Putting a product on the market is an important thing for businesses. Whether it is an upgraded version of an earlier product or service, the launching plan is also the deciding factor for its success. So, what strategy should businesses use to successfully launch new products? This article will give you details of a one-by-one digital marketing strategy to boost product launch for SMEs.
1. Inbound Marketing
Providing valuable content might take time to get results but it’s the most solid digital marketing for a long journey.
The inbound methodology can be applied in 3 ways:
– Attract: Start by creating and publishing valuable content on social media, blog articles, and other channels. For instance, the topic you can stick to should be related to your product and provide useful knowledge as much as possible.
Attracting tools: Ads, video, blogging, social media, content strategy.
– Engage: Having a long-term relationship with customers might be the main target in Inbound marketing. Besides that, ensure you have 2 ways of communicating with leads. To succeed at this stage, bear in mind that you’re selling solutions, not selling products.
Engaging tools: Lead flows, email marketing, lead management, conversational bots, marketing automation.
– Delight: This is the stage to maintain customer happiness after making a purchase. You can use chatbots or surveys to assist and support this task. Choose the appropriate time to ensure that it makes sense.
Delight tools: Smart content, Email marketing, conversations inbox, attribution reporting, marketing automation.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO can bring your content to the right customers in the Search Engine Result Page (SERP). In SEO, you need to focus on 8 features:
– Title tag and meta description: This is the sentence that is going to appear in the SERP. It’s also the first impression your audience has about your website. The whole keyword should be included in this sentence and as close to the beginning as possible.
– Headlines: Come up with several headline options that all include your target keyword. Headlines score based on common headline types, character count, pixel length, etc.
– Content: Good content maintains the reading time which perfectly improves trust with Google.
– Keyword: Think of how new users would research your product and use it wisely. Remember that Google will penalize overuse keywords. So the keyword density should be lower than 1.5% to the number of words in your content.
– Image optimization: inset the keyword into the image information in the most natural way.
– Site speed (both web and mobile): This can improve users’ experience which sites as one of the leading SEO factors for years. Google offers PageSpeed Insight to help you indicate what you need to change in order to decrease the loading time.
– Links: Google uses inbound links as one way to determine how authoritative and relevant your content is. At the same time, outbound links are related to sites that improve the quality of your content. Finally, internal links connect pages together which makes them more valuable and trustable.
– Authority: More than half of the sites in the top ten Google search ranking are three years old or more? So if you’ve had your site for a while, it’s a big advantage. You can check the DA for free at Small SEO Tools.
3. Word of Mouth
Word of mouth marketing statistic:
– Nielsen reports that 92% of consumers believe suggestions from their friends and family more than advertising.
– Beyond friends and family, 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.
– And 74% of consumers identify word of mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions.
– 72% say reading positive customer reviews increases their trust in a business, it takes, on average, 2-6 reviews to get 56% of them to this point.
How to build a Word of Mouth strategy for a product launch?
3.1 Start with your employees
Who is more trustable than people working in your own company? The worker who joins their own hands to grow the product is the one who is clearest about its quality. If your staff are really satisfied with your product, they’ll be happy to share their thoughts and feelings.
3.2 Encourage user-generated content
User-generated content is content created and shared by consumers. Encourage your customers to engage more with your brand on social media, by creating share-friendly content like contests, polls, or fun quizzes and have them tag it with a shareable hashtag. Create a sense of community to provoke UGC, then showcase it prominently on your website or main profile.
3.3 Share customer testimonials/reviews
For a newbie product in the market, getting a valuable testimonial/review is a tough task. The outcome, however, is completely worth trying. Posting testimonials or reviews can greatly push your credibility.
Testimonials and reviews can be a showcase as a short text or video that you can repost on your channels.
3.4 Get Product rating
Depending on your product, you can add a rating bar to your website and ask your customers to rate with a short description. Of course, good reviews can produce up to a 28% increase in sales.
3.5 Connect influencers
The name of this strategy says it all a person who has a strong following and power to influence is undoubtedly the most valuable WOMM solution.
Explore more b2b marketing strategies for SaaS products.
4. Make contests
Contest marketing can be a powerful way to utilize social competition to drive brand awareness, promote your product launch and get more new leads into the sales funnel.
There’re some sampling contest marketing campaigns that you might consider:
– Event-based contests: held on specific occasions such as holidays or special events: Halloween, Christmas, Black Friday.
– Polls: This is a great way to gain information by offering multiple-choice questions as a market research tool.
– Photo contest: This is the right way to promote user-generated content by provoking visuals to draw crowds and capturing the interest of your target audience.
– Giveaways: just ensure you suggest some basic requirements for the giveaway as a method for gaining engagement and sales.
– Quiz: People prefer short, funny questions and potentially win a prize. You can use this contest to get user insight into customers’ knowledge of specific brand-related questions.
5. Email marketing strategy
In short, Email can help announce a new product, a new feature, or a new release. It’s a series of emails to get people excited about what’s coming. To create a successful product launch campaign, an email marketing strategy consists of three stages:
Preparation
Collect email addresses from people who are interested in your new product.
The hint
Once you have enough subscribers, it’s time to email them. However, don’t promote your product immediately. Give your subscribers a hint then incentivize them to share about your launch to their circle. As the launching day gets close, email your subscribers about it to make them eagerly wait for your launch email.
The reveal
It’s time to show the most interesting part of your product. Design an eye-catching email that includes a relevant CTA that drives traffic to your site.
6. Social networks
Define your goals
When it comes to a social media campaign, it’s important to start with goals and KPIs. Once you have a clear goal, moving up to strategies to achieve it.
For a successful launch, your goal could be building good brand awareness, building engagement, growing your email list, or stimulating them to walk through your physical store.
Map out your content calendar
Timing is important in planning a new product launch strategy if you don’t want everything to work in a stable timeline. Define your launching day as a starting point then schedule backward from there. For example
Kick-off your channel (Day 1-10)
Pre-launch contest (Day 11-15)
Launch day (Day 16)
Post-launch day (Day 17-22)
Mention your new product in your regular content schedule, or plan additional activations to keep up the momentum (Day 22-30)
Stick with your goal throughout the campaign. Review and track regularly to ensure it follows your previous plan probably.
Select media channel
The right social media channel is the one that fits the customer demographic. Each channel is suitable for a distinguished group of customers.
Normally, Facebook is a big community where you can reach almost all customers. Meanwhile, Instagram is more suitable for gen Z who is at a young age. Instagram prefers users who love photos, art, and fashion while LinkedIn is a good solution for B2B business.
Create “Coming soon” content
Instead of reviewing every new product, a “coming soon” post can greatly stimulate customers’ curiosity.
Many brands use cryptic content to provoke people to guess and engage. As a result, customers keep following up on the big reveal.
Besides, you can consider countdown or product preview posts which can easily remind followers of your product launch.
Why should you outsource a marketing agency to launch your product?
7. Influencers and Bloggers strategy
With the power of Influencers and bloggers, they can help you to gain much more awareness, and educate new audiences on the features of the product. This is considering one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for a product launch campaign.
Give Influencers early access
That’ll give them plenty of time to use and review. Likewise, their audiences will have time to ask and get the answer that they are concerned about. This method not only produces strong engagement and excitement but also provides a lot of beforehand information about the upcoming product. When someone with significant influence on your target audience says positive things about your product, it’s can build significant hype and establish trust.
Choose the right Influencer Partners
What is your industry? Connect an influencer who has a special knack that is highly relevant to your product. They’re able to create an interesting story to describe products in a way that perfectly resonates.
Contest & giveaways
Social media contests can gain better results with influencers. It can drive lots of UGC and word-of-mouth marketing as well as get audience awareness expressively.
8. Social ads
Social media is becoming a usual platform for brands to advertise themselves. Moreover, social advertising is very profitable as it allows creating a campaign for a wide range of business objectives at a reduced cost.
Choose a place to run your ads and consider these types of social ads below:
Photo ads
Facebook’s internal data show that a series of photo ads can gain more unique traffic than other types of ad formats.
Besides, use a mockup to showcase your app. Preferring showing how to use it than just the screenshot of the product itself
Video ads
Facebook video ad options range from short, looping video clips that autoplay in users’ feeds. Big tip: Shorten your video to get higher completion rates.
Stories ads
For this type of ad, photos display for 6 seconds and videos can last up to 15s. In addition, stories only last for 24 hours, so this is a great format for “moment marketing”. Remember, make your ads simple and easy to understand.
Carousel ads
Carousel ads allow you to post 10 images or videos. These types of ads are perfect for showing the different features of a product. Especially for explaining a step-by-step process, or presenting multiple products/services.
Slideshow ads
This is an ad that creates a video from images. If you don’t have professional photography, stock photos can be a good solution to help you express your brand video.
Collection ads
A collection ad highlights your products right in the Facebook feed. The collection ad includes a cover photo or video, plus four smaller images with pricing and other details.
Pro tip: Collection ads work especially well for retail and travel brands.
Messenger ads
Messenger ads are simply Facebook ads placed in the Messenger app. They’ll appear between conversations.
For more information, the messenger has over 1.3 billion users every month—many of whom aren’t even Facebook users. So, get chatting.
How Enosta can help?
Which digital marketing strategy will you choose to boost product launch for SMEs. If it’s not fit for your business, let the experts help you. Enosta is a strong marketing team that can bring you the most results.
With broad experience in digital marketing and new product launching plan. Enosta’s team will provide suitable advice to the business. Besides that, we will give effective strategies to bring your products to market successfully and reach a range of customers.
Providing an affordable price package, Enosta Agency is a worth-to-consider marketing solution for SMEs and startup companies.
Contact us to bloom your business!
