What is a Product Launch?

A product launch is like an endgame, where all the conceptualization, research, and technological advancements are brought on a single platform that is full of audience. It is a collective effort of a team or an organization that brings out a new product in the market. This launch will be responsible for making or breaking the years of hard work for new product development. One thing that assists the product launches is that the presentations 

are efficient and precise in every aspect. Though product launch presentations are now optimized in several dimensions simultaneously, still there is always room left for innovation.

The clear objective of a product launch is to make people aware of the offerings while creating a buzz around them. There are a lot of human resources involved, along with years of research and product development efforts.

When we talk about product launch, these are some types that we will encounter:

Soft Launch

This is often referred to as the silent launch, carried out without any promotion and handed over to the business partners. Mostly, when companies go for a new variant of an already existing product, the soft launch is favourable as they understand that consumers are not willing to know much about it. In some cases, when companies replace the existing products due to some issues or customer feedback, then also a soft launch is carried out.

Minimal launch

When you take a step ahead of a soft launch, there comes a time of minimal launches. Here, brands tend to go for minimal promotions, usually at the levels of B2B only, and they let their channel partners decide for the customers. When the budget is low and companies are unwilling to create a show around that particular product, the minimal launch is preferred.

Full-Scale launch

It initiates the commercial offering of a product for an entire national market or the whole of the targeted market geography, as opposed to beta launches. Brands go with all guns blazing in events like these and put in efforts to get most of the eyes rolling. These launches require more capital, planning and human resources than any other type of launches.

Planning your  Product Launch

It is important to start thinking about the launch while you’re still finalizing the product itself. It’s a bit of a chicken-or-egg conundrum. Shouldn’t you wait until you’re sure you have a product to launch before you start investing time on a launch plan? Yes or no. There will come a point when you’re in the product development process where you’ll know it’s moving forward. At this point, you should have a solid sense of timing as well (i.e., when it will be ready to market). This is the correct time to seriously start developing your launch plan, including the items outlined below.

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Determine your budget

You would have undoubtedly poured a lot of money into research and development, but now you need to have a number in mind for your product launch. Be realistic, but make sure you have a number within which you should work.

Determine who will be on your launch team. It helps to have at least a couple of other marketing and social media savvy people to help. Identify your team and start to include them in all strategy discussions.

Presentations

The launch of your product is a really BIG thing. You must rigorously follow everything that goes into successfully launching a new product- data into the market like gathering and analysis, market strategy, implementation, and more. But before unveiling the product and its offerings in the market, there is a need for briefing all critical stakeholders and business teams with the launch strategies and bring them all on one page.

To achieve this, both your in-house presentation and your public presentation should be strong 

and successful. Unfortunately, many do not take this seriously and end up designing slides which are boring-to-death, full of bullet points, and unprofessional designs. The better the presentation while launching the product, the better your product will appear to your target audience. An ideal presentation showcases the product features and specifications, perfect customer profile, and more, in style and excellent clarity, to leave an everlasting impression.

Here we have shared that what all slides a perfect presentation should definitely have:

All three launch stages, i.e., Pre-Launch, Launch, and Post Launch, are cardinal while planning a new product launch. Demonstrate different stages of the presentation with icons and graphics that are suitable and innovative to fuel your audience’s excitement rather than using an arrow with circles that you picked from SmartArt.

Develop a Website Strategy

If this is a new product for a new business, obviously, you need a website. Creating a brand-spanking new site is straightforward: you want great responsive design, easy navigation, clear messages, and an obvious way for people to buy your product (either online, in-store, or both). During the initial launch, and probably for several months afterwards, you’re going to want to have you’ll need some sort of call-out on your home page about the new product. This should then lead to a section on your site where people can learn more about: product details, the “story” behind the product, how to buy it, customer reviews, and more till date. The is section should be clear, clean, and easy to navigate, and it should allow visitors an easy way to return to the home page.

Develop a Buzz Strategy

Creating a buzz will go beyond simple PR, press releases, and media lists. These things still matter, and they will be part of your overall buzz plan, but you should also think beyond these.

How to alert current customers about the new product? Think of all the means at your disposal with which you can contact them:

How will you attract new prospects? Find out about where your core audience “hangs out” and sees the information about your product. Find out about their interest area by keeping an eye on their online activities.

How will you engage with the media? Will you simply send a press release over the wire using PR services? Can your product land a feature in a local daily or weekly paper? Does the product have a larger story that could land some TV coverage?

Develop a Social Media Strategy

These days, marketers and PR companies are relying on social media as one of the essential media to endorse their products. The growing popularity of social media makes it perfect for new products to make an entry.

Here are a few ways through which you can launch a product via social media:

• Spend time on research and get to know your industry before you market  your product.
• An excellent way to get the user’s excited is to launch a teaser campaign.
• Build excitement by blogging about your product as well.
• Come up with a catchy hashtag that will help your product stand apart from the others and curate conversations about it.
• Each tweet and Facebook post must strike a chord for motivating people to share it and stay interested.
• Create videos for a bigger impact than written content.
• Do not reveal too much information before the launch.
• Conducting contests are the best way to create buzz before the product launch.
• The tone of your social media marketing copy must be clear so that people know what the new product is. Use simple small descriptions, landing page links, and friendly reminders.

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Going with the launch

Try to map out a pre-launch, launch, and post-launch plan. During your pre-launch phase, you’ll get the web pages finalized which will go live during the launch. During the pre-launch phase, you will be creating your social media strategy — crafting tweets and Facebook status updates that you schedule for the launch day (and days that follow) itself. For the launch, you should be ready with a blueprint of all the activities. This document will be your team’s roadmap with information on what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and who is responsible for what. Post-launch is the time to evaluate how things went and to make adjustments based on information/reaction from customers and prospects.

Choose the Right Venue or Space

Finding the perfect space or venue for the product launch is another very important thing in a product launch plan. The venue of the product launch should match the theme of the launch party and the brand’s personality. The proper venue for your launch party will elevate the overall feel of your event. The event venue should not outshine your product. Branding of the event becomes easier with venues with empty walls and spacious rooms. The venue should also be centrally located and easy to access. This will earn you a higher guest attendance as they will not have to travel far to attend your event. The venue should also be big enough to accommodate your guests comfortably and small enough so that each room appears complete. Remember to ask for the maximum capacity of each venue when comparing potential locations for your event. 

Instore Experience

There is an undeniable fusion between design and sales. A sales strategy needs to be fresh and creative, just as a design strategy. How can you achieve it?

You need to respect the retailers and not waste their time if you want them to be responsive. You can get in their stores, try to study their corporate strategy, and then identify appropriate personnel. All main accounts whose white space and process fit your products should be listed down. The essential question to ask and answer should be “What’s in there for the retailer?”.

Who doesn’t want their invention to be associated with the biggest names in the market? But make your efforts go beyond traditional retailers. Identify speciality 

catalogues or websites that cater to the audience most interested in your product. While you are continuously “selling” to create demand, also approach distributors to use their networks. It is important to keep in mind that retail is constantly changing.

You need to partner with an expert who knows the ins and outs in the case of eCommerce platforms like Amazon. This will help understand how to craft product pages and also not get lost in the sea of sellers. It will also guide you in using Amazon advertising and other techniques to garner visibility and thus drive sales.

However, be flexible with your strategy, so getting a no means changing your tactics until you get a yes!

Public Relations

Every product has a story to tell. You can use public relations (PR) to tell the story and spur sales. In PR, instead of telling the world how great your new product is, a third party is validating and championing it for you, providing the objectivity that lacks in advertising. You can reach out to influencers having a much bigger audience than you. Millions 

around the globe will know your product by just a word from them. See what your target audience is consuming as different types of media appeal to different demographics like television, radio, newspapers, magazines, blogs. The PR will tap into news stories, current trends such as gift guides. Each media hit allows you to follow up with a potential buyer and keep sharing the excitement and validation of new successes.

Trade Shows

you can introduce your products to many buyers at once with the help of trade shows. But waiting for buyers and media to come to you by setting up a table and sign won’t

cut it. Even before the show starts, try to seek out face-to-face meetings actively. Give the same attention to your booth as to your ad. As we all know, first impressions always count!

Implement the plan

Seems obvious, but it’s worth stating. Once you’ve done the leg work, the research, and have created a plan, it’s time to execute it. This is an exciting time, and it should be more fun than stressful if you plan it right. Get ready to rock your project launch and enjoy the journey.

Why is it Important to keep launching?

Staying Close to Customers

Launching new ventures successfully leads to engagement with new customers actively. You can’t launch new ventures properly without talking to customers, with any possibility of success. Talking to customers is a big thing that companies mostly fail to do. These new ventures bring you closer to customers, increasing your level of empathy for them, giving you a chance to improve customer satisfaction levels and learn all kinds of things.

Identifying New Markets

In the process of experimenting and launching new ventures, you will identify new markets to tap into the ones which previously you hadn’t thought of to access successfully. You may even get an opportunity to discover new markets for your core business.

Experimenting with The Ideas

Every company has some novel ideas that seem groundbreaking to them. If these ideas go unattended, the brand will be left with outdated products that cannot solve the customer’s problems. Coming up with new products now and then opens numerous doors for the organization to build a following and a brand, which will carry a long-term identity.

Employee Engagement

Engaging your entrepreneurial employees in the process of instigating and launching new ventures will keep them more engaged and happier at work. And that will filter into the remaining organization as well. Employees love events, and when something grand happens, they like to stick for most of the part.

Stakeholders of a Product Launch

Including stakeholders in your product planning process is a vital part of product management.  To get buy-in from your stakeholders, they need to be involved early and often. It is important to inform your stakeholders that you have shared goals, and if these goals are successful, they will be as well.

There are two fundamental reasons to include stakeholders in the product planning process. The first is that they probably have some good ideas based on their experiences. They will bring a lot of wisdom from the previous places of business. And secondly, if you will not, they will make your life miserable in many ways.

The stakeholders will offer insights and suggestions and are force multipliers when gathering market feedback and competitive intelligence. 

Stakeholders can also complicate matters if they’re not on board with the planning. You can avoid unpleasant vetoes by incorporating their input earlier in the overall product planning process. Suppose you will understand what matters to each stakeholder and give it proper consideration early. In that case, this will ensure that you’ve at least accounted for their concerns, even though you might be ultimately planning to go in another direction.

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Why do Brands Launch New Products?

Getting More Revenues

You cannot bid on a single horse and expect a fortune!

Think about Google as an example. Let say magically, if Google Search dies, and YouTube still makes a ton of money. It’s much easier to develop another product and have a successful launch when you already have successful products. Even if the products are not related, it will still be easier. If we see Google Maps and YouTube. Other than a shared account, they don’t really have anything in common. But since you already have many users on one, you can easily cross-promote users to another. Also, if you offer services through one account, users are more likely to use your other services if they like any of your services.

Shareholder’s Trust

The more stakeholders are engaged and involved; the lesser will be the risk on the project. Stakeholders may bring up issues or concerns when discussing initial requirements, project needs, and constraints. Thus, involving knowledgeable stakeholders during this process will help immensely.

Competing with the Market

The market is always volatile as new products/services are always on the way. This offers opportunities and forces the companies to develop new products; otherwise, the chunk of the userbase will migrate to a new/innovative product. When companies launch new products, they create an opportunity for new positioning and promotion and reason to their loyal customers to feel proud of their choice.

How to Perfect a Product Launch Presentation?

A project manager has certain obligations before a product launch as it holds significant importance for the association and yourself. As the project manager supervises, so he/she is aware of each and every progression about the new item and also follows it entirely. For example, market methodology, research and analysis, and execution.

Efficient Briefing

Being a product manager, brief your partners and associates about your product and its unique features before the launch. This will give them a fair idea of how they can form their marketing plan. Nothing can beat a well-designed presentation. A cautiously curated presentation having all the insights in detail about the new product assists the crowd in understanding the data without any problem.

Cite the Important Details

The significant part of your product launch is the product overview. For example, the motivation behind launching a new product, the worth the item will add to the organization, and the intended consumer group of this new product.

Use colours and pictures and try not to make a plain presentation slide. Using visual metaphors, images, and catchy titles that match your brand helps attract the audience’s attention. Try defining your product’s features in an organized manner, thus comparing it with your competitors on the other half of the screen. Unorganized content looks really unprofessional and amateur as it’s difficult to appreciate anything from disorder in the designed content. Always use pictures so that your target audience can connect with your presentation. 

Make use of Simplicity

It’s really essential to keep your team informed about the product launch, and for that, you should streamline the data. Distinctive colours with sloppy content will consistently neglect to grab attention. Tasks mentioned according to the order of completion will reduce the confusion among the teammates. You make use of charts, pictures, colours, and focus on designing the presentation in linear form.

Always Prefer a Simple Format

Avoid using pointless and excess animation in the message as it doesn’t convey your message correctly and deviates the audience’s attention towards the animation instead of text. The use of hefty animations between two slides again looks very amateur and whimsical. Try choosing a simple format with an attractive colour palette to grab the attention of the crowd instantly. Try not to use the colour palette making the whole introduction jarring, use the colour/text style mixes carefully making the message readable.

Do not Overstuff the Content

An unprofessional practice that fails to grab the attention is cramming the slides with content. Slides with short messaging, captivating animations, and illustrations with clear font styles will consistently be more potent than a slide having overstuffed content. Conceptualize these things carefully before you start creating the slides and streamline the content to convey the 

message with simplicity.

Major Mistakes

Nothing will make a more significant loss to your hard work than inconsistency across slides. Here are a few things that you should definitely try to follow:

• Make sure your main headings are in exactly the same place on every slide.
• Ensure the margins are the same so that body copy is always a set distance from the edges or from the headings themselves.
• Circles should be circles, not ovals.
• Colours should be consistent; for example, always have headings in one colour throughout.
• If you use a 1pt grey line for a table with a bold font, then use the same rule for graphs.

This can be one of the most time-consuming phases while designing a deck, as you will have to check and double-check. 

But the efforts are worth as the end result is a presentation that is uniform and robust. 

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You can’t underestimate what your presentation says about the product, especially as a first impression. Here are some more mistakes that you can avoid:

Overdoing Animations

Animations make your presentation more engaging. Shapes or text boxes appear on the slides slowly and gradually, images just pop up from nowhere, and the slides’ transitions interestingly keep taking place. But it would be best if you did not overdo it. Having too many moves on the presentation might be annoying for your audience, or they will become more enthusiastic about the effects rather than the message you want to convey. In both the cases, you are moving away from your goal.

Wrong Choice of Font or Color

The idea behind giving any presentation is to ensure that the message or information is communicated correctly to your audience. The font used in the slides should not be very small or very large. If it is too small, the audience would not be able to read it properly, and if it is too big, it will cover the whole slide (Around 10 to 12 font size is recommended). The colour of the text should also be chosen so that it is visible from a far distance as well. The text colour should be in contrast to the background, or else it will merge with it. Experts suggest stick to Sans-Serif-type dark font with neutral/light-colored backgrounds. 

Not Scripting Your Presentation

All good presentations should start with a tight script. There are some methods to this madness when writing out a professional presentation. It’s somewhere between an outline and a complete document that helps you lay out the foundation before providing supporting materials and finally transitioning into the conclusion.

Don’t make the mistake of not writing out your presentation at first before you start designing. There’s a reason why CEOs sound so polished, giving keynotes so that the presidents could craft their speeches.

Announcing a Launch Date Too Early

You’re excited about launching the product but don’t let your excitement compel you to make rash decisions. When you’re very excited for your new product, you might make the mistake of announcing the launch date way ahead of its time. You might experience some issues along the way, and you might end up delaying the launch. This might turn out to be really disappointing for your customers because you made a promise to them that you can’t keep. This means they will not accept your newly launched product as expected, even after its launch.

You build up hype over your new product over some time and if you fail to deliver close to a stated date, you make it more challenging to maintain that hype. This is an easily avoidable mistake. Just simply, don’t announce your launch date too early. While setting up a launch date, try to take an extra margin of few days for any unforeseen situations. Make a realistic deadline and try to announce the expected launch date only when you feel confident that you’ll be able to meet that deadline. It would be safe to start considering a launch date when you are just a couple of months away from the deadline you’ve set, and you notice that everything is going according to your set launch plan.

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Post Launch Activities

Your product has launched. You yourself monitor your online advertising efforts, promote your product’s solutions on your blog continuously, in your database, through your social media channels, etc. You’re also monitoring your sales numbers. But this work doesn’t stop there.

Over the coming next few months, you might want to track KPIs to make sure your product launch delivers the kind of results you projected. You might need to optimize your marketing and promotional programs or introduce new programs depending on your findings to bring extra life to your product.

User Reviews

Try to forge a relationship with your initial customers. It is an exhilarating experience when you get your first few customers as each one validates all of the hard work that has been put into the project. 

Try to reach out personally to each customer and offer meaningful, customized suggestions to improve their conversion rates. This will make you receive testimonials from these impressed customers along with a great word of mouth that you just can’t buy. All your customers may not send in a testimonial, but they may share their experiences on social media with their own sphere of influence.

This can act as a free advertisement for you. You can re-tweet, re-post, repeat! This is an excellent opportunity for you to share how others are using your product or service.

Your audience becomes excited to review your product or service just immediately after they purchase from you. Get valuable ratings and reviews for your product by using this window.

Try to avoid forcing lengthy reviews. Sometimes, it’s a lot easier to ask for a star rating with an option of a written review. That way, it becomes short, sweet, and non-intimidating for your time-pressed reviewer.

Some Questions to Ask

We are listing down some questions to be asked from the users and employees of the organization for your newly launched product. 

• Were you provided with the appropriate enablement tools?
• Did you feel prepared for this product launch?
• Do you think we pursued all of the appropriate outlets for this launch?
• Do you think the timing of the launch plan was appropriate?
• Was there ample time to complete all necessary pre-launch activities?
• What can we do better next time?
• Did you feel like you were overexposed to marketing messages from us?
• What do you think of the new product?
• Does it meet expectations?
• Did the ramp-up process meet expectations?
• Did you encounter any problems with our new product?
• Are you happy with our new product?
• If not, what could we do to improve your experience?
• What messaging really resonated with you when you were evaluating our product?
• Any enhancement you want us to make in our marketing strategies
• Any improvements that can be taken care of during our next product launch

This feedback would be precious if these new clients were introduced to you through your product launch efforts.

Work with a Plan

Create content to drive continued awareness and fuel additional lead generation. Additionally, you can evaluate upcoming industry events to find out any opportunities to gain extra exposure for your product through a keynote, sponsorship, or speaking engagement. The first six months of a year are a great time to start collecting and showcasing case studies about your product. Contact the customers who had positive experiences and see if they would be willing to participate in a case study, talk more about their success story, or provide a short quote. You can also post all these stories to your website or can even build them into a blogging series to keep promoting your product in a positive light. Never forget that testimonials are often more powerful than anything your sales representatives could say during the entire process of selling, so they’re definitely worth the investment.

Develop Key Metrics

We are listing down some of the data points that will be required once the launch is over, so that data for better product launches drive your future engagements in the coming days.

Develop Key Metrics

We are listing down some of the data points that will be required once the launch is over, so that data for better product launches drive your future engagements in the coming days.

• Web traffic Internal content utilization

• New prospects in the database

• Marketing qualified leads Sales accepted leads

• New customer acquisition

• New revenue Leads and revenue by product launch and/or asset

• Potential TA leads generation

Measure

Return to the goals that you have set immediately after launch to start charting your progress. Think back to the goals you set during the planning stage and use the data you collected after the launch to map the change. Keep track of all relevant metrics, paying specific attention to new customer acquisition and revenue driven from your product launch. In the end, communicate these critical insights from these metrics to your team. You will be ready with a working strategy for future product launches.

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