The long-awaited moment is here. After months of rigorous development, scads of iterations, and countless cups of coffee, you’ve finally created a product worthy of the market.
But the world beyond your office walls can be a fickle place, and a knockout product alone won’t be enough to sway it. You need a proper launch strategy to back it up — one that covers all the bases and leaves no stone unturned.
The good news is you’ve come to the right place. In this blog post, we’ll get down to the nitty-gritty of launch preparation and walk you through five critical steps to launching a successful product.
Keep reading if you’re serious about giving your product the best possible shot at success.
Step #1: Know the problem you’re solving:
You can have the most innovative product in the world, but if you don’t know what problem it solves for your customers, no one can save it from tanking. That’s why the first step of your launch prep should be nailing down the exact problem you’re hoping to solve for your end users.
This will become the essence of your value proposition and the driving force behind every piece of your product’s future pitch and launch narrative.
Unfortunately, this is often where many businesses falter. Instead of conveying their value proposition through powerful and impactful statements, many companies hide it behind trendy buzzwords or empty catchphrases. And that doesn’t do anyone any good.
Don’t let this happen to you. Creating a customer value proposition is one of the most critical steps to charting the course for a successful product launch, and it’s something that you should handle with care. To ensure clarity of objective, here are three methods you can employ to get the job done:
Value proposition canvas
Peter Thomson’s value proposition canvas uncovers the different facets of your product that will contribute to a strong value proposition. According to Thomson, following such a procedure can lead people towards attaining what he dubs “minimum viable clarity” and consequently culminating in a succinct statement of the proposed value.
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Harvard Business School’s Questions
Harvard Business School created a set of 3 questions to help hone in on the center of gravity of your value proposition:
- Who will be your customers?
- Which needs are you going to fulfill?
- Which relative price will give customers an acceptable level of value and profitability?
Now, you can work around this framework to create a unified, cohesive value proposition.
Steve Blank’s Formula
Steve Blank, a former Google employee who runs the Lean Startup Circle, concluded that many product teams struggle to move past features and into benefits when constructing a value proposition. To solve this issue, he proposed a simple formula to help distill insights into an actionable sentence:
We help (X) do (Y) by doing (Z).
Using this formula, you can create a value proposition that’s descriptive, specific, and easily digestible. All you need to do is fill in the blanks. For example, “We help busy entrepreneurs manage their finances by providing automated financial tracking and analysis.”
These three methods will set you on the right path to creating a value proposition illustrating how your new product can readily deliver tangible value to the customer, upgrading its status from a “nice to have” to a “must-have.”
To get your creative juices flowing and give you a sense of what an ideal value proposition should look like, take a look at Uber’s value proposition.
Uber’s value proposition, offering uber-convenience, is simple and powerful:
In the value proposition, Uber perfectly encapsulates everything people dread about hailing a traditional taxi while emphasizing what they do to make the process easier and more efficient.
Cultivitae’s signature coaching program’s value proposition is another excellent example:
Happily Hired Formula is a group signature coaching program, a coach’s unique approach to solving a problem. The program aims to meet the needs of job seekers who have a burning desire to land their dream job but are feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, and underqualified. And with their value proposition, Cultivitae’s team makes it abundantly clear how this coaching product can help people achieve their job search goals.
Step #2: Deeply understand your intended audience
Beginning a product launch without comprehending your target audience is like attempting to fly an aircraft without the right coordinates. You might make it, but the odds are surely against you. The needs and expectations of your target audience should be just as familiar to you as the features and benefits of your own product.
You might’ve made certain assumptions about who your target audience will be and why they’ll care. But as you get closer to launch day, those assumptions need to be pressure-tested against actual evidence from user feedback, online surveys, and behavioral data. By validating your hypotheses using actual data, you can bring clarity to your launch strategy and increase your chances of success. Not only should your assumptions be pressure-tested, but the performance of your product should also be rigorously checked. Adopting methodologies like performance testing ensures your product’s optimal functionality on launch day.
Many product launches have failed because the creators didn’t take the time to understand their intended audience. Take Palmtoms’s launch story, for example.
The product’s creator had set out to design an interactive music controller, but he failed to validate his ideas with any potential customers. As a result, Palmtoms didn’t have wide enough appeal, and it barely raised a third of its intended funding.
It’s easy to get caught up in the mechanics of launching a product, but never forget why you’re doing it in the first place. Learning about the people you’re selling to and understanding their pain points will steer you in the right direction and lead to a much smoother launch.
Step #3: Create a go-to-market strategy
A go-to-market strategy is a blueprint that guides how you’ll get your product into customers’ hands. It’s the culmination of all your research and planning compressed into one simple, actionable plan.
Planning your go-to-market strategy is essential because when you launch a product, you have one chance to get it right. If you miss the mark, recovering momentum and compensating for lost time, resources, and opportunities can be extremely difficult and expensive.
With a well-executed go-to-market strategy, you can create cohesion between all stakeholders, cover all your bases, and launch with confidence.
A few key ingredients that you should include in your go-to-market strategy would be:
- The pricing, packaging, and positioning of the product. How will you differentiate your product from the competition?
- The channels and tactics you’ll use to reach your target market. Will you utilize SEO, PPC, email marketing, or some combination of all three?
- The resources and personnel required to support the launch. Who will be responsible for executing the plan, and what resources will they need?
- A timeline for achieving each milestone. What needs to happen and when?
Chances are, if you’re in the process of launching a product, you’ve already done most of the work necessary to move forward with a go-to-market strategy. You just need to pull it all together and align it in a way that streamlines your launch process.
Step #4: Employ Digital Tools
Hitting the high notes of a product launch in today’s digital world goes beyond human resources and creativity. You also need the right tech stack to make it happen.
If you’ve ever manned a product launch before, you’ll know that the process involves a lot of moving parts and players. To bring order to this chaos, you need digital tools that can help manage resources, communicate and collaborate with stakeholders, store data, and measure progress. Here are some of the most valuable digital tools your virtual toolkit cannot be without:
Project Management Tool:
Manning the helm of a product launch necessitates that product teams have the capacity to zoom out to make sense of the bigger picture and then come back down to the micro-level to put in the work. But how can you do both if you’re stuck juggling tasks scattered across multiple platforms and documents? This is where best free project management software come in.
By bringing together all the moving parts of a product launch into one centralized space, project management tools give product teams an easy way to stay on top of project progress, assign tasks and ownership, track deadlines, measure metrics, generate reports—the works.
Of course, you don’t need to shell out thousands of dollars for a premium project management platform or learn a complicated tool. You can also set up the almighty Google Sheets for free and get the job done. All you’ll need is a suitable template, which you can easily find online. Then, you can customize the template to fit your product launch’s specific needs and get started.
Information Sharing and Collaboration Solutions:
Of course, the best product launches don’t just happen with a crack team of engineers and data scientists. It also involves a good deal of collaboration between different business verticals, stakeholders, and customers. And for that, you need a collaboration tool to serve as your digital communications headquarter. In this collaborative space, everyone from your team to customers can gather to brainstorm, hash out ideas, and make decisions.
The most effective collaboration tools foster quick and easy communication, enable teams to share documents and feedback, and give everyone access to the same knowledge. Platforms such as Confluence and Slack tick all these boxes and more, making them perfect for real-time collaboration and sharing knowledge.
By incorporating these digital tools into your product launch toolkit, you can ensure nothing slips through the cracks and give your team the infrastructure to stay organized and hit all its milestones.
Data Tracking and Analytics Software:
Deep within your product launch data lies all kinds of insights and clues about where things are going wrong. And with the help of data analytics, you can unearth these gems and use them to your advantage.
Data analytics tools give you the power to track key performance metrics, identify trouble spots, and isolate the root causes of any problems. As a result, you can make better decisions, reduce downtime and setbacks, and optimize your product launch process for maximum success.
From Google Analytics for tracking website data to Mixpanel for monitoring user behavior, you’ll find a vast ocean of data analytics tools out there. The key is to find the right one that fits your product launch needs and configure it to collect the correct data points for in-depth analysis.
#5: Hype up Your Product’s Launch
Once you’ve got the infrastructure and digital tools set up, it’s time to get people talking about your product. The best way to do this is to devise promotional campaigns that capture the attention of your target audience and get them excited about what’s coming. Some of the ways you can create buzz include:
Run attention-grabbing email campaigns:
For teams with relevant products and a large subscriber list, this task should be pretty straightforward. But if you don’t have that luxury, then you’ll need to put in some elbow grease to build an email list from scratch. Once you’ve done that, it’s just a matter of designing catchy emails with strong CTAs and a link to the product page.
Check out Willo’s launch urgency email campaign for some inspiration.
The email highlights all the essential details about the sale, such as the time, date, and the number of units available. It also provides a URL to the product landing page, adds a sense of exclusivity by limiting the sale to Pioneer customers only, and offers them a unique code. This is an excellent example of an effective email campaign that creates urgency, intrigue, and anticipation among potential customers.
Tease your product on social media:
Social media platforms are invaluable when it comes to spreading awareness of your product launch. You can use them to create stunning visuals and videos that capture the imagination of your target audience and get them excited about what’s to come. You can also partner up with influencers or notable figures in your industry to further amplify your message and create a buzz around the product.
Get the press involved:
Press releases are no longer just for big companies with deep pockets. In fact, with the right strategy, even small-sized startups and product innovators can use it to drum up hype and get only the benefits of press releases. Create an engaging press release that provides media outlets with all the essential details they need to craft compelling stories about your product launch. Reach out to editors, journalists, and top publications to get the word out and create waves of anticipation leading up to the launch date.
Give your Product a Smooth Takeoff
The road to a successful launch is fraught with peril; only the best-prepared products make it out alive. It takes thorough research, careful planning, and a lot of hard work to get it right.
The steps outlined here are just a starting point, but they should give you the clarity and confidence you need to move forward with your launch. Just remember to stay agile and be ready to pivot if the market demands it. After all, even the best plans can fall apart in a heartbeat.
