Young Entrepreneur Council — April 12, 2018 — April 12, 2018
What’s one thing you can do to prepare for a big product release?
1. Build a Community
Building a community around your company is an incredibly powerful resource. It takes a lot of time and work to build up. For product releases, having an active community who care about what you’re building is a great place to start with promotion. – Ben Lang, Spoke
2. Look at What the Competition has Done Recently
Be sure to check out what the competition is doing so that you can address that in your launch by differentiating what you say about your product. Consider everything from pricing to distribution channels to see how you can do things differently in releasing your product. – Peter Daisyme, Due
3. Prepare Messaging and Channel Timing
Create a roadmap in advance of what you will say, where you will say it, and when. This is key to determining interest and generating buzz. Often, it’s good to plan it in a way that releases a little information in advance at a time to stir interest and get people excited. Preparing messaging in advance ensures consistency and offers a way to tie it to various tactics. – Angela Ruth, Calendar
4. Update Your Email List
Don’t depend on social media and advertising to help you earn sales. Create content, attract prospects to your website, convert them to email subscribers, and then let them know when they can pre-order or when the product goes live. – Thomas Smale, FE International
5. Test With Different Influencers
Before a launch, I always test my product with different influencers. It’s easy to be excited about your product, but sometimes you lose sight of reality. Listen to the feedback those influencers give. Usually, you’ll learn a little something that will make your release even more successful. – Colbey Pfund, LFNT Distribution
6. Tap Into Thunderclap
In the past, whenever I did a product launch I asked friends to post on their social feeds about it on the day of. Then I started using Thunderclap and got 10 times the results from previous launches. The tool gives me the ability to send friends a link where they can submit their post in advance, and on the exact time and day of launch, everything gets released at the same time. It’s been huge for us. – Mark Krassner, Expectful
7. Run Paid Advertisements
You can build demand for a product through blog posts, press releases, and tapping your social media connections. But paid advertisements over search engines, Facebook, and Twitter will allow you to target individuals who would be more likely to make a purchase and deliver great short-term gains to gear up other strategies, such as email remarketing for those who abandon cart purchases. – Kristopher Jones, LSEO.com
8. Develop a Content Marketing Strategy
Create a calendar to keep track of your content marketing. You will want to execute this well to ensure that you rank well on social media. Use tools like AnswerThePublic.com to figure out what your future customers are searching for and create blog posts with the answers to their questions. Your customers will keep coming back for the valuable information. – Jared Atchison, WPForms
9. Hold a Mock Release to Find Pain Points
If there’s one consistency in product releases, it’s that they often create challenges or introduce complexity into your pipeline when you run into a problem you didn’t anticipate. Distribute a “mock release” to a small, unbiased test group to emulate the process of releasing the product to its core audience to find and correct pain points before they become a problem for real customers. – Blair Thomas, eMerchantBroker
10. Get Your Customer Support Ready
If you aren’t already using a ticketing system like Zendesk, now would be a good time to implement it. You may receive a lot of questions when launching a new product. Sometimes, this isn’t the case, but it’s always best to be prepared. – Ismael Wrixen, FE International
11. Launch Late if You Have to
Sometimes there is a temptation to launch on a set date. More important than the date is nailing the product. We decided to let the official launch day pass and added three additional weeks of rigorous testing. While we technically launched “late,” our customers now love the bug-free product, and are helping us spread the message far and wide. – Brint Markle, Mountain Hub
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