25 Best Product Launch Ideas and Strategies [+Examples]

Launching a new product is like bringing a baby into the world. Everyone’s happy, but the parents are panicking. ( or something like that, lol)

But jokes apart, it is indeed tedious to reach out to a new product in the market successfully.

So product launch is a great way to draw people’s attention to your product and give a marketing push to kickstart the momentum.

But you must create buzz around your product before setting your product launch dates.

Here you need to be creative and out-of-the-box to attract people out of too much going around on the internet.

Don’t worry; you got us!

Best product launch ideas and strategies for your small business to successfully launch your product.

Contents

Essential Steps To Launch Your Product

Before you get into implementing product launch ideas, it is essential to get an overview of the process of launching your product.

You must check all the boxes before you start your product launch campaign. Here are 12 necessary steps you should take to launch your product successfully.

1. Prioritising What Consumer Needs

One thing that is common in all successful product launches is prioritizing what your consumer or user needs. That’s always the first step!

Your strategy always satisfies the end customer in the best way possible. One of the best ways to do so is to conduct a survey to understand the market.

You need to find the answer to why someone would buy your product.

People buy things only for the following reasons :

Resolve their issue or some problem
Improve the quality of their life
Fulfill their desire

So, look for how your product can resolve customers’ problems, improve the quality of life or fulfill someone’s desire. If any of those boxes check, you’re good to go.

Also, figure out your product’s true “value” and whether it aligns with customer purchasing behaviors.

Are people spending that much?
Is your product worth that much?
How much are they willing to pay for it?

And other such questions must be answered before you begin.

Learn about your customer. You also need to know their motivations, goals, problems, and desires.

You can grasp a lot with basic questionnaires, polls, and surveys. You can talk to your customers as well. Ask specific questions.

2. Mark Your Competition

The market is all about competition. If someone opts for your company to purchase from, it simply means he or she refuses to buy from your competition.

It goes both ways. If they opt for your competition, that means they rejected your offer. And it must be for some reason. You need to know that reason to improve.

And that’s why it is essential to find your competition and mark them to keep checking on them.

Remember, You don’t need to be just good to make a purchase. You need to be BETTER than others.

So explore your competition, and identify their strategies, products, customer assistance, tactics, and challenges as well.

Their disadvantage can be your unique selling point or give people prefer to buy from you over your competitors.

3. Craft A Positioning Statement

You need to write a brand position statement. Your positional statement must give clear and precise answers to these three questions.

Who is the product for?
What does your product do?
Why is it different from others out there?

The deeper you will go with the questions, and the more questions you ask to craft your positioning statement, the better it will be.

You can be even more specific by asking more questions like this :

What is your target audience?
What will be the name of your product or service?
How is your product better than your competitors?
How will you prove the worth or credibility of your product?
What problems will your product resolve?

4. Make A Prototype Of Your Product & Test It

You cannot just greenlight your product for mass production without testing.

That can lead to many risks, such as putting your brand reputation at stake, huge loss, and product failure in public due to some defect.

So it is better to go for the beta testing phase of your product. You can make a prototype of your product and test it.

Hire beta testers so they can test and give you feedback before it hits the market. Beta testers can also tell you how to resolve the issue or improve it.

5. Pitch Your Positioning Statement To Stakeholders

When you are done with your positional statement and testing your prototype, it means you are sure about your product and how to position it in the market.

Now, take the next step. And pitch the positional statement to the stakeholders in your company. You must ensure they and you are all on the same page.

If your partners, stakeholders, or employees are not satisfied with the product, there is no chance your customer will be.

So it is essential to take everyone in confidence before you launch the product.

6. Reconfigure And Improve Your Product

In the testing phase of your product, you will gain a lot of feedback from the beta testers, family, friends, experts, colleagues, and stakeholders.

Also, there will be a lot of early testing customers who will review your product critically. Or actually, anyone can give you advice that might improve your product.

So you need to be more receptive to it, focusing more on how you can improve the quality of your product.

People might suggest something that you may not agree with. So it is essential to understand from a “customer” point of view.

7. Plan Your Marketing Strategy

After you have your product in place, you need to decide how you are going to market it. You need to come up with a strategy to launch the product.

Some businesses utilize the funnel strategy, some use promotional events or influencers, and also prefer the flywheel approach.

Irrespective of your strategy, it requires planning, resources, investment, and skillset to initiate, execute and manage.

The process has too many moving parts, and all need to be synchronized and worked together in order to pull a successful product launch.

8. Examine Profit Margins

One of the crucial steps in manufacturing and further launching a product for end users is calculating the profit margins.

Even high sales don’t matter much if you don’t have enough profit margins on your product.

So, you better run the numbers to determine at what performance level you can expect certain profits from the business.

You need to understand the customer acquisition cost, revenue generation through products, and all costs. And by the end of it, what profit you are having.

You must see whether your stakeholders or business partners can enjoy the benefits. Make sure everyone gets a piece of the pie.

Also, aim for a reasonable sale conversion which you can expect, and see what it presents on the table.

9. Set A Specific Goal For Your Product Launch

Before you get into launching the product out in the market, it is critical that you set a specific goal for the success of your product launch.

It means you need to decide what goal you will achieve through this product launch that you can consider a win or a success.

It also helps you focus and give direction to your efforts to achieve the desired results.

The product launch can be about brand awareness, or it can be about bringing sales opportunities right there.

Both specific goals require different sets of efforts to make them successful, and that’s why you need to set a goal for your product launch.

10. Using Pre-Marketing To Build Product Anticipation

Any successful product launch is only as good as the conviction of your marketing team in it.

One of the clever ways to make a product be well received right at the launch is to create anticipation for it amongst people.

You need to create a buzz about your product which is about to launch. And that can be done by aggressive but smart marketing.

Build anticipation in the market about your product so people will be looking forward to seeing the product.

This helps in driving more sales for a new product but more than it does wonders for brand awareness.

few Tips For Pre-Marketing Your Product To Build Anticipation

Create an attractive landing page demonstrating your new product, preferably using video or graphics.
Start an email marketing campaign to encourage people sign-up to learn more about the product. Make sure you give them some lead magnets such as an early bird discount.

Connect to bloggers, media persons, and influencers to spread the word about your product. Preferably only a tease of your product at this time.
Reach out to the PR people encouraging them to publish a press release talking about your product.
Try to advertise on as many platforms as possible but surely under your budget. Remember, this is pre-marketing.

11. Building Supply Chain, Delivery System & Other Logistics

Some aspects of a product launch might not seem as the front of it, but you need to check all the boxes.

Ensure you have the inventory of the products you are launching so you have enough to meet the demand.

Building an efficient and easy-to-manage supply chain is great to ensure that. Create a close network of your business and establish strong communication.

Work closely with your vendors and ensure the maximum number of units they can provide at one time.

You need to collaborate with people who can help you scale the production and always meet the demand over supply.

12. Create Promotional Content Across Platforms

Once you are set with your logistics and ready to supply the demands, it’s time to get back to your product launch’s marketing and promotional aspect.

You need to be proactive in creating promotional content across social media channels, media channels, and everywhere possible.

This can also include influencers across platforms, bloggers, and other avenues.

But more than that, you need to create more content that helps carry your product further.

Product Launch Ideas For Your Small Business

Launching A Teaser Campaign For Your Product

A product launch aims to gain attention from a certain target audience.

Product launches should hook people immediately, so they invest more in anticipation of the product.

You can start a teaser campaign for your product that acts as a catalyst in the overall marketing of your product.

Image Source: Pinterest

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are ideal for teasing your product to the world.

It creates hype for your product, building excitement within people so much that they wait for it to come.

So what you can do is create a social media teaser under your teaser campaign. It should start at least 20 or 30 days prior to your product launch date.

You need enough time in-between to create a buzz on social media. Remember, such buzz or anticipation builds slowly and then gets the hype, so 20-30 days’ time is the minimum.

You can create graphics and videos to post regularly during this period of time.

Utilizing Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is known to be the most cost-effective and fastest-growing marketing method today.

Even larger enterprises realize how effective and profitable influencer marketing is as compared to spending a fortune on TV ads.

Image Source: Business 2 Community

Influencers have credibility along with a huge online following. They are the ideal people to market your upcoming products.

Also, they can create hype amongst people regarding the product.

When your target audience sees the influencers they follow to be suggesting or talking about a product, they trust them and are more likely to buy.

The quality of the audience, if not quantity, is way superior to any form of marketing.

Image Source: Business 2 Community

Influencers also create awareness about your product and brand towards the more informative side rather than just pitching them blankly.

So it is important for you to collaborate with influencers where they have to review the product.

Reviews come across more informative content that people want to see and rely on as well.

So, launching a product through influencer marketing campaigns is already a successful formula.

Creating Content That Highlights Your Product

With so many marketing strategies, techniques and gimmicks, you must remember the fact that content marketing still rules!

In fact, content marketing offers three times more leads as compared to other traditional marketing, where it costs 62% less.

But whether you should create content or your product launch, that was never a question.

Image Source: Later

You should focus on what kind of content you need to make for your product launch.

Well, you better create content that highlights your product, not just features them at its best.

You can create content in different spectrums, such as graphics, text, images, audio, and video.

But it is important you focus on creating more video content as it is consumed more than any other form. Also, it drives attention faster than others.

Launching Through Trade Shows

One of the excellent ways to reach an already established and highly relevant audience is through industry publications.

Industry publications have a huge audience you can gain if you get featured. And to do that, the easiest thing to do is attend trade shows.

Attending trade shows gives you maximum media coverage exposing you to a massive range of relevant audiences.

It can give your product launch a huge push, and the best part is it will be on a credible side, so people will be more inclined to check out your product or brand.

Your goal should be to get featured in the highest-ranking online publications relevant to your industry or niche.

If you are launching a tech product, publications that cover tech news, such as TechCrunch or WIRED, will be the game-changer.

Building A Story Around Your Product

Stories sell; brand doesn’t!

People connect to the story of a product rather than the product itself, especially and definitely not when it tries to sell itself too harshly.

Image Source: Instagram

A successful product launch can directly result from too much buzz about your product before it actually comes out.

If you can create an interesting story around your product, it can generate more buzz about your product and brand.

Stories tell how there was a serious problem with a guy just like you, and your product resolved them, making them happy in the end.

For Example

Walby Parker is an American online retailer selling prescription glasses and sunglasses. They connected their personal story to the product launch.

They bring out this story of four guys who met at college, and one of them lost their costly glasses on the trip.

He wasted his first semester complaining and all. And that is what brings them all together, launching Warby Parker, aiming to provide affordable eyewear.

Now, this brand suddenly makes more sense and feels connected to you. It creates characters, events, and personalities in your head, making this brand more real.

So that’s it! That’s what a story does; it gives people a perspective, makes a brand relative to them, and makes it more personal and believable.

So that’s it! That’s what a story does; it gives people a perspective, makes a brand relative to them, make it more personal and believable.

Leverage The Crowdfunding Platforms

Crowdfunding might not look sensible here if you already have enough money to develop and launch your product in the market.

Well, that’s the strategy here! Irrespective of whether you have enough money to launch the product or not, you need to use a crowdfunding platform for marketing purposes.

A crowdfunding campaign can help you create buzz about your product yet to launch.

The best part about this is crowdfunding will not appear as you straightway marketing for your brand or upcoming product but actually raising money.

Image Source: Kickofflabs

If you do a crowdfunding campaign for your product launch, it will help you build a network of those people who aren’t just interested in your product but even spend their money on its development.

So that tells you how dedicated they are towards your product. They even can help you to promote your brand.

Since they invested in your brand, they are definitely going to share it with their friends, family, and followers.

You don’t even need to ask them to do that. You just have to make sure that connection must build over time.

Make sure you engage with them consistently and consider rewarding them for their support.

In this case, the rewards should be appealing and useful for your brand advocates.

Image Source: TechCrunch

Example: One of the most popular and successful crowdfunding campaigns was from the brand Pebble Time Smartwatch. They raised more than $20 million from 78,000 backers at Kickstarter.

Make Your Launch Events Live On Facebook and Instagram

why small business go live video statistics

You have no reason not to leverage live video features on social media platforms, especially on Facebook and Instagram.

Brands are killing it with their live events where they talk about new products or live stream their product launch events to their consumers.

Image Source: Restream

Use live video streaming to showcase your product and demonstrate how it works and what it can do for people.

You can also do live meetings, including your employees talking about the product and how it adds value to people’s lives.

The possibilities are endless if you come up with creative ideas for leveraging live features on Facebook and Instagram.

Image Source: Shopify

For Example, Dunkin’ Donuts connected with their fans on Valentine’s day on live stream, showing their test kitchen and how they create new products.

That is amazing for the audience to get that insight and even better for the brand to launch its new set of products through it.

Create Engaging Videos

Video is a superior content piece compared to any other form as it has more potential to drive attention and offer more.

So why restrict images and text to hype up your product launch?

Brands widely use videos to tease consumers about their upcoming products. The best you can do is create a short video on your upcoming product.

Image Source: NDTV Gadget 360

You can show some selective features of the product.

Even to begin with, you can just show some B-roll shots of the product but not exactly reveal anything except the logo at the very end of it.

Think how much curiosity it will generate.

You can even make very short videos about using that product in daily life but not reveal much about the specification or price.

Focus on the USP of your product and may begin with that.

For example, if a mobile company is launching a flagship phone but it is way cheaper. Then, they can build hype like “ cheapest flagship phone” or something.

Make Demonstration Videos On How To Use Your Product

The product launch becomes even more tricky when introducing something new to the market.

Even something remotely different requires people to understand it.

If a consumer does not know how to use a product or doesn’t see its application clearly, it throws them off.

So the best way to introduce such product launches or can work with any new product launch is – to create demonstration videos.

Demonstration videos or explainer videos tell how to use your product, how it can be helpful for customers, and also the potential it has.

Such videos are very informative as well as entertaining to watch. So make sure you make it like that.

The aim is to improve the customer’s experience of using your product.

Image Source: DroneDJ

People just want to use the product immediately, and they need to know what it does and how to make the most of it.

So, these videos make customers more confident about the product, making them more inclined to buy it.

Write a Guest Post To Promote Your New Product

One of the biggest challenges of promoting a newly-launched product or product launch is a lack of brand awareness.

Well, how and why people will care about your product if they have never heard of you. However, that can be overcome if your product is interesting, valuable, and relevant but mostly if it comes from a credible or authoritative source.

Also, how do you even reach them?

How do you get the attention of an audience who never heard of you?

Well, one of the best ways to do it is to reach out to those target audiences through reputed and authoritative blogs and websites.

And that’s where guest posts can resolve your issue. Many websites, blogs, and publications have established as well as massive audiences with targeted quality

readers.

Image Source: EasyWebcontent

You can write a relevant blog post or pitch an idea of a blog post to those websites or online publications depending upon the niches.

Once your guest post is published on their website, it benefits them as valuable content from an expert and experienced author.

And for you, that guest blog will contain some subtle information about your product, clearly promoting it but not in too sales way. You can even insert direct links to the product as well.

So it gives you a large audience exposing your brand and product to them for the first time.

And coming from a reputed publisher, people do give though to the blog and the product as well.

Just make sure you don’t go overboard in explaining your product. It should be even not like a marketing piece.

Focus on delivering value to your readers and then be subtle yet impressive with your product mentioned in the right relevance.

It is also a great way to generate backlinks for your website, further improving the domain authority. It will boost your ranking on the search engines, further helping you reach more targeted audiences.

Take Pre-Orders From Customers

If you want to build hype for your product launch, one of the most inexpensive ways to do that is to start accepting pre-orders from early-bird customers.

This idea might not strike you as a marketing tactic because your head is already in launching your product and looking forward to taking orders.

So this doesn’t come across as unique.

But it is an excellent marketing tactic. The emphasis here is “taking pre-orders”, not orders.

Image Source: Stripo

So in a way, you are saying that you, as a brand, is providing a privilege to customers, more like an opportunity window to buy it easily.

By saying it “pre-order,” you are already making a confident statement that your product might get sold before they get their hands on it.

You are presumably producing scarcity of your own product before even selling one.

Image Source: Wishpond

In another context, you are making them wait until the launch date happens to allow them to change their minds in between.

It just makes them curious and attracted, so it works. Pre-orders can make tons of sales before you launch your product.

Social media platforms are the most effective way to amplify the buzz if you want to create conversations around your upcoming product launch.

Social media channels are highly engaging platforms that promote or spread brand awareness and can help you build a community around your brand.

You just need to focus on two things primarily :

Creating valuable, creative, and promotional content
Engage with people

The more you do these two things on social media, the more you can create an audience base for your brand, which will be your potential customer.

Paid promotion or social media ad campaigns can push the envelope even more. It will help you create brand awareness much faster.

Here are some tips to be a desirable brand on social media :

Be consistent in content creation
Engage with the audience in comments and messages
Utilize humor in your brand identity on social media
Resolve customer issues
Don’t hesitate to be creative and out-of-the-box.
Use contests and giveaways to spread the word about your product.
Do live streaming very often

You can release pre-launch videos like behind-the-scenes videos to promote your product launch.

It works really great to stir up conversation about your upcoming product. People get excited to see a glimpse of what is coming.

Also, it creates anticipation for actual events coming up. Many popular brands do that for upcoming events, newly launched products, etc.

It is just like releasing a teaser before the feature film that is yet to come. Make sure it is entertaining and, really teases people, also doesn’t give away a lot.

You can document your planning and other conversations with your team members and use them as pre-launch videos.

Live-stream videos can be used for this as well. There are actually no boundaries or rules.

You can be creative and think of something unique and engaging content to publish.

It fuels up the curiosity of people and builds the hype for the product launch as well.

Create A Social Media Account Only For Your Product

Your brand must have already been out there selling various products so far. And this is a new product where you want to do even more.

The best way to escalate your product launch apart from your existing products and business operations is to create a social media account dedicated to your new product.

One of the best options to create a separate account is on Instagram. However, it depends upon what kind of product you are launching.

Image Source: Sellfy

If it is related to lifestyle, beauty, photography, or something that might resonate much on Instagram, then a dedicated Instagram account on your product name will be great.

A Facebook business page or group can be a great option if it is a new course or program.

A separate account will help you focus on completing this particular product, so all your content will be around it only.

The direct link to buy the product will always be in the bio section of Instagram.

This will also help when you have a different or unique product to market differently than your other products.

Target All The Major Media Outlets

The amount of content or information an average person consumes daily can be limited. So, clearly, there is competition to grab people’s attention.

In order to really reach out massively to a large number of people, you need to target all the major media outlets.

Image Source: Kaspersky

Follow the right strategy, and you will land one or two major media organizations.

Make sure you pitch yourself as an expert in a particular niche or industry. A thumb rule to selling something in the room is to offer what they want.

So make sure you research to find out what story segments producers want to publish or air. They are always looking for experts, so just ensure they are in the right place.

Create your pitch interesting and engaging, along with a sensational hook. Also, add some actionable advice as well.

Promoting Giveaways With the Help Of Influencers

Giveaways are one of the most assured ways to build anticipation and buzz about your product. The idea really never fails, as people love giveaways and are keen to participate in them.

Giveaways help you get a small part of your target audience by offering free samples of your product.

So they mostly do reviews about the product and share their opinion convincing people to make purchases.

Image Source: Easypromos

But giveaways on their own become difficult to cut through the pile of content on the web, so it often fails to broaden their reach and make it to the target audience.

So what you need is to promote your giveaways to your target audience. The best way to do that is through influencers.

If you collaborate with the right influencers, they will introduce your new product to relevant and potential customers.

These will be more active customers, more likely to buy from you than others. Influencer marketing generates great ROI and high-quality leads.

Tell People How Your Product Gets Made

People always fall for behind-the-scenes and making-of content as it is entertaining, interesting, and informative to see how anything gets made.

It’s a great way to preheat the market by generating interest in your product.

To begin with, these kinds of content are easily made because it is more of a documentation. However, make sure you provide excellent product quality.

Image Source: Startupscene

Also, behind-the-scenes or stories about your product getting made tell about your brand personality and identity.

It also gives your brand a more humane side as you reveal your struggles, motivations, and challenges on the way to get there.

Create videos about :

The inception of the idea to actually get into making
About your team, how you met and collaborate
Behind-the-scenes of production
Footages of meeting rooms and conversations

And much more you can add depending. Just make sure you think of this before everything starts so you can document most of it.