Whether you are a new business owner or a pro in the industry, launching a new website, product or service could determine how much your business grows.
In that sense, launches can be exciting and thrilling but also a little daunting. That’s why to ensure you get the best out of them, you need a proper launch strategy.
As the name implies, a launch strategy helps you set the stage before, during and after launching a product. That way, you can improve the launch’s overall effectiveness and boost sales.
With that in mind, let’s go over why you should map out your launch and what each phase of a launching strategy entails.
Importance of Building a Launch Strategy
The First Stage: The Pre-Launch Strategy
The Second Stage: The Mid-Launch Strategy
The Third Stage: The Post-Launch Strategy
Final Thoughts: How To Build a Successful Launch Strategy
Importance of Building a Launch Strategy
There are several benefits to planning and building a launch strategy for your business. Here are some of them:
A Launch Strategy Creates Opportunities for Better Income
Whether you intend to launch a product, service, website or business, building a fail-proof launch strategy is necessary to increase your revenue.
By taking measures to build and publicize your launch, you’ll increase your brand awareness. As more of your target customers know about your launch, you will make more sales and profit.
It Establishes Brand Credibility
When your launching strategies spread awareness about your business, it shows people how valuable your offer is and that you’re genuine.
Even if a product or business like yours exists in the market, you still get to harness your target audience’s attention and show them why your brand is better.
It Puts You Ahead of the Competition
Even if it’s just for a brief period, you get to enjoy that “moment of fame.” From planning to the actual launch, every correct step gives you more publicity and patronage.
By creating a big uproar for a new product or even to mark the start of your business, you can generate maximum sales for your business and get ahead of your competitors.
It Increases Employee Motivation
Newness makes the job interesting. A new launch encompasses new goals, ideas, and processes for your marketing team. By building launch strategies, you’ll boost your team’s morale so they can produce a great product or other offers.
For instance, Apple believes its product managers have a way of turning new ideas into the best products, services and customer experiences.
Moreover, launches show that your company is dynamic and expanding.
Launching Strategies
- Create systems for lead generation
- Segment your audience
- Work on your content strategy
- Run a time-conscious launch
- Spread the word on social media and publications
- Use online community platforms like Product Hunt for promotions
- Collect feedback from your customers
- Follow up with leads that didn’t convert
These are eight launching strategies you can follow step-by-step. They cover everything, from ensuring your launch offers something your customer personas are interested in to promoting your new services or products and following up with leads.
Let’s now dive into what each has to offer and fully understand their roles during the pre-launch, mid-launch and post-launch stages.
The First Stage: The Pre-Launch Strategy
The pre-launch strategy refers to all the essential launching strategies you need to set in place before releasing a product. Pre-launching is a period dedicated to building up hype, awareness, and the audience’s interest in your new product.
While planning your pre-launch strategy, ensure that you:
1. Create Systems for Lead Generation
For the sake of building an effective business or product launch strategy, you should create ways to get leads. After all, you need leads to turn into customers.
You can create a landing page or content gated behind forms, such as guides and webinars to capture leads. You can also support your lead generation with pre-launch marketing.
Pre-launch marketing aims to build brand awareness and interest for your brand. Throughout the process, promote your business or product and tell your target audience to stay tuned. This way, you get more leads during your launch.
Lead generation is a crucial pre-launch strategy because your ideal customers are within your reach — in social media inboxes, phone numbers for calls or in your email list. However, you may want to consider focusing on list building since 62% of marketers find it more profitable.
2. Segment Your Audience
HubSpot discovered that segmentation improves the performance of email marketing metrics. You should find opportunities to enhance personalization by segmenting your audience.
Email segmentation is a differentiation technique that lets you address each lead based on their needs, preferences and stage in the customer journey.
In addition, your existing customer base has a different lifecycle stage than your leads. That means you won’t nurture them similarly. Hence, segmentation is paramount.
To easily segment your audience, you can:
- Install a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
- Create segments in your email marketing software based on opt-in forms and other smart rules.
1. Work on Your Content Strategy
A pre-launch content strategy lets you test different messages and marketing channels, thus empowering you to create conversion-focused content for your launch.
Moreover, by building a content strategy, you can use different marketing and social media trends to your advantage.
To build an effective content strategy, you should:
- Carry out keyword and market research
- Perform competitive analysis to discover content gaps
- Build a marketing plan
- Test your messages and ideal promotion channels
- Perform launch funnel optimization
The Second Stage: The Mid-Launch Strategy
This stage comprises all the launching strategies you’ll apply during your launch. You should ensure that you create a launch strategy that will help you:
2. Run a Time-Conscious Launch
Time consideration is an essential factor in your launch strategy. Being time-conscious about your launch plan ensures it’s effective.
You should carefully plan out your launch dates and avoid over-extending them to prevent your launch from becoming a bore. Preferably, wrap up your launch during weekdays to maximize sales since people rarely check their emails on weekends.
Also, do not rush things as many entrepreneurs launch their products too early to beat competitors or adhere to stringent timelines without proper planning.
3. Spread the Word on Social Media and Publications
Promote the new product or service on your social media pages, email marketing campaigns, paid ads, online publications and strategic areas on your website.
You should use conversion-driven copy to highlight your value proposition and how your offer (product, service or business) provides unique solutions to your audience’s pain points. To strengthen your marketing strategy, collaborate with influencers.
More importantly, track your lead generation channels’ traffic and conversion rate to discover the most profitable marketing sources.
1. Use Online Community Platforms Like Product Hunt for Promotions
It is one of the least common yet highly effective launching strategies. You can use community platforms like Product Hunt for more results-driven promotions.
Product Hunt is the go-to market to discover the best new products, services and startups in the market. It helps companies launch and find customers and stakeholders for their businesses.
You can collate a bank of honest reviews from genuine customers on Product Hunt. Reviews are a form of word of mouth marketing that encourages sales, customer trust and partnerships. There are other community platforms, such as Launching Next.
The Third Stage: Post-Launch Strategy
Your launching strategies don’t end with your launch. In this launch phase, you must take specific actions to maximize the launch’s results.
Here are the launching strategies to follow post-launch:
2. Collect Feedback From Your Customers
It would be a great disservice to your brand and your business if you did not seek to hear what your customers think about it after the launch.
Obtaining and catering to customer reviews is crucial to your overall launching strategy. That is because addressing feedback helps improve your product or business quality, customer satisfaction score and brand reputation.
In the process of building your launch strategy, create avenues for customers to give feedback. To do this, you can:
- Send a follow-up email asking for reviews
- Direct customers to an online survey form
- Include rating or review widgets on your website
- Point customers to third-party review platforms
Attend to both positive and negative reviews. By reviewing negative comments and making corrections, you’ll not only increase sales but also customer loyalty.
3. Follow Up With Leads That Didn’t Convert
The truth is, no matter how promising your launch is, some people may not purchase your product or service. Up to 50% of leads are qualified but not yet ready to buy.
That is why you should take proactive measures and follow up with leads who didn’t convert to customers after your launch process ends. You can follow up via email, social media posts and direct messages.
Final Thoughts: How To Build a Successful Launch Strategy
A successful launch strategy has three stages — pre-launch, mid-launch and post-launch. Failing to account for the strategies involved in each step could cost you a lot of sales.
With the list of launching strategies above, you can prepare for a successful launch and follow up with leads to boost conversions.
But remember, having a reliable business website is also essential for lead generation and a seamless user experience. Back up your launching strategies with Bluehost’s hosting packages today.
