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How To Launch A Product: Our Top Five Marketing Tips

Do you have a new product ready to hit the market shortly? Planning a product launch can be a huge opportunity to grow your audience, maximise sales and grow customer loyalty. However, it’s not as easy as sharing a single post on launch day. A successful product launch requires careful planning and preparation over multiple platforms. 

With over 73% of consumers using multiple channels during their customer journey, it is important to be present wherever your consumers are frequenting. Most shoppers aren’t going through a single channel to make purchases anymore. Instead, they’re looking at various platforms, and even being subconsciously exposed to marketing materials before making their final purchasing decision. So, when launching a new product, it is crucial to implement your campaign across multiple channels to maximise reach, awareness, engagement and ultimately conversions. 

In this blog, we’ll show you exactly how to use multi-channel marketing to maximise the effectiveness of your product launch.

Organic Social Media

No matter what you’re selling, more and more consumers are discovering and researching new products via social media. So how do you launch your product on social media?

  • Pre-Launch Countdown

Rather than just simply surprising followers with your new product, “coming soon” posts are an excellent way to encourage engagement and conversation. To build excitement around your product launch, create a launch countdown and teaser campaign on your social media. When customers visit your page, they’ll see reminders about the upcoming release. 

  • Stories

Short-lived content like stories are just as important as those on your feed, so ensure that you include them in your pre and post-launch strategy. Whilst stories are time-sensitive, they provide a great way to show up on your followers’ feed if they miss your regular posts. 

  • Reels

If you’re looking to take your Instagram marketing game to the next level, it may be time to start experimenting with Instagram Reels. Use instagram reels to show your product in use, explain the benefits in an engaging format, share exclusive previews or even show behind-the-scenes footage of the creation process.

  • UGC + Campaign Hashtag

Encourage your community to share their photos of your new product using a dedicated hashtag for the campaign. Post user-generated content from your audience to create a strong brand community. 

  • Giveaways + Competitions

Giveaways and contests are proven ways to drive engagement, and a new product launch is a great reason to roll one out. Giveaways can increase your engagement rate and reactivate old customers who may not have connected with your brand recently. If you are running the giveaway prior to launch, you can consider posts that encourage your audience to tag people in the comments or share your post. If you create a competition after the launch date, you may consider using a contest for the best user-generated post using a specific competition hashtag.

Paid Social Media

Running social ads is worthwhile if you have a budget for your product launch. Paid social media can help amplify your organic content to produce a higher quantity of leads and drive conversions. It creates opportunities to reach a larger audience and target those with interests that align directly with your new product. 

Use data from your organic social media, previous advertisements to identify your target audience. By creating a lookalike audience with similar demographics, interests and buying behaviours, you can capitalise on this data to create more effective ads that resonate with your specific market. You can also utilise remarketing ads via Facebook and Instagram to retarget website visitors or former customers. This is an effective way to keep your brand top-of-mind and push sales with customers that may be sitting on the fence. 

All marketing is about driving results, whether that be brand awareness, lead generation, or conversions. However, it is important to understand why and how you get the results received. Use A/B testing to find out which ads drive the best results, and look at data from your previous campaigns to analyse what does and doesn’t work. 

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Bloggers + Influencers

Generate buzz and exposure about your new product launch by connecting with bloggers and influencers within your industry. When it comes to finding influencers to advocate for your brand, it is important to consider different influencer tiers (amount of followers) in your marketing strategy. A large influencer following isn’t always indicative of real reach, or overall ‘influence’ on their audience. 

If your goal is to raise brand awareness with a limited budget, consider partnering with several nano or micro influencers (those with under 100K followers). Micro and nano influencers are often more well-connected with their following, have higher engagement rates and are more trusted to make reliable recommendations. Whilst their following may be smaller, their followers respect them for their authenticity which often results in greater call-to-action ‘actions.’ 

Once you find a list of influencers who work within your business’ niche, connect with them via email or DM and send them your product to try and review. Not only will this boost your brand awareness, but it also instills trust in your audience. When connecting with influencers, it is important to communicate the specific details of the agreement, and whether it will be a contra-based partnership (exchanging your product for promotion) or a paid sponsorship. For example, in a contra-based partnership you might gift your product in exchange for 2-3 x IG stories, 1 x IG Grid Post and 1 x Google Review. Make sure the influencers post using your branded hashtag for the campaign and tag your social channels. 

Events

A new product launch event is a great opportunity to showcase your newest product to industry professionals, the media, influencers and your customers. If you have a store, throw a launch event in your store or hire out a venue space. 

The point of the event is to have fun, celebrate and generate excitement about your launch. 

The entertainment at your product launch should inform guests about your product, whilst creating a fun, unique and engaging experience. Consider hosting workshops, demonstrations, DIY activities or competitions as part of the entertainment for the party. By creating an experiential event, attendees are more likely to remember and love your new product, and stay loyal to your brand. 

Cover the event on your business’ social media and encourage your guests to do as well, using your branded hashtag for the campaign. When you successfully build social media hype for your product launch, you can keep this energy rolling after the launch event. Post your favourite photos from the event and repost pictures from your guests. 

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eDM

Before launching your product, generate some buzz around your product by sending one or two short teaser eDMs. In the first one, you can be more mysterious, telling your customers towatch their emails and that “something is coming soon.” In the following email, you can reveal more about your new product, and may like to include a launch countdown in the email to remind your customers of your launch date.

The launch announcement is one of the most important emails to nail. Make sure to keep it short and to the point with engaging imagery and a clear call to action to learn more and purchase the product. You may want to briefly mention key highlights or features of the product to entice your audience.

You may also like to reward your valued customers for signing up to your mailing list by offering VIP early-access to your new product or offer an exclusive discount code. Your email database is a great asset and marketing tool for your business.  By creating incentives for signing up, you are more likely to grow your database which will also assist your business in broadening the reach of your future marketing messages.

Post-launch, continue to promote your new product in additional emails with a clear call to action. Use reviews and customer photos to lengthen the life of your launch campaign and create a sense of community. Ensure that you monitor the results of your email marketing to determine how regularly to send eDMs. Try not to spam your mailing list with a large number of emails or repetitive content as your customers may become uninterested and unsubscribe.

Marketing Calendar

Now that you understand how to use different channels and strategies to launch a new product, how do you put it all together? This is when a clearly defined marketing calendar comes in handy. Align your marketing activities to create one seamless, integrated and consistent approach. You may also like to align your launch date or other marketing activities with public holidays or events that are relevant to your business. 

Check out our example below to see what your marketing calendar could look like.

marketing calendar

As you can see above, when the launch date for this business falls, it’s vital to overlap organic SMM, paid SMM and PR activities. However, how those campaigns individually role out depends on their independent channels. By having an overall marketing calendar, your whole team as well as your contractors can be in the know for what’s happening in the coming months, meaning everyone’s efforts will be aligned and steering towards the same goal.

If you’re looking to launch a new product this year but don’t know where to start with your marketing campaign, get in touch with our team today. At Milk Bottle Projects, we know exactly what it takes to create a strong multi-channel marketing plan to make your product launch an absolute success!