I was invited to the iNQ Mini (social media phone) launch event last night, which reminded me to write this post on online strategies for launching a new product. It’s important for me here to sketch the outline and I may not cover the detailed tactics. If you are interested to find out more, you can leave a comment or email me.
New Product Launch #1 Get Your Website Ready
Let’s skip the usability part for now; the least thing you want to make sure is “content”. Right; you want to make sure you have enough and detailed content available on the site. Do you know who the content are for?
- Search engines. Flash is good; it looks cool and could make you look “professional”. But, don’t make it hard for the search engine to understand, will you? Make it easy for search engines to crawl and understand what your new product is. Of course you need to optimize your content copy.
- Users. Yes, your customers. Make it on your homepage of your product and make it interesting so that people could be patient enough to understand all the “unique selling points”.
- Journalist. Prepare a media kit for the journalists and PR people.
New Product Launch #2 Optimize for Social Network
If you really think your new product is great, why don’t you help your users to share the idea with their friends? It’s the easiest word of mouth marketing you could ever do.
Make it easy to allow people to share your new product in Twitter, Facebook, and/or other social networks. And, make it easy for them to bookmark it in their favorite bookmarking sites. The easiest thing you can do is to put a “Tell A Friend” widget on your site.
New Product Launch #3 Get the Paid Search Campaign Ready
You should be there whenever your prospects look for you or your products. Before you announce your product launch to the mass media, get the search campaign ready. Separate the search and content campaigns; brand, and product generic campaigns.
New Product Launch #4 Implement the Trackings
You want to report to the management how well the launch goes; and, you want to learn which part works and which does not. At the end of the day, you need to tell the visits by all traffic sources: direct, email, banner ads, PPC, organic search, social media, bloggers, and other referrers.
Create trackable short URLs for Twitter and Facebook respectively. And, spread the word out at the right time.
New Product Launch #5 Tell the Influential Bloggers First
Tell the bloggers first. Be transparent about who you are and what product it is. Leave it up to the bloggers to decide whether or not they want to share that information with their readers. NEVER pretend to be a reader and simply leave the news in the comment.
Collect the list first to get the “influential” ones and the relevant ones. It’s not a bad idea to share a mobile phone launch with a popular food blogger; but, it’s bad if you miss the popular gadget blogs.
More New Product Launch Ideas
- Hold a launch party and invite your fans and bloggers
- Show off your new product in road show
- Give it to a celebrity before you release it to the market
- Launch an online contest to give away new products for free
- Let people try it and feel it for free
Ideas can be very fancy; but, products must be really good. Deliver a product you promised. I’m going to talk about what to do after the product launch in another post.