Marketing Plan for Your Product Launch: 10 Strategies

Are you familiar with the term "growth hacking"? It has become quite a buzzword over the past few years, referring to non-traditional digital marketing strategies that ensure rapid growth. Though many startups use growth hacking techniques to quickly enter a market, they can be just as useful to companies of any size.

Some examples of the 10 growth hacking strategies for you to include in your marketing plan for a new product launch are: organizing a pre-launch giveaway, creating shareable content, creating a referral program, establishing relationships with influencers, among other. Let's take a closer look at them!

What Is a Marketing Plan?

Why Is Creating a Marketing Plan for a Product Launch Important?

It is important to have specific goals for what you want to achieve and a plan for how you will achieve them. For a new product, it's crucial to do market research, define your buyer persona, and then create a strategy for how you will reach those people. Taking the time to think about these aspects will greatly increase your chances of success.

10 Marketing Strategies to Launch Your Product

1. Organize a Pre-Launch Giveaway

For a product to take off quickly, you need to create a feeling of anticipation and excitement about its release weeks or even months in advance.

One of the most popular ways to do this is with pre-launch giveaways and contests. Give your product away to an exclusive group of lucky participants in exchange for them helping get the word out about it. There are a variety of options like Instagram contests, creating a hashtag challenge on social media, giveaways, and more.

Whatever option you choose, try to come up with content or ideas that can help your product go viral. For example, ask users to share their participation on social media, or come up with a good TikTok challenge. Be creative in your messages to make sure people don’t see it as spam and offer extra points for users who refer your product to their friends.

2. Increase Your Organic Visibility

Having a well-positioned website on SERPs gives you a steady base of traffic to promote your new product to. For your search engine optimization strategy to work, you need to give users information that is of use to them. Focus on these three areas:

• Keywords: don’t think about what you would call your product or how you would describe it, but rather how a new user would search for it.

• Meta descriptions: meta descriptions are the summary of your web page on search engines so they need to be short and attractive. But beware! Google sometimes ignores this description and shows the first lines of text on your page, so make sure that is up to par as well.

• The first paragraph of text: the goal is to make sure readers know and understand what your product is in the least amount of time possible.

3. Create Shareable Content

Consistently creating content is one of the most reliable digital marketing strategies, especially in the medium to long term.

Invest time in creating a high-quality blog that talks about your business or related topics that your consumers will be interested in reading about. The goal is to get the users themselves to share your content, bringing traffic to your website on a regular basis. Another idea for creating shareable content is to answer questions from your audience. This can be done via videos on social media, which can also increase your follower count and engagement rates. You can also incorporate trending topics in your sector into your content. This will get you more views, as these topics get a high volume of searches.

4. Take a Chance with Remarketing

A well-rounded marketing strategy guides users through the conversion funnel.

Consumers are in different stages of the purchasing process and they might not be ready to purchase from you the first time they hear about your brand. But, this doesn't mean they're not still potential customers! You can nurture them over time using different remarketing tactics

Remarketing can also be used for your regular followers. Keep in touch with your more dedicated customers (through a newsletter, for example), and don’t forget to tell them about your launches.

5. Create a Referral Program

Word of mouth continues to be an incredibly effective way to spread the news about new products or services. People naturally talk to their friends and acquaintances about the products they use and recommend. You can also give them a little push to get the wheels turning. How? By creating an incentive system for recommendations.

Everyone likes getting freebies so all you have to do is offer a discount coupon or free shipping in exchange for them telling their friends about you. This is a very popular tactic used by brands like Airbnb and Uber.

Before you launch your referral program, make sure you identify which channels are the best place to announce and promote it. You also need to consider which platform you will use to notify both your business and the referred customer that a referral has been submitted so that everything works smoothly.

6. Optimize Your Website Speed

This is a trick that is as simple as it is effective: make sure your website is running at top speed.

There is nothing more frustrating than a website that takes ages to load. A quick and fluid website improves user experience and brand perception.

There are several things you can do to improve your website's loading times, though many of them involve coding knowledge, so we recommend talking to an expert. This person or agency can do an audit of your site and give you a more customized report detailing how to optimize it.

In the meantime, a quick fix could be ensuring your images are of high-quality while also not being large in size. The bigger the file size of the image, the slower your website will run.

7. Establish Relationships With Influencers

Influencers are the kings and queens of social media marketing. As they brand themselves as experts in a given area or industry, they tend to have loyal audiences that follow their recommendations. Think of influencer marketing as the digital version of word-of-mouth marketing.

In order to get bloggers and influencers talking about your brand, the most common strategy is to organize events and send free samples. However, keep in mind that you shouldn't buy their opinions or recommendations. Take time to investigate which influencers would be most suitable for your product or services and build relationships with them.

8. Take Care of Your Customer Service

Customers are used to getting answers from companies 24/7, so make sure you have a reliable system for them to reach you whenever they need to.

Customer service is one of the areas in which careful employee selection is most important. Your company’s ambassadors should be patient and empathetic in order to offer your client the experience they deserve.

Keep in mind that problems don't start at customer service. They usually show up at points in the buying process. Therefore, it's worth putting time and effort into ensuring that all parts of the purchase process are well organized and that there are protocols in place for how to quickly resolve issues should they arise.

9. Prepare Your FAQs Before Launching Your Product

When you launch a new product or service, it is normal for users to have questions about how it works, how to properly use it, and what they can do with it. The more innovative your product is, the more you will have to explain it. Our recommendation is to get as much as possible prepared ahead of time by creating a complete and easy-to-find “Frequently Asked Questions” section. Ideally, encourage users to visit it before reaching out to you with their questions.

You can even include FAQs in your social content as a way to get ahead of new user questions and share how your product works. You can also regularly answer user questions on your social media accounts in order to not only respond to your customers but also to increase followers and engagement.

10. Don’t Forget About Email Marketing

In order to effectively implement an email marketing strategy, the first step is to create a database of your clients. The more information you have on each one of them, the better. Think about things like age, location, lifestyle and, of course, previous purchases or products they have shown interest in.

Use this information to create a highly personalized messaging strategy. Try to make the user feel like the emails have been written especially for them. Marketing automation can be a big help in efficiently managing all this information.

Why Social Media Is Important for a Product Launch

If you're not promoting your new product or service on social media, you're missing out on a huge marketing opportunity. To prove our point, we're sharing key findings of how social media marketing contributes to sales.

Social networks play a very important role in purchasing decisions:

• Two out of every three users declared that social networks had influenced them when deciding whether or not to purchase a product or service.
• Social networks especially influence purchase decisions in clothing, footwear, accessory, and beauty product purchases.
• Offers, special pricing, and product interest are the biggest purchase drivers.

About a third of global users and more from younger generations have visited a brand’s social media channels after seeing one of their products advertised on TV or in a magazine. This shows that cross-advertising plays an important role when it comes to linking online and offline channels.

Hopefully, with these tips, your product launch will be a success!