14 Essential Elements of a Flawless Product Launch
Getting ready to launch a new product? No matter how great it is, in today's cluttered marketplace, it probably won't speak for itself. So here are 14 lessons I've learned over the years launching products at HubSpot and speaking with product marketers at companies I admire like Apple, Google, and Salesforce. This will be helpful for anyone getting started in product marketing, or business owners with new products in the works.
14 Product Launch Lessons for New Product Marketers
1) Be crystal clear about your buyer persona.
Building a buyer persona is like tying your shoes: If you don't do it before you go anywhere you'll trip and fall. This blog has lots of great articles about building your buyer persona (here's one). My advice: Find every way you can to get to know your buyers. Interview them, watch them, do whatever it takes, then keep doing it.
2) Be crystal clear about your buyer's journey. What is the series of steps that your typical buyer takes on the path from knowing zilch about your brand, to becoming a customer? As a product marketer, you need to know that general path -- and specific examples of steps along the path like search keywords, blogs, and review sites. You should choose product launch content and tactics based on what you know about your typical buyer's journey. 3) Don't expect to generate boatloads of leads. A product launch isn't a top-of-the-funnel marketing activity. Sure, it makes sense to set up forms to collect interest in your launch (here's an example of one we created), but most people don't care about your product. Instead, focus your launch on influencing people who you've already attracted and who are in your funnel. 4) Use your social networks to do lightweight research early on.
Most product marketers get lazy and skip product research. They probably figure it's a complicated task that requires focus groups and testing facilities. Testing your messaging with members of your buyer persona early in your launch planning process will help you narrow in on a message that resonates and avoid an expensive flop at the launch. Plus, you don't need to do heavy-weight focus-group-style research. Just reach out to a few people on Twitter or LinkedIn, give them an Amazon.com gift card, and fire up a free Join.me session.
5) Create a document that spells out launch positioning early on.
Any successful product launch needs to have a clear message that is consistently articulated across your entire company. That's hard, particularly if you have more than one person at your company. The best way to make sure everybody sees eye-to-eye on your launch is to actually write out the positioning.
Create a document that spells out the key points: What are the new features or products that you're launching? Who's the buyer persona? What benefits do they provide the buyer persona? What's the competition and how is your product different? If you can get your whole team to agree on answers to these questions your message will be much sharper when you launch.
6) Create web-based content that explains your product.
So you've been a responsible product marketer -- you did your product research, you created a document to spell out your product positioning -- now you're ready to start creating content. This is a critical step. You can't just send sales a new PowerPoint deck when you launch. Buyers want to learn about your product before they talk to Sales. That means videos, web pages, infographics, whatever it takes to explain your product to people browsing your website.
7) Have a weekly war room for your launch team.
Remember what I said about consistency in #5? Well, even if you have launch document, people start going in different directions as you get closer to a big launch. The best way to nip this in the bud -- and to handle all the coordination that needs to happen for a complicated launch -- is to pull the whole team together once a week to go through all the projects people are working on and resolve open issues.
8) Run a sales test on the new product.
If you have a sales team, you need to train them before your launch. One way to get your team excited about and trained on the new product is to run a test. Here's how you do it. First, pick a few of your top-performing reps. Train them on the new features and let them start selling it. Second, get feedback from them. Figure out how they're positioning it, what kind of tools they need to sell it, and what you can do to help them sell it. Finally, use all the information you gathered from the test to guide training of the full team. The training will be stronger, and the reps will be excited about it because they know it's something the best reps were already using. 9) Create a minute-by-minute plan for the day of your launch.
Don't leave the day of the launch to chance. Create a document that lists everything that needs to happen, and the DRI -- the directly responsible individual -- for each item. Details and timing are critical to the success of your launch day, so it's critical to spell them all out. 10) Make sure your launch is customer-focused.
Lots of marketers focus exclusively on prospects. Don't do that. In many cases your launch will have as much impact on new revenue from existing customers as it will on revenue from new customers. Loop members of your services team into the launch planning. And ask yourself: Will the positioning make sense to customers?
11) If you're launching with a speech, do a test run in front of your whole company. Many companies launch new products in a speech at a major event. If you're doing this, have the executive giving the speech do a dry run in front of the whole company. Marc Benioff does before Dreamforce every year, and we've started doing it at HubSpot before INBOUND. You can pitch it to the executive as a way to communicate the launch messaging to the company (you don't need to mention that it's also a great way to get him or her to practice in front of an important audience). 12) Use case studies in your launch.
Don't make your launch all about features or potential benefits; show the benefits by showing a customer already using the new product. This is complicated, and requires trusting, beta-tolerant customers, but it will catapult your launch into a new level.
Salesforce is great at launching with customers. Here's one of my favorite examples, a launch from last year that they did with the ski equipment company Rossignol. Here's an example of our launch of the Content Optimization System this year with Magellan Jets and New Breed Marketing. 13) Create a shared file filled with resources to empower your evangelists.
One of the best ways to get more reach for your launch is to cultivate relationships with evangelists. Every business has different evangelists -- in some cases they're partner agencies, in other cases they're journalists, in other cases they're analysts. Part of your job as a product marketer is to identify these evangelists and help them tell the story. A great way to help them tell your story is to create an online file (we use a Dropbox at HubSpot) to collect resources that make it easier for evangelists to tell the story of the product launch. Your “resources” could be anything -- pre-written blog posts, images, videos, quotes, data -- whatever you think will help your evangelists tell the story.
14) Attach your launch to a bigger story.
Make sure your launch gives people a reason to care. Don't add features to re-engineered widgets. Take steps that will help change the world. Salesforce doesn't launch software -- it moves its business into the cloud. Google doesn't launch features -- it takes steps toward organizing the world's information. HubSpot isn't just making marketing software -- we're helping people build inbound companies. What is your company doing, and how does your launch reflect that?
