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Successful Product Launch: Checklist, Plan, Examples & Tips

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Getting a product launched is not too difficult but it should be taken seriously. In case you cannot do it effectively and successfully, customers will not pay attention to your products and might leave a bad impression on yours. Hence, you may not achieve your profitability and revenue goals. Product launch planning is very important and you should get your product started planning in 4 - 6 months before launching so that the product is ready for being sold. Product launch plans aim at helping you sequencing events leading up to and even after a product launch date. Your purpose is making sure everyone inside, your targeted customers, and your partners know your products well.

In this article, you can learn more about how to do a successful product launch.

Let’s get into details.

What is a product launch?

A product launch is an effort of a business that was already planned and coordinated to get its new item first launched to the market and make it available for ready purchasing. A product launch can help serve many goals for a company, providing customers with an opportunity to purchase a new product. Besides, it aids this company builds anticipation for this new item, collecting feedback from the first users, generating industry recognition and momentum.

What should you prepare before launching your product?

Before launching a new product, every big company needs to prepare to establish strategies to help create curiosity around this product. You can have a closer look at some immediate pre-launch actions that can help you achieve your own sales goals.

Product launch checklist

1. Study your customers

No matter if you call it “customer development” or “market research,” it is important to know what exactly drives your own customers. What you have to do is to identify their motivations and goals, along with pain points that can head you to market and develop your valuable solutions. Actually, you do not have to show years of intense research in order to study your customers. You are strongly suggested to talk to 12 or 15 current prospective customers.

2. Prepare a positioning statement

The second thing you need to prepare is a positioning statement. You can write out a clear and concise statement that can help answer the three following questions:

  • Who is the item for?
  • What does the item do?
  • Why is there any differences from other products out there?

Should you want to study in details, you can make a statement answering those questions below:

  • What is your own target audience?
  • What kind of brand name do you give your service or product?
  • What segment of your target audience will have a higher rate to buy your product?
  • What proof do you need to prove your product is different?
  • How is it different from competitors in a similar category?

3. Raise your positioning to stakeholders

As you are developing your positioning statement, you should show it to stakeholders so that all of you can be on the same page.

In case the employees have a tough time purchasing the item, your customers might suffer also. If your team likes it, this can be a wonderful signal that the product can be launched well.

4. Prepare your marketing strategy

Why do you have to prepare your marketing strategy? Because this strategy will help you launch as well as promote your products. When some businesses like setting up a funnel strategy, others can love the flywheel approach.

No matter if you call it “customer development” or “market research” it is essential to know what exactly drives your customers. You have to identify their motivations and goals, along with pain points that can head you to market and develop your valuable solutions. You do not have to show years of intense research to study your customers. You are strongly suggested to talk to 12 or 15 current prospective customers.

5. Set up a goal for your product launch

Before starting on your strategy implementation, you also have to make sure you can write down your product launch goals. For instance, your product launch aims to successfully establish a product name, generate sales chances, and build awareness.

The most effective way to set up your launch goals is to write them like SMART goals that stand for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

6. Generate promotional content

Right after you plan your marketing strategy and your SMART writing goals, you can begin to produce content supporting and align with these promotional programs. This can contain blog posts relevant to your industry or product, landing pages, and demos and tutorials.

You also need help to decide which content you had better use for each phase of your own prospective customers’ buying journey.

7. Get your team prepared

You have to make sure that your brand and important stakeholders are willing to launch as well as start to market your product. It is better for you to communicate with the firm by internal presentation or email to keep your company knowing your product launch plans.

8. Get the product launched

When you finish the above-mentioned steps, you can easily launch your products.

9. Check to see how well you achieve your goals

Right after launching your products, you can track on how your marketing strategy is performing. You should prepare or adjust the aspects of your own plan if they are not going smooth.

Additionally, don’t forget about the goals you can set before launching. If your product launch does not net your expectations, you have to re-consider your marketing strategy and adjust from there.

Product Launch Tips

The HubSpot Product Marketing Manager owns three main tips for an effective product launch:

  • Your item positioning has to reflect a shift you are checking and how your items help your own customers can get benefits from this shift.

  • Generate a schedule for you and the key stakeholders for product launching to help check in and make sure all of you are on the same page.

  • Ensure that you can keep your product team on your marketing plans. This product team can provide insights to inform the marketing campaign.

Product launch plan

After getting the product launch check-list, here are five steps for a successful product plan. As you can see, lots of blogs will load with market research as well as product creation as an internal part of an effective product launch plan.

Step 1: Prepare a good team

If you already have a team that is ready to go with you, you have to guarantee that they are all good and understand the project quite clearly.

When it comes to project discussion, you can keep this structured and on the right points. Your team might ask some questions such as:

  • What issues do we have to cope with when launching a product?
  • Do people have any concerns they want to deal with?
  • What advantages can your customers have from the product?
  • What is a specific timeline for the whole team to get the product launched?

The questions-mentioned above enable you to deal with any failure. Although you can have a good vision for your product, someone might see obstacles clearly. Moreover, those questions like this can help your team be amped up. They will notice the tangible benefits that this item brings for your customers as well as begin to realize a simple idea will become a profitable reality.

Step 2: Generate a content for promotion

After finishing step 1, you will need to create a plan for immediate action. You also take note that your plan is dependent on your marketing strategy. There remain 4 kinds of marketing strategies which can work for your product launches. They are paid advertising funnel, organic content funnel, social media funnel, and email marketing funnel.

Step 3: Generate the content

No matter you choose which options you want to stick with, you will know what type of content you might want to create. Regarding contents, there are some kinds of content which are needed in the strategies that are mentioned below: popups, presell pages, sales pages, and order forms.

Take note that the content that happens on your presell pages can change relying on your item. However, the final decision for using one over the other will depend on you and your own team. If you want to check, you can use A/B split test your own strategy and allow the data to decide which one is best for you and your team.

Step 4: Get your launch prepared

An often overlooked yet crucial aspect of preparing for a successful product launch is ensuring that your inventory storage facilities are up to the task. This is particularly important if you are dealing with heavy or bulky items. Understanding how to determine the capacity of your cantilever racks could be vital in guaranteeing your storage can support your inventory needs. Once this is taken care of, you should check with your team to ensure that they are ready to proceed. Disclose any potential obstacles in your product launch plans and work together to resolve them. It’s also vital that every team member fully understands their role and when they need to act.

After that, you can have everything tested. You can go through each step of each funnel to make sure that it works well and smoothly. When you are content, you can ask to select groups of trusted friends or colleagues in your own network to do the same thing.

Step 5: Launch

After planning everything, it is time to push everything and launch. However, it also depends on your item. Although those funnels are automated AND, you also test everything and launching days should be stress-free.

5 product launch examples for your inspiration

In order to help you avoid the deafening silence for no one who notices your items, we want to show you 5 recent product launch examples to aid in inspiring your own launch marketing efforts with some tips on practical implementation:

1. Harry’s

The largest selling point of Harry’s is rather simple. They provide their customers with custom-made razor blades at a very reasonable price. It means their products are much cheaper than well-known alternatives. However, having cheaper prices does not mean having more customers to come. Customers need to be persuaded to buy your items. Harry’s did the same thing and convinced their customers by a trial offer on its sites and in social media ads to help get more traffic to the landing page. This simple strategy has been helping the company develop a big online retailing with around three million customers monthly and more to count.

What they can do is to try to create a trial order since it is known as one of the most effective ways to convince your customers. Then, they can joint the marketing funnels as a promise. Customers always want to try the products, which means in turn you can hear more feedback for your products from them. Making a trial offer is not so complicated so that customers can feedback with a simple message, along with calls-to-action.

2. Robinhood

Robinhood is known as a stock-trading service that allows customers to trade with some amount of commission with ease. It is also a good standard to build a waiting list. In the year of launching services, Robinhood already invented their potential customers to access to its own private beta to offer them the opportunity to become the initial stage to benefit from what their offer committed.

When it comes to opting in, users were located on the waiting list and were shown a “thank you” page to show their position on the list with the opportunity to gain priority by getting friends and family invited. The more people a person gets to joint, the sooner the access will be granted.

What you can do is to build up a waiting list.In fact, a waiting list that is driven by incentives to share can generate a potential development. You are allowed to build up a database of interesting unsers, build up hype for your own products, and enable you to feel interested in customers to collect feedback. Furthermore, let’s create your landing page of your products to make it easy for everyone to opt-in and you should not forget to add the factors below:

  • Clean and distraction-free landing page design
  • Simple sign-up
  • Strong benefit-focused headline
  • Powerful call-to-action

As people went into this, you had better keep them fond of your products and your brand by keeping sending to them some helpful information. For instance, in case you are launching software which can help customers with their own online shopping by seeking for the cheapest items, you can send weekly newsletters with useful advice on how to get money saved on shopping.

3. Nütrl Vodka Soda

When it came to Nütrl Vodka Soda, it faced a problem. Customers coped with believing the claim this drink loaded with carbonated water, natural lemon juice, and Nutrl Vodka. It was necessary for you to get people to buy what they sold. They made playful videos focusing on both men and women who love vodka soda cocktails. With such a target market, the company can run up to 30 seconds of ads breaking up with wine as well as beer during the sport games on social media via Facebook ads with retailers and on TV.

What you should do is to get video marketing embraced. You can check out those statistics:

  • 45 percent of people watch a video lasting one hour or more daily
  • Facebook can get 8 billion videos per day
  • 79 percent of customers who love to watch a video read a product.
  • 84 percent of customers will buy something after watching a video
  • Video marketers can get 66 percent qualified-leads monthly
  • Video marketers can get a 54 percent increase in the brand awareness.

Those figures will tell you many things. People love videos and use it to increase the sales and brand awareness. You can make short and snappy videos to get your key message and encourage sharing.

4. Unsplash

Like a way to say thanks to photographers who created photos to help its website to 50 million downloads, this Unsplash already launched a Kicstarter campaign for a booking having beautiful and inspiring photos, along with essays from creators. The aim of this campaign is to raise USD 75,000 but they could exceed this number by USD25,000. They were able to do the same thing by getting influencers involved. The work in this book included key people in our creative industry with their own influences.

What you need to do is to partner with influencers. As you are aware of the fact that, 70 percent of millennial customers are affected by recommendations from their peers. And due to the fact that there are 26 percent of desktop users with 15 percent of mobile users applying ad blockers to get transitional ads hidden and using influencers can become the most powerful way to reach your target audience. The reason is because influencers can develop trust and relationships with brand awareness improvement. You can easily seek for people in your own niche, then reach out. You are strongly suggested the tips below on Linkedln; however, they can be used on all social media platforms:

  • Start to like their posts and shares before inserting them to your own network
  • Send a meaningful message about their content
  • Let them know how you find them
  • Request them to join one of your groups on Linkedln
  • Explain on you just like a moment of their time.

As you find your influencers, let’s discuss more to cooperate with them. There remains some ways you can do this:

  • Sponsored content
  • Affiliate arrangement
  • Guest blog posts
  • Product reviews

5. Absolut Vodka

Absolut Vodka decided to launch a party which gets people to interact with a fictional doorman named “Sven” via Whatsapp. Through Whatsapp, this brand could enjoy three days of uninterrupted chat with more than 600 contacts with over 100 videos, images, and audio messages being created. A WhatsApp number was already given out on Absolut marketing as well as advertising materials with details on what you really want to do.

What you can do is to explore new channels for launching marketing. You can seek for where your customers are and reach them there. You can try to listen to your customers, research the market, as well as test new channels. You should take note that every channel you test will not all valuable; however, should you keep exploring and tweaking, you will find an untapped niche providing ROI. You should remember that marketers will use lots of marketing platforms until they are no longer beneficial; hence, you can stay ahead of the curve by reading some publications, including Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, and Search Engine Watch to get new channels identified.

Conclusion

We hope that our article on Successful Product Launch: How To Bring Your Product To Market? will help you better understand a product launch and prepare an effective product launch plan to help you market your product well. A product launch will be successful if you can plan it carefully and thoroughly. In case you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us for further discussion. If you find this article helpful, don’t forget to share this on your social media.


Sam Nguyen is the CEO and founder of Avada Commerce, an e-commerce solution provider headquartered in Singapore. He is an expert on the Shopify e-commerce platform for online stores and retail point-of-sale systems. Sam loves talking about e-commerce and he aims to help over a million online businesses grow and thrive.