When a digital launch is planned and carried out successfully, it can yield high-volume sales and added benefits that strengthen your brand. We enlisted the expertise of Ariana Rodriguez, Founder of AR & Company, to explain how to plan a successful launch that pays off.
3 Core components for a digital marketing launch
With any digital marketing launch, there are three vital aspects to focus on.
- The product or service being sold: Your product(s) or service needs to be relevant to your target audience and answer a question or solve a problem that they may have. As Jawad Kahn from Tweak Your Biz explains, the product itself may be the thing leading to failure as “they either address a problem that is not big enough to attract large sales volumes, or they do not address one particular problem in detail.”
- Where the launch and sales are handled: You can promote it on your website, in a chosen search engine, or on social media. You can sell on your website or on one of the growing number of social media platforms that offer the ability to sell products. Choose the spaces that will reach your audience the most effectively.
- The customer experience from start to finish. Everything from your ad copy to your product photos to your customer support needs to offer an on-brand and customer-centric experience that leaves them happy.
There are plenty of other details that need to be taken into account when you plan a launch but they should all contribute in some way to these components.
Bad products or services won’t yield interest, poor promotion leads to a lack of knowledge about the product, and, of course, even the most well thought out product and promotion will be taken out at the knees by a poor customer experience. Make sure to create your launch with all of that in mind!
Plan your digital marketing launch using these 8 tips
Have a product or service you are looking to launch soon? We are in your corner to help out. Use the following tips to plot out a launch that gets your products sold and helps build your brand.
1. Narrow down the services, product, or product series you are launching
Trying to promote every product or service that you can offer your audience can easily backfire. Too many options leaves potential customers feeling overwhelmed and spur them to search for simpler alternatives.
Make sure to focus your digital launch on a certain product, series of products, or a specific service or even a service bundle that you are offering. This will help your audience more easily determine if you have what they want and yield you better sales.
2. Kick things off with a flowchart to visualize the process
When we asked Ariana what one of the most helpful tools was for a digital marketing launch, her answer was a flowchart.
“It’ll give you a visual roadmap to help you plot out what this process is,” Ariana explained. “You can’t automate the process if you don’t need to know what’s supposed to happen next or you’re missing steps. Mapping it out allows you to see all of the steps from beginning to end. It forces you to think about what has to happen for your clients to get to this product, whether it’s a physical product or a digital product.”
“Something like this, where you are able to go in and see step by step of what has to happen throughout the process like how people will find your product or what they’re clicking to get to the product (an ad, a directive website, etc.) If they click on the product, where does that take them on your website? “
3. Ask yourself what you could automate
Let’s be real, the ability to automate anything, from the sales process to washing dishes feels like a revolution after handling the task manually. A digital marketing launch is absolutely the situation to use automation to help you get the results you need. It can leave you with more time to reinvest in your business overall or, even better, a bit of extra time to chill out after working hard.
Ariana highlighted that Zapier is an extremely helpful program that you can use to not only plan your launch, but also to figure out different aspects you can automate.
“Once you have that visualization…Zapier is going to be your best friend for trying to automate anything because it can talk to almost every tool and it’s insanely easy to create, especially now that they have their AI builder,” she said. “You add in what needs to happen or how the data needs to move and Zapier creates a Zap for you, the flow map.”
What’s more, when your workflow highlights what customer data needs to move from one platform, like Squarespace or Shopify to an email marketing system, it will make it easier to automate things in a system like Zapier.
4. Pinpoint where you are going to handle promoting and selling
What good is a billboard for a new product if no one who sees it will be interested?
It is vital to determine the locations where you’ll be promoting your product or service and where you’ll actually handle selling it. Maybe they’ll happen on the same platform, such as Instagram or perhaps you’ll handle promotion on social media and have it lead your customers back to your site.
Before you start creating ad banners or social posts, make sure you have these details nailed down and outlined. This will make it clear how you can plot the path for the customer to guide them from consideration to purchase.
5. Create promotional and supportive materials that hold attention
Once you figure out where you are doing your promoting, you can start figuring out what that promotion will look like. This is when you may want to start trying to use lead magnets or trends to attract people to your business and, more specifically, to the products you are launching.
In our article on attracting customers with lead magnets, we pointed out, “Lead magnets can help convert leads into customers, as you establish your expertise in your industry, increasing the credibility and authority of your brand or business.”
- You can learn about five different types of lead magnets that you might try using in your next launch by checking out that blog: Attract Customers To Your Business With Lead Magnets.
If you plan to use social media to help with promotion, you may want to explore our article on Using Paid Social Media Ads to Get More From Your Budget to get some pointers on how to use different platforms to your full advantage. You can also try to promote organically on social media by tapping into trends that will expand the number of people your posts will show up for. You can learn more about this idea with our blog How to Make the Most Out of Trends That Are True to Your Brand.
6. Select when to do the launch with care
Prime examples abound in December, as many business bank on the season of giving to launch or even relaunch their products and services. Or perhaps you could launch a new “Heartbreaker” makeup palette near Valentine’s Day. The right timing for a launch can help you reach a wider and more receptive audience, which increases your chance at making more sales.
7. Set yourself up for success with tracking that gives you vital data
From the first social media post to the months after your launch has successfully….well, launched, there will be a large amount of data to learn from. One of the best things you can do for your business in the long run is to make sure you set things up to collect the data points that help you learn the most about your customers.
The right data can help you now and in the future. As Ariana pointed out, “You’re investing and building and editing as needed as you’re getting the feedback back from people. Make sure you’re not just collecting quantitative data points, you’re also collecting qualitative data on whether people are confused about your product, or whether they have any questions you can answer preemptively in your lead up [to launch] so that people have less pushback to buy.”
This can guide future product creation and launches, making them even more effective and increasing your sales over time by helping you target the right people more accurately.
Once you know what data you need to collect to help your launch succeed, the next step is ensuring you are set up to track those data points accurately. You’ll want to make sure that any data tracking is connected to your chosen platform so that you receive the data automatically.
“Try to track your links with Google Analytics or HubSpot, or even Bitly so you have a link tracker to see who is clicking on your links, when and where they’re coming from, etc, so you have really good data of where your leads are coming from,” Ariana advised. “You need a link tracker and a spreadsheet like Google spreadsheets that will allow you to use formulas and visualize the data and make it possible to track your data daily, weekly, and per launch.”
8. Don’t overdo it
This advice can be applied across the board of course but when it comes to launching a product, you need to find a sweet spot in terms of how you promote it. Too aggressive ad copy or too many social posts and you’ll end up losing customers, rather than gaining them.
An example that Ariana pointed out when brands overdo it is with emails.
“If you’re sending more than three emails a day, you’re overdoing it. It’s too much. I have seen people send emails every hour on the last day of a launch.They may read the emails in the beginning of the launch but they aren’t going to read your emails if you send seven in a day.”
It is also important to remember that the quantity of emails produced at that point can come at the cost of their quality. So what is a marketer to do instead? Create your marketing to serve your customers just as much as your products do.
“I like to tell my people, sell for the human first,” Ariana added. “Let’s be humans first. Understand where people are in their buying process.”
When you partner with a team like RM Creative Services, launching a new product or service can be even easier than before. With services ranging from helping you plot your overall marketing strategy, to getting the right words on the page with our copywriting services, RM Creative can offer as much or as little support as your business needs and get you the spotlight you deserve.
Contact RM Creative Services by sending a message to rachael@rmcsofficial.com or visiting our Contact page.
Written by Brianna Fries, a California-based writer, editor, bookworm, and mother of two. You can contact her at brianna@rmcsofficial.com and discover more of her work at brigibbsis.wordpress.com.