Ensuring the Launch of Your New Product Is a Success

Ensuring the Launch of Your New Product Is a Success Even great product ideas can fail, so how do you go about ensuring that the launch of your new product doesn’t fall short? Keep Reading to find out.

Bringing a new product to the market is always a stressful ordeal.

It doesn’t matter if it’s your first time or if you’ve done it a dozen times before – there are many things to take into account here, and the potential for failure is always significant.

You can generally do a lot to maximize your chances and put your product in the best position it can be in for its launch. And much of that involves work that’s not directly on the product itself, but rather on auxiliary factors and features. Some of these tend to get neglected all too often.

Marketing Should Start Before Actual Product Design and Development

A common misconception about marketing is that it’s something that should be done once the project approaches its release date. In fact, proper marketing needs to start before you’ve even done any planning work on things like features, package design, market exposure, and so on. Ideally, marketing should determine how you’re going to develop that project right from the start, and what kinds of approaches you’re going to need for most of its parts. It’s not something that you can think about after the fact.

Research Your Audience Carefully

Take your time to research your actual audience as well – this is a specific part of marketing that is sometimes ignored, or at least not done to its full potential. There are many ways to collect valuable information about what your customers will expect to see and how to deliver it best, so take your time and learn as much as possible. Use good project management software to organize what you’ve learned and combine it with the production plans of your organization as a whole. And make sure that you keep your knowledge base up to date with any new findings. For more tips on developing a product launch strategy, click here.

Have a Fallback Plan for Known Issues

You probably won’t be able to get everything perfect for the release day, especially if this is a new type of project that you don’t have direct experience with. Make sure that you have a good fallback plan that can allow you to get back on your feet quickly if you run into any of the issues that you know about beforehand. Communicate with your audience properly and ensure that your customers are on the same page as you with regard to your plans to address their concerns. You may have to disable some features temporarily until you bring the situation under control – and that’s fine, just make sure that you have a proper system that can do it without impacting your product as a whole.

Prepare for a Financial Hit on the Big Day

With some exceptions, launching a product is almost always going to incur a hit to your finances. You have to be prepared for that and do your best to mitigate the effect until your balance stabilizes. This can be made easier when your product is successful right off the bat, in which case you can probably count on a nice stream of money to supplement whatever has gone missing during the launch period. But in most cases, you’ll want to prepare for a difficult period for your company’s finances at that time, and make sure that you can get through it without any long-term impact. Thankfully, there are many ways to prepare for that which don’t require significant prior knowledge.

Social Media

This doesn’t apply for all types of products, but there are some releases that can definitely benefit from a good social media presence on top of the ordinary launch activities. This is not just true for digital products either; it can actually be very important for physical launches as well. Make sure that you have a good overview of the platforms that you’re going to need to use and know how to approach them exactly. Each individual social media platform has its own specific requirements if you want to be successful in it, and you will need to get used to the specific tone of each one. It’s best to leave this in the hands of an experienced professional if you don’t know whether you can handle it yourself.

Post-launch Support

Just because you’ve pushed your product out the door it doesn’t mean that your work is done. Far from it – in most cases, this is just the beginning of a long journey. You’ll have to put a lot of effort into supporting your product now that it’s out on the market, and this is not as straightforward as responding to questions, fixing bugs, and posting updates. You’ll need to have a specific plan of action with concrete milestones. You should also have a lot of resources dedicated to providing support to your customers when they run into problems with your product. The way you handle this is going to make one of the biggest differences in how well you’re received.

How to Navigate the Ocean of Criticism

People are going to have a thing or two to say about your product.

In most cases, you can expect those with criticisms to be more vocal than the others. Make sure that you have a good ability to filter the feedback you’re getting, and know which points are actually worth focusing on. Not every criticism is worth paying attention to, but there are some things that you’ll definitely want to ensure you address. This partly comes down to experience – you will need some time until you start to understand what feedback is worth looking into more seriously.

All that said, you should prepare for a busy few months after your product is out on the market. This will be a very challenging period for your company in many ways, and it’s going to make or break your near future. But even if you don’t succeed entirely, don’t worry – the important thing is that you’ve at least learned something from the whole experience, and know how to integrate that knowledge into the future work of your company and any products you’re releasing later.

The post Ensuring the Launch of Your New Product Is a Success appeared first on Graphic Web Design & Brand Marketing Company Medford OR.

by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company