help you to build the product’s persona, resulting in a valuable set of information.

As a marketer, your main responsibility is to have a deep knowledge of the product you are positioning and messaging. In most companies, the product manager is the professional who has a wide understanding of the product persona and their needs.

Therefore, before starting to plan the product launch marketing plan, be sure to get to know who this figure is inside the company, become their best friend and pull as much information, data and details of the product as you can. Schedule a meeting with the product manager and be sure to secure the following takeaways:

• How the product fits into the target audience needs;
• How the current customers feel about other products;
• How the product stand out from the competitors;
• The unique features the product has;
• The main problems the product solves.

Moreover, it’s really important to test the product. To be sure you’re testing it in an unbiased way, forget everything you know about the product and try to extract valuable information from it. Identify which the powerful characteristics, problem-solving features and the key benefits you can apply to the campaign to attract the target audience’s awareness.

To double-check it, you can invite people from outside the company to test the product. Pay attention to the user experience and how people behave in front of your product. Analyze if they are struggling somehow, and which critical points you can simplify. All this effort will score on your product knowledge.

Your company may already have one or more buyer persona built, guiding the communication and marketing goals. However, when it comes to the product launch plan, it’s crucial to comprehend that this campaign must have a single buyer persona.

Start analyzing all validated personas to define which among them is a great fit with your new product and be certain to collect relevant information about their likely behavior with the product. Now it’s time to focus on the demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral aspects, to comprehend everything you can about the persona who will be impacted by your campaign.

Try to identify these people and talk to them to understand their pains and goals as this will support you when it’s time to define the proper strategies to reach those people.

This is one of the most critical steps of your product launch campaign. It’s the moment when you will determine where the best traffic and publicity the launch will follow and which kind of tone of voice you will apply. To choose the right channels, it’s important to identify the places the buyer persona is consuming content and how they behaved to search for it. 

Create content for the selected channels and proper messaging that fits your persona, and spread the word! There are plenty of options out there to communicate the product launch such as email, landing pages, blog posts, events, social media and other tools from digital marketing that can support the release.

Consider the example from Apple’s Watch Serie 4 campaign, the company used videos to communicate the release of its product update, take a look:

This ad employs different activities and occasions with people utilizing their product, with a joyful background song, stimulating good feelings. One of the reasons the company has such a strong brand awareness is that it has such a deep knowledge of its customers. When a true connection is established between brand and customer, chances are great that the relationship will be permanent and successful.

Your company may launch a product in a field where it isn’t an authority yet. If that is the case, it’s essential to build this image before releasing the product. Nobody will buy a solution from an unknown brand in the market. To start building this reference image, be sure to produce a bunch of different types of awareness content about the solution the company had developed. 

The brand can create content about basic concepts, benefits and the problems the audience has. Be careful to not talk about the product itself… now is the time to develop the specialist image in the market, and to provide the proper environment to beat the drums to release the product. It will also facilitate the sales process, bringing more quality potential customers with higher chances of acquiring the product.

All the aspects you’ve learned here should be registered on a friendly and easy to share document. This will be your guide to the launch of new products and everyone in the company can access it and help become ambassadors. If you are questioning how to create this document, we are here to support you!

Pipefy is the Lean management platform focused on leveraging control to anyone in their daily work, making a greater impact on the business. With our platform, people are able to centralize all steps from successful product launch in a single place.

Our Marketing Product Launch Campaign Template is focused on assisting in the scheduling and elaboration of a product’s marketing strategy before its release. The template will serve to better structure the launching process, making the process easier.