Every product is unique and needs a great product launch. Not only does it require, but it has to have a great product launch.
A flawless product launch gives your product a myriad of chances of succeeding in the long term and building great relationships with its clients.
Because they say you only get one chance to perform best and make an everlasting impression. So, it’s time for your product to create a buzz in the market and let people decide how powerful your product is…
Launching a new product was neither an easy cakewalk nor it is. Be it a SaaS product, enterprise software, or custom-designed, it’s extremely critical to lock down a customer-centric and smart marketing plan. Also, create executive summary templates of the same to ensure you can build buzz, reach targets, and hit huge numbers.
Competition is fierce when it comes to product launches as we are living in the most influential entrepreneurial era.
You definitely need a win-win strategy to stay ahead in the competition.
Here we come up with a detailed product launch plan right here for you to make your marketing efforts fruitful.
Why Need A Product Launch?
A product launch plan is a full-fledged plan that involves customer-centric marketing strategies and procedures that can be used to develop communication channels for its targeted customers.
A full-fledged product launch plan helps you target your potential customers, evolves channels of information and ways to target them easily and fast. Your entire business completely depends on a solid and well-crafted marketing strategy and requires planning and timely execution at its launch stage.
Having a product launch plan helps you in:
- Estimate the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
- Listing the required number of resources.
- Understanding your customers and your competitors.
- Identifying your business and its products and services.
- Identifying the marketing approaches you will use.
Read also: 7 Inspiring Product Stories For Every Entrepreneur in 2021
Launching A New Product In 6 Simple Steps
Every product is unique and has different targeted customers of its own. There are no guaranteed methods that ensure success while launching a product. However, a well-crafted and full-fledged product launch plan will help eliminate failures and take your business one level up.
In this guide, we will discuss 6 easy steps to planning a successful product launch.
1. Start With An In-Depth Market Research
You will not be able to identify your target audience if you don’t conduct proper research. This will only boost the chances of your product launch failure. To eliminate this, you need to conduct in-depth market research. In such a case, you need to consider the following areas.
Identify Market Position
First of all, it’s important to understand how your customer views the competing brands in the market. The perceptual map is available to help you understand how your customer ranks your brand in terms of characteristics and also in comparison to your competitors.
Fragment Your Target Audience
One of the important product launch steps is fragmenting your target audience research. How successful your product launch depends on what impression you leave on the people.
Read also: MVP Development 101: Step-By-Step Guide To Build Minimum Viable Product
2. Identify Buyer Personas
Move one step ahead and identify buyer personas pertaining to each market segment you have identified.
How to Develop a Buyer Persona
Step 1: At first, search for your targeted customers. You can do this via making phone calls, email surveys, or in-person interviews as well.
Step 2: Make a quick check on important user details such as demographics, age, customer behaviors, characteristics, challenges, goals, etc.
Step 3: Create distinct user personas for each segment.
3. Build A Unique Value Proposition
After having a thorough knowledge about customer behavior, competitors, and the market, it’s time to combine them and create an effective value proposition.
Here how we create a Value Proposition?
Step 1: Identify what are your product offerings?
Step 2: Is your product different from others?
Step 3: What are the solutions your product or service will provide?
Step 4: Combine these three elements and create a unique value proposition.
4. Construct A Product Development Roadmap
From development to the launch of the product, it involves a combined effort of all team members. With the assistance of smart professionals and a streamlined process, it’s necessary to keep everyone on track.
The product roadmap provides you with a complete overview of all elements of the product development including its features, timeline, resources, etc.
How to create a product roadmap?
Step 1: Using a mind map you can break down complicated processes that you track in your roadmap into individual steps.
Step 2: Assign a timeframe and plot initiatives at a quarterly or monthly level.
5. Delegate Authority And Tasks To Teams
It’s important to ensure that everyone involved in the product development process has a well-defined goal. If your team members are unaware of the tasks assigned to them or the goal they are supposed to accomplish, your product roadmap is of no use.
It’s crucial to have a well-defined process and the right allotment of tasks to each individual. Hence, the individuals should be responsible for each task assigned to them.
6. Plan Your Product Launch
You might get myriad ideas while brainstorming with your team but you can’t go ahead with all of them. You have to pick only one to move forward. So, create a well-defined plan that matches your target audience’s demands and market.
Also, Preparing a product launch schedule helps you stay on track. You also need to set a launch date before creating the schedule. You can then create a timeline and plan everything accordingly that needs to be done for a successful product launch.
Quick Checklist To Product Launch
Once you decide to get started with your product launch, it’s important to keep the whole process holistic, clear, and systematic. Here is the quick checklist right here to help you get started with the product launch.
SetUp SMART Goals
Set up smart and customer-focused goals that should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Setting up smart goals helps you achieve one milestone after another and too without losing focus. Also, keeps you focussed all the time while gaining customer attention.
Make All Possible Changes Required
The main goal of any business enterprise is to launch a product in the market faster. Most of the startups have the privilege to change their product as many times as required. The entrepreneur needs to set up a flexible and innovative culture to be agile while product development.
Implement List Of Ideas
You will need a list of business hypotheses to track the dynamics of your product after launch. This will helps you a lot in taking the right decision. You can build a limited number of features after every iteration to keep the process simple and effective. Implementing the list of ideas will take your business one level up.
Keep Focus On High Sales
Businesses always need to focus on sales to stay ahead in the competition. At the early stages of development, an enterprise's name, brand, logo, or colors don’t mean much. Let your product spark in the market and make your customer’s first choice should be your priority. The profit is the only metric that shows the viability of your product in the market.
Always Be Customer-Centric
Make your product launch in such a way that your users not only love your product but are also mesmerized by it. To build a successful product you should always be customer-centric and work in collaboration with the users. If your customer paid you once, try to keep them motivated and encourage them to get their friends to sign up too. Also, provide referrals to the users.
5 Product Performance Metrics To Consider
Digital products require a real measurement tool to calculate success. However, these are the real identifiers of your success that shows how much your customers love what you offer to them:
App Traffic
When it comes to product performance, the most important metric to consider is the traffic of the app or the number of people who want to use your product.
Make use of free tools like SimilarWeb or Alexa to find out the traffic of your platform. You can also use Ahrefs. The best way to check mobile app usage is Google Play or Apple Store statistics.
Number Of Registered Users
The no. of registered users on your website or app showcases how many customers like your product. The main approach here is to identify your targeted customers and the navigation of visitors landed on your site. When your customer enters your site or app is the first step in the customer journey. This clearly depicts whether customers are interested in your product or not.
Number Of Active Users
Active users are the users who are currently active in your website or app. This is the only metric that shows the real level of interest of customers in your product. The users that are active on your website or app at times. Here comes the next challenge is to check out how to keep those customers engaged so that they can keep coming back.
User Engagement
This metric depicts the behavior pattern of your customers. First, identify what is the most important indicator for your solution. To do this you can use apps like Amplitude or Mixpanel: Check YouTube or Instagram. The key indicator for both apps is the amount of time spent on the platform. And for an Uber-like app, it would be the number of rides taken.
Moreover, if your business model doesn’t generate revenue – it is then considered useless.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) And Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
CAC is termed as the correlation between the amount of money invested and the number of customers. The lower the number, the faster you grow. For example, a Facebook Ad company costs 100 dollars, but you get only 5 new customers, which means CAC is 20 dollars.
On the other hand, the CLV parameter shows how much revenue a startup can expect from a particular customer throughout the time. The more customer buys, the higher that rate is. Both CLV and CAC show how much money the product generates.
In A Nutshell
By following this product launch marketing plan, you will definitely find your way to a successful product launch and seek the attention of your targeted customers. Ensure that you keep these key points in mind before you start your journey.
Here at Classic Informatics, we help entrepreneurs to create innovative digital products from an idea to launching. We have a team of skilled professionals that assist you at every stage of software development.
We help you launch a product the right way: in the right place, at the right price, and at the right time.