The Best Ways to Pre-sell Your Product Before It Launches

Creating a well-thought-out launch strategy is absolutely essential before promoting a new product. Launching a new product requires time, money, and various resources, and failure can have disastrous results, especially for a new business. Here are a few ways that you can increase your chances of having a successful product launch.

The secret to a successful launch is to always think of the prospects and what they need. It’s why big brands have few qualms about shelling out thousands of dollars in market research. They want to know exactly what their target audience desires before creating a solution to solve their problems or improve their quality of life. Before launching a product, be sure that you understand your customers thought processes and what things may add value to their daily lives before beginning the promotion of your products or services.

Ensure Competitive Advantage

If your industry isn’t highly competitive at the moment, be assured that at some point it will be. Here are a few competitive differentiation questions you should be able to answer before your product goes to market:

• How is your product different from other products offered by your competitors?
• What would make prospective buyers purchase your goods instead of someone else’s?
• Do you have the best prices?
• Do you offer a higher quality product?
• Does your brand convey trust and reliability with your target audience?
• What makes you so special?

Look for ways to do the exact opposite of what your competitors are doing, while still offering the same value and solutions.

Test The Waters

You can avoid the risk of pouring too many resources into a potential product that’s bound to fail, by hiring beta testers to see if the product is viable. Give out samples, conduct user surveys, and create test versions of your product before going to market. This is a great way to get feedback and suggestions on features, price, and desirability. If the overall feedback of your product is negative, then you’ve potentially saved yourself thousands of dollars that can now be allocated toward another product.

Perform Analytics

It’s always necessary to run the numbers and estimate your profit margins before launching your new product. Also, be sure to take a look at your current products and their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Go over the launch strategies that you used during their promotion and the numbers that you achieved to hit your goals. Learning from past mistakes is one of the best ways to determine what revenue goals may be feasible.

If this is your first product launch, use industry standards for each marketing vehicle to establish a baseline of expectations for each one. For example, the response rate for direct mail pieces is around 3.7 percent, so if you send out 50,000 mailers you can expect to average around 1850 responses.

Give Consumers A Nibble

Build anticipation of your new product by releasing limited editions and free versions, giving away samples, and building up a fanbase before your launch. Creating hype is a great way to build a list of evangelists that can attest to the “greatness” of your product in video ads, reviews, and on social media. Social proof will always be a huge incentive for new buyers.

A product launch that meets or comes close to revenue targets is only possible through careful planning and adequate market research. Be sure to look at the feedback when testing your product before it hits the market, as this could save you a lot of money come launch time.

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