Every great business success in history started with the launch of a new product or service. Of course, many new products also fail after launch. Whether a new product is a success or a failure is often determined by how well it is marketed. So how can you give your new product the greatest chance of success? Though every offering is different and requires its own strategy, below are some tips you can follow when determining how to launch and market a new product. 
1. Understand your audience.
The most important thing you can do throughout the process of launching a product is to fully understand the people you are trying to sell to. You have to know their wants and needs before you can satisfy those wants and meet those needs.
This process should start before you design the new product itself. The best marketing plan in the world will fall flat if the product is something that nobody would ever be interested in.
The questions to be answered about your target market include:
- Who are they? What segment of the population are you hoping to reach?
- What are their pain points, or the problems that your product is going to solve?
- Where are they, both offline and online? Are you targeting a specific geographic area, or a certain type of person who is more likely to frequent certain websites?
- How do they prefer to be communicated with? What medium, and what communication style?
- One thing that can help you answer these questions is to create buyer personas. A persona paints a picture of your typical target customer, describing their personality, lifestyle, responsibilities and challenges.
- You can’t just invent a persona and then hope that person exists; it must be based on a real segment of the population. So, you’ll need to do research to determine both the characteristics of each persona and the estimated size of the target market.
2. Understand your competition.
Your new product will likely have some form of competition. Even if it is a completely new-to-the-world idea, it is still solving a problem that people have found ways of dealing with. To articulate your product’s benefits and advantages, you will need to know how it is similar to or different from the competition.
By studying your competitors and how they originally launched their own products, you can also avoid their mistakes and learn from their successes.
3. Pick your price.
You can’t sell any new product unless you’ve set a price for your product. The difficulty here is obvious: ask for too much, and nobody will buy. Ask for too little, and you’ll be leaving profits on the table.
You can utilize focus groups, surveys or auctions to help you determine the price the market is willing to pay.
Some new web-based services use free trials or a “freemium” model to prove the worth of their product before charging customers. Such a model will require you to have enough capital on hand to weather the “free” period in which you are collecting no revenue.
4. Choose your channels.
Once you’ve done your research on customers and competitors, you can determine the best ways to reach them.
That means choosing where you are going to focus your marketing message. Perhaps there are certain social media networks to reach out on, or certain keywords you should invest in for SEO or SEM purposes. If you are focused on a narrow industry or geographic area, there may be publications, websites or social influencers who reach exactly the target audience you are looking for.
If you are selling a physical product, there is also the question of how to physically distribute it to customers. Will you sell direct, or through an online or brick-and-mortar retailer? In many cases, it may make sense to start small and work out the bugs before approaching a major retail chain.
5. Craft your message.
Based on the communication channel, your target personas and your own brand personality, you can then craft your marketing message. Make sure you clearly state your value proposition, or the benefits your new product will provide to the customer. People don’t really care about your product; they care about their own problems, and how your product can solve them.
6. Test and refine.
You probably won’t get your marketing strategy perfect on your first try. So, from the beginning, make sure you are set up to test different approaches to see what is working, and what needs improvement. You can then quickly learn from any mistakes and refine your approach before most people see your message.
Launching a new product is risky, but there is no reward without risk. By using the right product launch strategy, you can give your new product the best start possible.
*Image courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net
