Launching a new product is an exciting new venture for any business. A new product or range has the potential to boost sales, increase brand awareness and add an additional revenue stream for your company. But if you don’t have a strategic marketing plan behind a launch, a new product could flop.

The goal is to prioritize your new product portfolio – just like your individual financial investments. Once completed you then need to determine if your new product portfolio is “balanced” and can potentially deliver results vs. expectations. There are three critical elements to consider to make sure your new product portfolio is “balanced”.

Are your new product ideas strategically aligned with business and innovation growth strategies
Is your new product portfolio balanced across product type, risk, time and resources
Can they deliver against new product revenue growth expectations – are they sufficient?
The key to a successful launch is an integrated strategy. One channel alone will not do enough to really sell your product; you have to take advantage of all of your marketing assets. Here are just a few platforms you may want to use and how you could use them to spread the word about your new venture.

The follow-the-rabbit strategy:
Use a non-platform demonstration project to model success and attract users and producers and then convert to a platform. (Amazon, for example, started as an effective pipeline business, then converted itself into a platform by opening its system to external producers.)

Social Media Campaign
A strategic social plan with a content calendar and an intriguing hashtag can generate some pre-launch buzz and interest.

Facebook and Twitter are popular sites you can use to get the word out and announce your new product but you could also use Snap-chat or YouTube to be a bit more creative with your announcement.

Competitions are not only a good way of attracting interest but also collecting email addresses and building a social following. For any new product launch, social media is a great place to start.

Launch Events
Launch events can be a useful opportunity for meeting customers and press in person to talk through your new product – and when it comes down to it, they can be enjoyable and fun experiences for all involved.

Holding demos, answering questions, taking bookings and encouraging social sharing can all be powerful strategies for pushing your customers down the sales cycle. These strategies can be harder to do solely online so an integration of online and offline marketing activity can really help.

Website and Customer Experience
If you’re selling your product online or are even taking enquiries, the process needs to be as streamlined as possible. There’s nothing worse than generating hype and getting customers excited only for them to struggle to use the website when they do want to buy.

Make sure that the checkout or inquiry process is smooth, quick and easy – but also make it enjoyable with creative text and beautiful product photography.

A well-designed website is a final piece in the product launch puzzle but if this isn’t right, all of the marketing before it could be a waste of time. Provide incentives to attract key users (consumers or producers) whose participation can make or break the success of your platform.

Other Marketing Channels
You will probably have existing marketing channels that you can also use to help promote your new product whether through email newsletters or a blog post on your website. If you use these channels too, make sure the messaging is consistent with the rest of your campaign.
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