How to Plan a Product Launch

A well-planned Product launch can generate new business leads and improve your company’s reputation. It can also bring in investor interest and help you grow faster.

When launching a product, demonstrating how it will help sales reps meet their quotas is a powerful way to build support for the launch. This can be done by leveraging data from Heatmaps, Session Recordings, Surveys, and Incoming Feedback.

Preparation

The product launch process involves many different departments across a business. It is a time-consuming project that requires meticulous preparation. A thorough launch increases customer adoption and allows a company to see a return on its investment in the product.

As a product marketer, your days are spent balancing deep strategic thinking and active collaboration throughout the planning stages of a launch. You are a linchpin connecting multiple departments, from sales to IT and customer support.

Preparation for a product launch begins with an evaluation of the scope of the project and the resources required to complete it. Establish clear objectives and include time frames for each task to ensure that all major projects in the launch plan receive a timely review and are ready for the next phase.

Use available research tools to glean insight into your prospective customers and their pain points. Communicating clearly how your product alleviates those pain points is an important part of a successful product launch.

Marketing

Product launches involve many teams, people, and resources. Creating a strong campaign plan requires deep research into buyer and user personas to optimize targeting, creative, channels, budget allocations, and experimentation to learn which tactics resonate with which audiences.

Launch campaigns should drive awareness and excitement, but also connect with existing sales frameworks and customer relationships to add value and bolster pipelines. The best way to do this is by translating the features of your new product into a clear explanation of its relevance and urgency.

Using language that is accessible to your audience helps humanize the product and establish deeper trust. This approach also enables you to highlight how the product alleviates your buyers’ pain points rather than simply describing its features.

Sales

A product launch isn’t easy, but with careful planning and a clear roadmap, you can make a successful debut. The goal of a product launch should always be to create awareness and drive adoption, and it’s important to track key metrics throughout the process to ensure that your go-to-market strategy is working as planned.

Creating a product pitch is one of the most crucial tasks in the process of launching a new product. It’s important to consider how the new product will impact sales, and how you can position it as a game-changer for customers.

In order to be effective, the pitch should also reflect the customer’s needs and pain points, and show how your solution addresses them. It’s also helpful to frame the product launch in terms of how it will help your sales team meet their quotas, as this is a strong motivating factor for many teams.

Support

A successful product launch requires collaboration between the marketing and engineering teams. Often, this involves understanding the product market landscape and what differentiates the new product from its competitors. It also helps to identify a clear target audience and create a compelling positioning message that articulates the product’s significant features, who it benefits, and how it solves customers’ problems.

Developing this messaging can be challenging, especially when the product is being launched to a diverse group of consumers. To help with this process, a launch company can conduct research to find out which groups of consumers are most likely to purchase the new product and how they can be best reached.

In addition to establishing a positioning strategy, a product launch plan should also include documentation of all the necessary steps. This provides a clear image of the required resources and motivates employees. In addition, a laundry list of all the activities involved in the launch can help prevent miscommunication among different departments, as it is easy to refer back to the checklist for clarity.