Tips to Craft a Digital Marketing Strategy for a New Product Launch
Did you know that 95% of customer product launches fail every year?
One of the most common reasons for this failure is that those companies don’t use an appropriate marketing strategy, or they simply don’t have the necessary digital marketing knowledge for a new product.
If you want success (and who are we kidding, of course you do!), you’ll need to establish a solid digital marketing strategy for a new product launch.
Here, we’ll provide you with a few guidelines to help you plan and launch a new product with the proper digital marketing strategies and methods.
The Best Marketing Tactics Follow Strong Marketing Research
Whether you’re a big or small business, before ever launching a product, you must first consider what your product is actually worth to your target audiences. In other words, why should they buy your product?
Market research is one of the most effective ways to uncover the real demands of the marketplace, and find a strategy to meet the needs of your specific customers.
Before you even take the first steps towards product launch, you must have answers to vital questions like these:
- Is there a need in the market for the product I’m launching?
- Who are my competitors?
- Who is the target audience for this product?
- What is the best way to present the product to customers?
- What will be my Return on Investment?
Learn More How Expert Can Help You With This
Craft the Product Promotion Plan Pre Launch
Once you’ve discovered why customers should buy your product, it will lead you to plan how to showcase your product.
To start, you’ll need to determine what sort of strategies and marketing to employ. For example, inbound marketing and content marketing tend to be the most common types of marketing used by companies for product promotion.
Video marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing campaigns are also valuable resources for promoting your new product.
Find the Best Digital Marketing Strategy for a New Product Launch
Of course, if you want sales, planning the beginning phases and understanding how to promote your product won’t be enough. You’ll also need to consider the best digital strategy that will enhance the recognition and selling processes.
The best way to do this is to consider your long-term goals while you are planning your product promotion, pre- launch. That way you can have a better understanding of how your product will behave in the market, and how you can continue to meet your customers’ needs in the future.
Digital Marketing Strategies to Consider
There are all kinds of strategies and tactics to consider, and which you choose will depend greatly on your industry, your product, and your target audience. Some examples may include:
- Pay-Per-Click marketing.
- Influencer marketing.
- Content marketing, including blog posts.
- Search Engine Optimization.
Learn more about crafting the right digital marketing strategy for your business.
Use Asset Digital Communications’ SKATED Approach for Launching a Product Successfully
While finding the right digital marketing strategy and a pre-launch plan is crucial for a successful launch, there is another way you can tackle the challenges that a product launch throws at you.
The SKATED approach is our unique methodology that comprehensively brings together all of the moving parts that make a product launch successful.
From planning to outreach to conversion, the ADC’s SKATED approach makes sure that you are positioning your product in front of the right person at the right time while optimizing for conversion that gives better ROI.
Let’s look at the details.
Plan Your Strategy
Before undertaking a product launch, it makes sense to plan the strategy to roll it out.
Many variables can affect your product launch (seasonality, cultural events, etc.) and without a strategy that takes into account these variables, you can very easily lose your focus.
A well-planned strategy will help you anticipate and mitigate risks, prepare a response in case of any unforeseen events and take advantage of serendipitous opportunities that might come your way.
Know Your Competition
Launching a new product without a thorough understanding of the competitive landscape is like driving blind in a hailstorm.
There are always alternatives to your product in some form or the other. And it is your responsibility to be aware of how your product compares to the competition.
This will not only help you to identify the unique selling proposition of your product and further fine-tune your positioning but insights like this are also useful for the product development team!
A list of competitors with the knowledge of how they position their product and the marketing channels they use will help you bring out the uniqueness of your product even more.
Articulate Attainable Targets
Having goals and milestones that track the progress of your launch and keeps the team motivated is vital.
These can be goals in terms of market penetration, product awareness, positive reviews, or even negative feedback.
Goals can help you course-correct on the fly and build a solid foundation for other teams (such as marketing and sales) to work on. But make sure these goals are realistic, attainable, and measurable.
While there’s no harm in thinking big and being ambitious, being practical during goal-setting is important.
Translate Into Actionable, Accountable Steps
You’ve made your goals, now it’s time to create actionable steps to achieve them.
Be mindful of all the levers of digital marketing that can help you achieve your goals. This is the most important part of creating a digital marketing strategy for a new product launch.
Want to hit your product awareness goals? Is your website SEO-optimized to enable that?
Want to ensure sales conversions? Is your e-commerce website and email marketing optimized for abandoned carts?
Similarly, you would want to ensure that you’ve created all the product brochures, case studies, social media posts, paid ads with content that is on point.
Asking questions like this and more will ensure that you are thinking about the steps to achieve key milestones and goals.
A new product launch is a gargantuan task and without a step-by-step plan (or help from the right agency!), it can quickly spiral out of control.
Engage on Social
In a world where everyone is on social media, you cannot risk your brand not being there.
A new product launch social media plan needs to cover all of the major channels that your target audience frequently visits (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) and it needs to have a paid and unpaid campaign plan.
Besides that, it should lay out best practices for follower engagement, influencer outreach, and promoting user-generated content.
All of this should be in a calendar format that tracks progress basis certain metrics such as click-through rates, impressions, and conversions.
One approach is to categorize your content into themes, and then having a theme-based weekly social media plan that is optimized for conversion.
Drive Website Traffic
Driving traffic to your website from all the channels you’re running a campaign on should be one of your primary campaign success metrics when it comes to launching a new product.
And not just any traffic but high-quality traffic that has higher chances of conversion.
A well-designed website that is optimized for conversion will have dedicated product landing pages, clean UI, and intuitive site navigation.
The best product-specific websites put the amazing new product front and center and lean more towards minimalism than over-saturation of brand messages.
This helps in instantly directing the attention of the visitor to the new product and makes the conversion process frictionless.
Of course, all of this relies on the quality of traffic coming in and how well your marketing channels are optimized for conversion!
Find the Right Time to Announce Your New Product
Once you think you’re finally ready to launch your product it will be time to carefully consider the timing of your announcements and promotions.
Take a look at what your competition has done when they launched a new product or service. What have other businesses in similar industries done to get ready for a product launch? Nailing down the best time to release your product can help optimize both the launch itself, and the sales to follow.
If you’re not sure how or when to launch your new product, we can help! The team at Asset Digital Communications has the experience and know-how to help your next product launch be a success! Book your free consultation today!
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