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How to create a marketing plan for your new product (Checklist)

Rachel Burns

November 05, 2021

Your marketing strategy can mean the difference between stellar sales and a disappointing launch. Create a marketing plan for your product launch with this checklist.

A wise person once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

When it comes to launching a new digital product, we couldn’t agree more.

After hours of brainstorming, research, and hard work, you’re finally ready to launch and sell your digital product . The last thing you want is a disappointing launch day.

That’s where planning ahead comes into play. A solid product marketing plan can mean the difference between a $10,000 launch day and a failed product launch . And you don’t have to be a marketing pro to create that plan.

To help you get set up for success, we put together a six-point checklist for building your marketing plan. Follow these steps to create a marketing roadmap you can use for every new product launch.

Podia’s all-in-one platform makes it easy to sell and market your digital products, and you can use it completely free. Start planning your successful product launch today!

Product launch marketing plan checklist

Download a PDF of the checklist here .

Step 1: Set goals for your product launch

You can have the biggest marketing budget and the fanciest tools, but until you set goals, your marketing plan is like a ship without a rudder: directionless.

Marketers tend to have a bad habit of setting vague goals. We say things like “make more sales” and “drive engagement” without really digging into what meeting those goals looks like in action.

Why do we do that? For one thing, it’s hard to recommend specific universal marketing goals or ways to measure success. Every creator has different key performance indicators (KPIs) depending on their goals.

Setting goals that are specific to your business, brand, and product can help you select which metrics to track leading up to your launch.

For example, if your goal is to collect pre-launch signups for your new online course, you might track the number of website visitors who sign up for your pre-launch email updates.

On the other hand, if your goal is to convert new customers through social media ads, you would track how many people click on your Facebook ads, and how many of those visitors then purchase your product.

To set the right goals for your marketing plan, we recommend the SMART goal framework.

With the SMART goal framework, you design your goals to meet five criteria:

Specific: Set detailed goals that narrow in on a particular part of your business.

Measurable: Make sure that you can quantify your goal and track your progress.

Attainable: It’s fun to dream big, but pie-in-the-sky goals can quickly become discouraging. Keep your goal challenging but achievable.

Relevant: Check that your goal aligns with your values, brand, and overall business goals.

Time-bound: Give yourself a realistic deadline to achieve your goal. Deadlines hold us accountable and give us a timeline to work towards.

For example, say you’re a month out from launch day for your new online course. You want to validate your product idea and grow your email list by gathering pre-launch signups .

Your SMART goal might be: “By adding a pre-launch landing page to my website, I will collect 100 pre-launch email signups before launch day next month.”

With specific metrics in mind, a realistic goal, and an action plan to get there, you can set yourself up for a successful launch. What that action plan looks like depends on a variety of factors — including your audience.

Step 2: Define your target audience

One of the most important questions to ask before starting a new business is, “Who is my target market?”

That question is just as valuable when planning for the launch of a new product.

Here’s why: You can’t market your product if you don’t know who you’re marketing to.

Your target audience is the group of potential customers you plan to sell your products or services to. To make your marketing as effective as possible, you need to get to know your potential customers as people, not just demographics.

That’s where buyer personas come in.

Content marketing consultant Amy Wright explains : “Buyer personas describe who your ideal customers are, what their days are like, the challenges they face, and how they make decisions.”

A buyer persona might look like this example of one of Spotify’s target customers:

To build your buyer persona, it’s time to do some customer research and discover what your audience wants to learn, achieve, and buy.

Look at forums, online communities, and reviews for products in your niche. Ask yourself:

What are my target customers talking about online?

What challenges do they face?

What are their goals?

What do they value?

What language do they use?

When you learn how your audience talks and thinks, you can better communicate why your new product is a great fit for them.

If you have an online community of your own, don’t be afraid to ask them directly what they’re looking for. Reach out to your brand community , email list, and social media followers and ask them to share their feedback.

Your audience wants to share their feedback and ideas with you. 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them, and 90% of consumers have a more favorable view of businesses that ask them for feedback.

When you create discussions in your brand community, you can build connections and bond over shared values. You get to know your target audience more personally, which helps you create marketing messaging that resonates with them.

You can even ask your existing customers to test out and share feedback on a prototype of your new product .

One great example of learning from your customers comes from Tiffany Williams, founder of CEO InsideHER .

Tiffany learned what her audience valued by asking them directly. “I just ask my audience what they want, what they want to learn, and if it matches something that I have done, and I have been successful with, then I teach it to them,” Tiffany shared with us .

Getting to know her customers helped Tiffany build a membership community of nearly 40K entrepreneurs and sell digital products that help her audience grow their own businesses.

(Podia makes it easy for creators like Tiffany to build brand communities, connect with their audience, and sell digital products, all from one platform. Give Podia a try for free today .)

Overall, the better you get to know your target audience, the more you can tailor your marketing to fit their needs and show them how your product can help them succeed. You’ll need that info in this next step.

Step 3: Establish your unique selling proposition (USP)

Once you know all about your target audience’s pain points, needs, and goals, you can define your unique selling proposition (USP).

Start with the result you want to offer your customer, then work backward to determine how your product achieves that result. That’s your USP.

Your USP, also called your value proposition , answers two questions:

What problem does my product solve for my customers?

What makes my product different from my competitors?

When you define your USP, you’re reaffirming that your product helps your audience meet their goals or overcome a real obstacle. And that’s a key piece of a successful product launch. 35% of startups fail because there’s no market need for their products or services.

In other words, there’s no product-market fit. Your product-market fit is how well your product meets customer demand. Your USP pinpoints that product-market fit and explains what sets you apart from the competition and makes potential customers choose you.

If you aren’t sure what makes your product stand out, conduct market research to learn more about your competitors.

Are there any pain points your competitors don’t address? What does your product do differently? You might have a course with more visual lessons than others on the same topic, or maybe your experience gives you a different perspective from other creators in your niche.

Your USP also helps you figure out how to market your product.

Take Death Wish Coffee , for example. Most coffee brands highlight features like smoothness or flavor, but Death Wish takes a unique approach, claiming to be “the world’s strongest coffee”.

Death Wish knows that their ideal customer wants extra-strong, kick-in-the-pants coffee, so their marketing messaging highlights that differentiator. Their USP might not appeal to every coffee drinker, but it showcases what makes them unique and is tailored to their target market.

All in all, when you know what makes your product special, you can highlight that in your messaging. Use the same language that your target audience uses when talking about their pain points. Your messaging will resonate with the right customers.

You’re nearly ready to share that messaging with the world — but first, let’s make sure you can do it without breaking the bank.

Step 4: Determine your marketing budget

As a creator, you probably don’t have the budget to hire an outbound sales team and in-house marketing staff, and that’s okay. But you need to figure out how much you can afford to spend on marketing before you start running ads or commissioning designs.

How much money you set aside for marketing depends on your overall budget, product launch goals, and how many tasks you outsource vs. handle in-house.

The good news is that you don’t need a six-figure marketing budget to execute a successful strategy. In fact, more than one-third of small businesses spend less than $10,000 on advertising each year.

As you figure out your budget, you may want to allocate money to costs like:

Software and tools to create content, communicate with your audience, and manage campaigns.

Freelancers, like graphic designers, copywriters, video editors, and web designers.

Paid advertising, such as sponsored content, paid search ads, and social media ads. (We’ll talk more about paid social ads in the next section.)

If you can’t afford to hire freelancers or buy high-end software, don’t worry. You can still create a high-quality marketing campaign on a budget. Here are some resources that can help:

12 best free tools for creators selling digital products

How to create social media graphics (no Photoshop required)

6 video editing tips you can learn this weekend

11 free SEO tools for infopreneurs and creators

With your budget in hand, you’re ready to move on to step five and pick the right marketing platforms for your product launch.

Step 5: Choose your marketing channels

As you’ve hopefully realized by now, there’s no one-size-fits-all way to promote a new product .

Different tactics resonate with different audiences, and not every platform will work for every creator, budget, and product.

Plus, there are more digital marketing channels out there than any one creator could tackle on their own, so it’s essential to find the right ones for you and your customers.

Here are a few of the most popular channels to consider including in your marketing plan.

Email marketing

Email marketing is a must-have in any digital marketing strategy. Over 4 billion people will use email this year, collectively sending about 320 billion emails per day.

Marketers and customers alike love email. 73% of consumers rank email as their top channel for marketing messages, and 59% of marketers cited email as their top source of ROI in 2018.

Email is also an affordable option for small businesses with a tight marketing budget. At around $42 for every $1 spent , email has one of the highest returns on investment (ROI) of any marketing channel.

To use email marketing in your product launch campaign, you need two things: an email list and an email marketing platform .

One way to encourage potential customers to sign up for your email list is via lead magnets . A lead magnet is a high-quality resource, like a free digital download , that users receive in exchange for their email address.

Here are some resources to help you grow your email list, choose an email platform, and make the most of your email marketing:

5 proven ways to build your email list fast

Create your first lead magnet in 90 minutes or less (+5 ideas)

5 steps for writing sales emails that convert (+ Templates)

14 digital marketing email templates for every awareness level

6 email metrics to start tracking ASAP

Social media marketing

59% of Gen Z and 55% of millennials discover products on social media, so it’s no surprise that many creators and entrepreneurs use social media to sell digital products .

You can find the best social media platforms for your small business by figuring out where your customer base already spends their time online. Then, decide if you’ll use organic vs. paid social media advertising .

Social media marketing works best when you combine organic and paid initiatives. Organic social media marketing lets you engage with your community and potential customers, while paid social ads help you get more eyes on your products.

To build some buzz around your new product, Twitter is a solid choice. For example, designer and marketing expert John D Saunders used a video on Twitter to announce a new online course:

John’s video let his audience know what to expect from the course and saw high engagement with 30+ retweets and over 200 likes.

Engaging his audience on Twitter and beyond also helped John earn $10,000 on launch day and $100,000 overall from his first course on Podia.

On the paid social side, ultra-specific targeting tools help you reach more of the right people faster than organic can. Over 62% of marketers say that paid social media advertising has been at least somewhat effective for their business.

Facebook ads are an affordable choice for small businesses and solopreneurs to get their new products in front of a larger audience. For example, business coach Melyssa Griffin used this video ad to promote her Pinterest workshop for bloggers.

With the right audience targeting in place, Facebook ads like Melyssa’s translate to digital product sales for creators.

Here are some additional resources to help you master social media marketing:

Guide to Facebook ads for digital product entrepreneurs

How to use Twitter for your small business

The real 411 on using social media for small online businesses

The 9 best social media management tools for entrepreneurs

Content marketing

Content marketing costs 62% less and can generate more than three times as many leads as traditional marketing. It’s an affordable way to reach your audience, establish your expertise, and build relationships with prospective customers.

80% of people read, watched, or listened to a piece of content from a brand in the last year. That content can include videos, visual content like infographics, live and pre-recorded webinars , and, of course, blog articles.

Here’s how starting a blog can play a big role in a successful product launch:

Your ideal customers discover your blog content through search or other distribution channels.

They learn from your articles and begin to trust your expertise.

They sign up for your email list or follow you on social media.

You keep them updated about your product launch.

They’re excited to buy your new product, support you, and continue to learn from you.

The key here is to create blog posts that provide real value, not just longform product ad copy.

For example, if you’re selling an online course on dog training, you could write a blog post about high-value vs. low-value treats to reward your dog. Your followers will come to trust your dog training expertise, making them more likely to buy your course as soon as it launches.

Make sure to write your blog content with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind. SEO makes it easier for your target audience to find you when searching for relevant keywords and phrases. That’s why nearly 64% of marketers actively invest time in SEO.

Here are some resources to help you get started with SEO and content marketing:

A step-by-step guide to SEO for selling digital products

Simple SEO tips that require no technical skills

How to give away free content and make more sales in 3 steps

The best video marketing strategies for beginners

How to use webinars to launch online courses

Website and landing pages

Picture this: Your launch marketing is all going according to plan.

Potential customers are flocking to your website, ready to learn more about your product, sign up for pre-launch updates, and eventually make a purchase. Now, you need a landing page that makes all your hard work pay off.

Before your product goes live, you can create a pre-launch landing page. Pre-launching your product has two big benefits:

Validating your product ideas.

Building your email list leading up to your product launch.

On your pre-launch landing page, include a short description of your new product and tell visitors why they should sign up to learn more and get notified when you launch.

Come launch day, that pre-launch page becomes a product page that, with the right copy, turns visitors into buyers. You don’t have to be a professional copywriter to craft a sales page that converts . You just need to help your potential customers answer, “Is this for me?”

To answer that question as you write your sales copy , go back to the USP you established in step three. Focus on your product’s benefits rather than its features. A feature is a part of your product, while a benefit is the impact that feature has on your customer.

Take a look at Nicole Saidy’s product description for her online course, Become a UI/UX Designer.

Nicole understands that transitioning to user experience design can be overwhelming — but she’s here to help. She helps her audience determine if the product is right for them by speaking directly to their pain points.

Here are a few more resources on crafting landing and product pages that bring in sales:

5 persuasive copywriting techniques for better product pages

5 tips for writing product descriptions that convert

The digital creator’s guide to landing pages

5 strategies for better sales writing

With your marketing channels chosen, you may think you’ve reached the end of the checklist. But there’s one more vital step to make the most of your product launch marketing and set yourself up for success — now and for many product launches to come.

Step 6: Track your results and keep iterating

Our sixth and final step, tracking your results and iterating on your marketing, is more of an ongoing process than a checklist task.

During and after your product launch, revisit the goals you set in step one. If you’re not meeting your goals, you have an opportunity to learn and make changes for next time or even update your current marketing activities.

For example, let’s say your email marketing campaigns aren’t performing as well as you expected. Your open and click-through rates are lower than you’d like them to be, but you still have time to make changes before launch day. It may be time to run some A/B tests .

A/B testing (or split testing) involves changing different elements of your email one at a time, then seeing how those changes affect your performance.

If you were A/B testing different subject lines, for instance, your subscribers would receive identical emails except for the subject line. By comparing the two open rates, you can see which subject line performs better, then use that knowledge in future email campaigns.

Above all else, remember that trying new things and allowing yourself to make and learn from mistakes helps you grow as a creator.

Maybe you discover that a certain marketing channel isn’t the right fit for your business or audience. That’s valuable information to bring into your next product launch plan.

In fact, Python developer and successful course instructor Reuven Lerner recommends experimenting with different marketing channels to find what works best for you.

“Experiment! It’s hard to know how to market online, and every group of potential customers is a bit different. So you’ll have to experiment to find out what’s effective (and what isn’t). With everything you do, consider, measure, and then modify your techniques to improve them. There’s no one magic bullet here!”

It can feel discouraging to discover that your marketing efforts aren’t getting results, but embracing the experiments that don’t work out is a major part of succeeding in business . Ryan Kulp, founder of Micro Acquisitions , explains:

“To run a successful business, you have to first get comfortable running an unsuccessful business, because most of the time, success comes later.”

In the Startup Curve , coined by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham , failure is a standard phase that happens right before your business starts heading upward toward scaling and growth.

Business coach Minessa Konecky agrees . “I think that what we really need to do is look upon past failures and mistakes as wells of information that we can then use to feed whatever it is that we’re doing now.”

Bottom line:

Don’t be afraid to experiment with your marketing to find what works best for you, your brand, and your audience. With your goals in mind and a little patience, you’ll be well on your way to an effective launch strategy that you can use for many product launches to come.

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Craft a go-to-market plan for launch day success

You’ve worked hard to create a product your audience will love. A successful marketing plan can help all that hard work pay off come launch day.

To recap, here are the six steps to create a marketing plan for your product launch:

Set SMART goals for your product launch. Figure out what a successful launch means to you and which metrics you’ll track.

Define your target audience and get to know them as people, not just demographics. Conduct customer research and talk to them to learn more about their challenges and goals.

Establish your unique selling proposition (USP). What makes your product the best choice for your ideal customer? How do you stand out from the competition?

Determine your marketing budget. You don’t need to spend an arm and a leg to create a marketing campaign that drives sales.

Pick your marketing channels. Email marketing is a must-have, but there are a variety of other platforms out there to choose from. Figure out which ones align with your audience and goals.

Track your results and keep iterating on your marketing strategy. The more you learn about your customers, the more successful your next product launch marketing plan will be.

Remember, you probably won’t get it 100% right the first time, and that’s okay. It may take some trial and error, but once you figure out what works for you and your customers, you’ll be a product marketing pro with the launch day sales to prove it.

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About the author

Rachel is a content marketer for Podia , an all-in-one platform where online courses, digital downloads, and communities scale with their creators. When she’s not writing, you can find her rescuing dogs, baking something, or extolling the virtue of the Oxford comma.

How To Create a Product Launch Marketing Plan in 6 Steps

Learn how to create a strong product launch marketing plan for your new product. We cover the 6 key steps to take when developing a go-to-market product strategy.

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rom Cheeto-flavored lip balm to New Coke to Google+, new products flop all the time. 

Recent statistics suggest that of all new products launched by companies today, only 40% survive in the market , and of those, just 60% generate any revenue.

New products can fail for a variety of reasons. Having a strong go-to-market strategy, or a product-specific marketing plan, can help ensure your product launch goes well ‚Äì and sets you up to measure success and learn from missteps. 

Creating a marketing plan for a new product launch involves outlining the strategies, objectives, target market, budget, and tactics to achieve your company's goals. It typically includes a timeline, budget, key performance indicators, and other measurements to determine the success of the plan.

A successful product launch comprises six essential steps. As a small business owner, clearly understanding each of these product marketing elements will empower you to confidently launch a new product.

Step #1 - Target Market Analysis

Target market analysis focuses on understanding a company's most likely customer base. This can be brand-wide, but when it comes to a go-to-market strategy, the focus must be on one product's target market.

Target market analysis involves researching and analyzing the characteristics of the company's existing and potential customers, such as their age, gender, income level, geographical location, and purchasing habits.

With this information, businesses can create a marketing plan that tailors messaging around a new product to the needs of their target market.

Six steps to identifying and defining your target market

• Research : Conduct research to understand the potential customer base for the new product. This may involve analyzing existing customer data and sales trends, researching competitors and their customer bases, and understanding the needs of the market.
• Segmentation : Segment the potential customer base into smaller, more defined groups based on demographics, interests, and needs.
• Profiling : Create customer profiles based on the segmentation data. Include demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information.
• Prioritize : Prioritize the customer segments based on their potential to benefit from the new product.
• Define : Identify the most relevant customer segments and outline the ideal customer's characteristics.
• Test : Test the target market definition by conducting market research or focus groups with potential customers. Make adjustments to the target market definition, if necessary.

Target market analysis in action

Target market analysis is an ongoing process. For example, the Harman brothers originally marketed Mountain Dew to Appalachia's tough mountaineers. However, its target audience has evolved drastically over time. 

Starting in the 90s, it became the official beverage of extreme sports. Then, its demographic shifted again to gamers due to its high caffeine content. Currently, Mountain Dew is dedicating 40% of its budget to targeting gamers in need of an energy boost.

Step #2 - Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis is a process of gathering and analyzing data about competitors and their strategies. It helps businesses identify their competitors' strengths and weaknesses, identify opportunities and threats in the market, and develop strategies to outperform the competition.

Tips for identifying and researching your competitors

• Use online search tools : Start by researching your competitors online. Use search engines to find out what content they're creating, what keywords they're targeting, what channels they're using, and so on.
• Follow their social media accounts : Follow your competitors' social media accounts to stay up to date on their products, services, and promotions.
• Subscribe to their email lists : Sign up for your competitors' email lists to get an inside look at their offers and strategies.
• Monitor online reviews : Stay on top of online reviews for your competitors' products and services. This can help you identify customer pain points and areas of improvement.

Note inspiration from strengths and opportunities in weaknesses

As you gather data on your competitors, make note of where they're succeeding and where they're failing. A competitor's strengths can inspire you because they can motivate you to strive to reach similar heights of success. Their successes can also give you insight into what strategies and tactics are working for them, which can help guide your own efforts. 

At the same time, their weaknesses provide an opportunity for you to capitalize on and potentially overtake them in the marketplace.

Competitive analysis in action

Brand names aren't exactly open with their competitive analysis data. But here's an example of how a bit of competitive analysis gave way to an entirely new industry.

Airbnb was founded in 2008 by roommates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia when a large design conference was coming to San Francisco. The two former Rhode Island School of Design students had an idea to rent out airbeds in their living room to attendees in need of a place to stay since local hotels couldn't keep up with demand. 

They created a website to advertise their loft, and within a week, they had three bookings. They realized that people were willing to pay for unique, authentic accommodation experiences not offered by hotels and that there was a potential for a business.

Step #3 - Product Analysis

Product analysis is a process used to evaluate a product's features, performance, and marketability. It may involve a review of the product's design, functionality, pricing, and target market. 

Product analysis can help you determine whether your product meets customer needs and expectations and provides a competitive advantage. Ultimately, product analysis can help guide product development and marketing decisions, including the details of a go-to-market strategy.

How to define the features and benefits of your new product

When developing a marketing plan for new product launches, a solid list of features and benefits starts the sales process. Here are some steps to extracting each talking point.

• Ask questions : Take time to ask questions about your new product. Consider the needs of your target market and the problems you're trying to solve with your product. List any unique benefits or features the product may have.
• Research competitors : Look at what other similar products are already on the market and what they offer. Identify areas where your product is superior.
• Talk to users : Ask potential buyers questions about what they like or dislike about similar products and what features or benefits they would find most attractive from yours.
• Prioritize : Once you have a list of benefits and features, prioritize them. Use the most important as the pillars for your go-to-market strategy.

Choose a pricing strategy

Consider your pricing strategy options when analyzing your product. Some of the most popular include:

• Cost-Plus Pricing : This is the most common pricing strategy for small businesses. It involves adding a markup to the cost of your product to determine the final price. 
• Value-Based Pricing : This pricing strategy is based on the customer's perceived value of your product. It takes into account the customer's needs and wants, as well as the competition in the market.
• Penetration Pricing : Penetration pricing involves setting a low price for an introductory period in order to capture market share quickly. 
• Bundle Pricing : Bundle pricing involves offering a group of products at a discounted rate. This strategy often encourages customers to purchase more than one item.
• Tiered Pricing : Tiered pricing is a strategy that involves offering different levels of pricing depending on the customer's purchase volume. This encourages customers to purchase more in order to get the best deal.

Developing the packaging and branding for the product

Your product's presentation is just as important as its price and features.

Before beginning the design process of packaging, start with an analysis of your brand to identify the mission, values, and desired message to customers. Consider the type of customer who will interact with the product packaging and how the design should reflect their values. For example, if your buyer persona appreciates green initiatives, use eco-friendly packaging. 

After brainstorming ideas, create a mood board with images, colors, and textures to create a clear vision. Finally, test the design with focus groups or customers to receive feedback.

Product analysis in action

Botanical Bakery's shortbread cookies were truly scrumptious - however, they were lost among the competition before the company gave itself a packaging rebrand. 

This rebranding effort proved to be incredibly successful, leading to a 300% increase in sales for the company. The project included a packaging redesign featuring bright colors, larger fonts, more vivid imagery, and an updated brand story to create a more personal connection with customers.

Once you have a good sense of your competitors' product offerings, your target consumer's needs, and your product's value, you can start to build out your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Your USP will describe why your product or service beats the competition and how it's uniquely positioned to help your target customer. This value proposition should be included in all of your marketing materials.

Step #4 - Marketing Mix (4 Ps)

The marketing mix, also known as the 4 Ps, refers to the four key elements of any successful marketing strategy: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. No go-to-market strategy is complete without a customized marketing mix.

By completing a thorough analysis of your product, you should have this element of the marketing mix handled. Here are some tips for turning all of that data into a landing page with high conversion potential.

• Create a landing page : Start by creating a dedicated landing page specifically designed to promote your product launch. This page should be designed to capture leads, so provide an easy way for visitors to sign up for more information or to purchase your product.
• Incorporate visuals : Images, videos, and GIFs of your product in action can be a great way to capture attention and make your product launch page more engaging.
• Use a call-to-action : Make sure your product launch page includes a clear call-to-action that encourages visitors to take the next step.
• Share customer stories : Use customer stories to show potential customers how your product has helped others. For example, if you release your product early to a select group of users before launching it to the general public, get feedback and reviews from early users to share across your marketing channels.
• Promote your page : Promote your product launch page on social media, in email campaigns, and across other marketing channels.

You should already have chosen a pricing strategy for your product. Now it's time to communicate it.

• Take the time to clearly define your pricing. Include the cost of your product or service, and any discounts, additional fees, and taxes. Make sure to be as transparent as possible.
• Using visuals, like charts, infographics, and illustrations can help to make pricing easier to understand. 
• Offer multiple payment options, like credit cards, PayPal, and other digital payment systems. This will make it easier for customers to pay for your product or service.

This part of the marketing mix process covers where and how customers can buy your product. It involves understanding customers' shopping habits, researching where your competition sells its products, and assessing the best buying experience and after-sales support that can be offered.

It is important to consider if sales reps are needed or if self-service is the best option. Additionally, weighing the cost of giving up revenue through particular distribution channels is important. Your options may include:

• Online Marketplace : Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and other online marketplaces are popular places to sell products as a small business owner. 
• Social Media : Platforms like Instagram and Facebook offer a great way to reach a wide audience and increase sales.
• Retail Stores : You can sell your products in retail stores, either through a third party or by opening your own store.
• Wholesalers : Wholesalers are companies that buy products from manufacturers and then resell them to retailers.
• Trade Shows : Trade shows are great places to showcase and sell your products to a large number of potential buyers.
• OEM Distribution : OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) distribution is when a manufacturer sells products directly to end users, such as through a website or through a network of distributors.

Determining where your product or service is sold will help you choose the right marketing channels to maximize discoverability and conversion.

The promotion portion of a marketing plan for new product launches is where it all starts to come together. When advertising a new product, prioritize quality over quantity when deciding which channels to use. Make sure to customize your approach for each channel and audience segment, generate excitement before the launch, and continue marketing after the initial launch.

Choose your marketing channels

• Research the channels most populated by your target audience. This may include social media channels, websites, television, radio, or print. 
• Consider the type of product you're advertising. Different channels may be more effective for certain types of products. For example, retail products may be best suited for Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Campaigns for B2B products may perform better on LinkedIn.
• Consider the budget available for advertising. Different marketing channels may have different costs, so it is important to consider what channels will provide the most value for your budget.
• Prioritize channels that track and measure results. This will help determine which channels are most effective and should receive more of the budget.

Pre-launch buzz vs. post-launch promotion

Pre-launch buzz is a marketing strategy used to create excitement and anticipation for a product before it has been officially launched. It typically involves activities such as releasing teaser videos, creating websites, and conducting interviews to generate hype and attract potential customers.

Post-launch advertising is a type of marketing that focuses on promoting a product or service after it has already been launched. It typically involves activities such as developing campaigns, running ads, and creating content to attract new customers and increase sales. It can also be used to create brand awareness and loyalty and build relationships with customers.

Your go-to-market strategy should include plans for both pre-launch buzz and post-launch promotion.

Step #5 - Implementation

The goal of the implementation stage is to ensure that the marketing strategy is executed effectively and efficiently. The following tips can help you put your go-to-market strategy to work with minimal hurdles.

Get smart with your goals

SMART goals are a method for setting and achieving goals. The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound:

• Specific goals are clear and unambiguous.
• Measurable goals have easily identifiable metrics for success.
• Attainable goals are realistic and achievable.
• Relevant goals are important and contribute to your overall objectives.
• Time-bound goals have a specific timeline for completion.

SMART goals are great for product launches because they help provide a clear and measurable plan for success. They are also easy to understand, which makes it easier for everyone involved in the project to stay on the same page. 

Establish a budget

Go-to-market strategies don't typically come with endless budgets. Before allocating funds, calculate the cost of each marketing activity, such as advertising, promotional materials, and event costs. Then, a realistic budget for product marketing can be set, with a buffer for unexpected costs. 

Monitor the results of each activity and make adjustments to the budget if necessary. If something is working well, consider increasing the budget for that particular activity.

Allocating resources

There are more than just financial resources to allocate in a go-to-market strategy. You should also outline processes, limits, and guidelines for:

• Human resources
• Material resources
• Time resources
• Technology resources
• Logistics resource
• Legal resources
• Marketing resources

Develop your timeline

Successful implementation of a marketing plan for new product launches relies on timelines that serve as references to track progress. We recommend creating an implementation schedule by working backward from your target launch date.

• Identify the tasks that need to be completed in order to reach the deadline. 
• Estimate the amount of time each task should take. 
• Work backward from the deadline, assigning each task a start and end date. 
• Make sure to account for any potential delays. 
• Reassess the schedule regularly to make sure you are staying on track.

Establish a system for monitoring progress

Monitoring progress after a new product launch is important because it helps identify areas of success and areas that need improvement. 

Companies can use A/B testing to measure the success of different marketing strategies and identify areas for improvement. 

Track key metrics like customer acquisition, customer retention, sales, revenue, website traffic, and user engagement to measure the ongoing success of your product launch.

Plan for the worst, hope for the best

Even with proper planning, a new product launch can fail. In a worst-case scenario, having a contingency plan for a failed product launch in place can help minimize the damage.

A contingency plan should include measures to help minimize potential losses and reposition the product for success. Additionally, offering incentives to customers who have already purchased the product, such as discounts or refunds, should be considered to help maintain customer loyalty and trust.

Reallocating resources to focus on other products or services to help offset any losses incurred from the failed launch may also be beneficial.

With the above tips in mind, you'll be able to ensure a smooth rollout of your marketing campaigns.

Step #6 - Post-Launch: Evaluation and Retention

Post-launch evaluation and retention in a go-to-market strategy is the process of assessing the success of a product launch and developing strategies to retain customers after the launch.

Measure success with a post-mortem review

A project post-mortem is a review process that takes place after a marketing project is completed. It's a time to evaluate what went well, what didn't, and what can be improved for future projects. 

During a post-mortem, you should review the project goals, resources, timeline, budget, and KPIs to identify what worked and what didn't. Make notes of process improvements you plan to make for future projects.

It is important to adjust your product marketing playbook based on data insights and post-mortem evaluations, but not necessary to start from scratch. Make changes to reflect the data and findings while keeping the overall structure and goals in mind.

Develop a retention plan

Developing a retention plan after launch is critical for any business to maintain customer loyalty, encourage additional purchases, and better understand its customer base. 

Suggested strategies include:

• Offer loyalty programs and rewards 
• Create a customer-only community
• Implement automated follow-up emails 
• Offer incentives for referrals

Final Takeaways

Crafting an effective and comprehensive go-to-market strategy requires a lot of thought and effort. Use this cheat sheet as a reference for each essential component.

• Target Market Analysis : Identifying and researching the target audience's characteristics, needs, and wants to create a tailored marketing strategy.
• Competitive Analysis : Analyze the current competition's strengths and weaknesses to identify areas of opportunity and solidify your value proposition.
• Product Analysis : Evaluate the product to ensure it meets customer needs and wants. Determine which features and messaging to emphasize in the marketing strategy.
• Marketing Mix : Develop a unique creative marketing strategy by considering the product, price, place, and promotion of the product.
• Implementation : Execute the go-to-market strategy and ensure all elements are in place for a smooth rollout.
• Post-Launch Evaluation and Retention : Measure the success of the launch, identify areas for improvement, and develop strategies to keep customers engaged and loyal.

A well-thought-out marketing plan clears the runway to launch

Without a calculated marketing plan, a product launch could fail due to a lack of awareness and engagement with the target audience. This could be a costly mistake for small businesses that may not have the resources to recover from a failed launch. 

By implementing the six shared steps above, you can easily develop a marketing plan for new product launches, ensuring each launch is successful.

Novo Platform Inc. strives to provide accurate information but cannot guarantee that this content is correct, complete, or up-to-date. This page is for informational purposes only and is not financial or legal advice nor an endorsement of any third-party products or services. All products and services are presented without warranty. Novo Platform Inc. does not provide any financial or legal advice, and you should consult your own financial, legal, or tax advisors.

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How to Create a Seamless Product Launch Marketing Plan

13 min read

A product launch marketing plan is more than a simple press release announcing your product. It is the process that guides you to a successful product release.

With several product launches occurring every day, you need something special to ensure your announcement doesn’t get lost in the noise.

In this article, we detail what a product launch marketing plan is, why you need one, and how to create a successful product marketing from the start. Let’s begin!

• A product launch marketing plan is a three-phase strategic plan to create product awareness and ensure product launch success.
• A product launch plan provides structure to your launch, enabling you to prioritize resources, prepare for every possibility, and reach potential customers.

Your launch plan should contain the following:

• Detailed market research and competitive analysis that examines the current market state and identifies the needs of your target user .
• A value proposition that explains how the product solves user problems and how it differs from existing options.
• Go-to-market and pricing strategies that detail your marketing plan and preferred sales process.
• Online marketing strategies for social media, emails, press releases, etc.
• KPIs like customer acquisition cost , trial-to-paid conversion rate , customer engagement score , etc. for measuring success.
• For a successful launch campaign, you’ll need to A/B test your messaging and test your product ahead of launch day.
• It’s also important that you create excitement ahead of the launch and ensure synergy between your customer support and sales teams.
• Finally, you must analyze customers’ in-app activities after launch to drive retention.
• To learn how Userpilot can supercharge your in-app marketing plan, book a demo today!

What is a product launch marketing plan?

A product launch marketing plan is a coordinated effort to announce a new product and successfully bring it to market. It is a strategy designed to create awareness and get customers to adopt the product.

The product launch marketing plan is often a three-phase plan divided into:

• Post-launch

Pre-launch phase

The pre-launch phase is all about preparation for the product launch. This is your time to understand your product, the problem it is trying to solve, and how it compares to the competition.

To succeed at this stage, you need to coordinate your marketing efforts with your product team. Join them as they do user tests and chat extensively with them to understand their vision for the product.

This is also the stage where you conduct in-depth market research to understand your target market. Your goal here is to understand potential customers’ pains and how the competition has addressed them so far.

Finally, define your product launch marketing strategy. By the end of this stage, you should have the answer to these questions:

• What is your unique selling point (USP)?
• Who is your target customer?
• What are your preferred channels for advertising, organic visibility, and digital PR?
• Will you partner with any influencers or thought leaders?
• What marketing KPIs will you track after launch?

Launch phase

Pre-launch planning is key to your success on launch day. As your product launch date draws closer, compile the information from the pre-launch phase into a detailed go-to-market strategy .

Then, it’s time for execution. This is your time to create events, press releases, email marketing campaigns , ads, blog content, social media posts, etc., and release them on your pre-determined distribution channels.

This is also your time to leverage influencer marketing and referral programs to generate as much hype as possible.

Post-launch phase

With launch day now behind you, it’s time to retain your new, hard-won customers. Your post-launch plan should, therefore, consist of a detailed customer retention strategy .

This means onboarding your customers to ensure they get the most out of your product. You also need to collect customer feedback and implement any desired changes or upgrades.

Finally, this is the stage where you determine whether you enjoyed a successful product launch. Ask yourself:

• What KPIs are you tracking?
• How did you perform against your targets?
• What lessons can you learn for future product launches?

Why do you need a product launch marketing plan?

A product launch marketing plan provides structure and organization to your launch, helping you properly define your aims and launch timeline. A good launch plan, thus, empowers you for product launch success . How so?

For starters, it enables you to prioritize resources and prepare for most possibilities. A good launch plan also identifies your target audience, online and offline channels to find them, and how best to reach them.

All these increase your chances of reaching potential customers, generating valuable leads, and retaining them long-term. It also reduces any chance of product failure.

What should a product launch marketing plan include?

A product launch is a complex process, often involving multiple steps. To be successful, your product launch marketing plan needs the following:

Market research and target audience

The goal of product marketing is to make sales. For that to happen, the product marketing team must do three things:

• Understand the product and the problem that it solves.
• Determine what your competitors are doing.
• Identify the product’s end user and their unique needs.

All of these are what you’ll set out to achieve with your market research. First, you’ll need to understand what problems your product solves and how it works. Put simply, become a product expert.

Once you’re thoroughly familiar with your product, it’s time to examine the competition. Perform a thorough competitive analysis of their product – branding, marketing strategies, features/functionalities, pricing, etc.

Finally, you need to determine your target market. Who is your ideal customer? What’s their background – job, hobbies, age, etc.? What are their goals and pain points ? In other words, create a detailed user persona .

Product’s value proposition

A good value proposition is key to your product’s positioning or messaging. It refines the narrative around your product, focusing only on the most valuable aspects of the new product.

To create a powerful value proposition, you must answer the following questions:

• Who is your ideal customer? If you’ve already created your user persona, you have the answer to this question.
• What problems are they experiencing? Consider your customers’ pains, hopes, dreams, and needs that your product could address.
• How does your product solve that problem? Figure out how your product addresses the needs of your customer.
• How is your product different? Put differently, what’s your product’s unique selling point? Or, what advantages does your product have over the competition?

Go-to-market strategy

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive roadmap for introducing your product to the target audience. Think of it as a marketing strategy that outlines all you need to do to enjoy a successful product launch.

It identifies your target customer, defines their need, and locates them. Then, it outlines the best marketing strategy (including how best to announce the product and when) to help you reach them.

Your GTM strategy combines all you’ve learned from your market research and crafting your value proposition into a robust market entry roadmap that generates demand for your product and mitigates product launch risks.

Pricing and sales strategy

SaaS pricing models differ from traditional pricing models and should be more carefully considered. Although the subscription model is the preferred SaaS option, you’ll still have some questions to answer.

For instance, would you be better off with a flat-rate, usage-based, feature-based, or tiered monthly price? Likewise, you’ll also need a way to convince prospective customers to commit to ongoing payments.

For this, you’ll have three pricing strategies to consider:

• Free trial: Free trials allow users to test out your product before deciding whether it’s worth the price. This strategy reduces your customer acquisition cost as you optimize for trial-to-paid conversion .
• Freemium: The freemium model is ideal for complex products with multiple features. It exposes customers to a limited feature set, encouraging them to pay to access the full feature list.
• Demo: If your product has a steep learning curve, demos may serve you better. The show-and-tell format of this strategy enables you to qualify prospects before they subscribe.

Digital marketing strategy for various marketing channels

Your GTM product marketing strategy should inform the channels where you’ll find your audience (before and during launch day). Still, you have some decisions to make.

First, you’ll need to decide which channel will be the main one and which would support it. You also need to consider what you’ll share in each channel and when to share it.

For this, you’ll have five primary options:

• Social media marketing: Start creating shareable content and social media posts on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, etc. to enable you to reach a wide audience quickly.
• Press releases: Leverage (or create) relationships with newspapers, magazines, and other online publications to broadcast your launch. Develop clear content for professional media use and send them in advance of your launch date to your selected
• Email marketing: Announcing your product launch to a warm email list with an informative copy and a clear call-to-action.
• Media Outreach: If you do not have existing relationships with journalists, you’ll need to pitch them and explain why your press release deserves attention.
• In-app marketing: This option is ideal for big feature releases as it targets users who have already adopted the product.

Key performance indicators to measure launch success

The final component of your product launch plan is your measure of success. You and your sales team need to determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) to watch after the launch.

Not only do these metrics help you measure the success of your product launch, they also help you optimize the customer journey, improve your product, and fine-tune your content.

Some metrics to track include:

• Customer acquisition cost : The average amount your business spends to acquire one customer.
• Sign-ups to PQL conversion rate : Measures the percentage of new sign-ups that find your product useful and upgrade their account.
• Customer activation rate : The percentage of customers that complete your onboarding process and reach the ‘Aha’ moment .
• Trial to paid conversion rate : Tracks the percentage of customers that go from free trial to paying users.
• Customer engagement score : Measures how much each user engages with key product features and assigns them a score based on their actions/inactions.
• Customer retention rate : The percentage of customers you retain over a period. In SaaS, this often refers to customers who immediately renew their subscription plan.
• Customer Satisfaction Score : Tracks how happy customers are with your new product.
• Net Promoter Score : Assesses how likely a customer is to promote your product, making it a great measure of customer loyalty.

Best practices for a successful product launch marketing plan

Now that you know the different components of your product launch marketing plan, let’s now consider some best practices to ensure your plan yields success.

A/B test the messaging in your marketing materials

Good messaging communicates what your product does and the value it brings. It is simple, persuasive, and unique. Unfortunately, telling which message will best resonate with your target audience is challenging.

Thanks to A/B testing , though, it’s not impossible.

First, you’ll need to create multiple messages. Each message may adopt a different messaging strategy – emotional, positioning, pre-emptive, or unique selling proposition.

Then, you have to expose the messages to small samples of your target audience and see which one drives the most conversion.

Have a group of beta testers evaluate your product pre-launch

Much like your messaging, your product also needs to be tested before launch. Also known as pre-release testing, beta testing helps you get users to explore your product before launch day and provide feedback.

Beta testers get early access to the product in exchange for their feedback. As they use it, capture their stories, review how well they engaged with the product, and validate your value proposition (and messaging) with them.

This is your one chance to get real-world insights from your target customers regarding your product/feature. It’s also a great opportunity to identify and fix all bugs before launch.

Collect customer feedback during the pre-launch stage

Getting user feedback is key to ensuring you’re ready for launch day. You can get feedback for your product through in-app surveys . This will help you iron out any issues users may experience before releasing to a larger audience.

But it doesn’t stop there! You can create focus groups from your customer base and get their insights on your creative materials – texts, images, videos, landing pages, etc.

Note, though, that all of this feedback is only useful if acted upon. As you prepare your product and marketing materials for the big day, be ready to adapt them based on the feedback you receive.

Create excitement over your product before launching

You don’t need Apple-level hype to enjoy a successful product launch. But you don’t have to adopt the “build the product, and the customers will come” approach, either.

The key to a successful product launch campaign is generating excitement in all the right places—leverage search engines, Product Hunt, and social media posts to generate awareness about the launch.

For instance, you may release teaser videos or conduct interviews to get the word out. You can also turn your launch into an event (perhaps a Reddit AMA or a live webinar) to give the launch a more personal feel.

Create sharable content between your sales team and customer support team

Successful product launches are the result of complete internal cooperation and teamwork. As launch day draws closer, for example, you need your customer support team to be well aware of the product and how it works.

This calls for cooperation between the sales, support, and product teams. The product team needs to create easy-to-understand materials that demonstrate the product’s functions and features to the support team.

Similarly, the sales team needs to share content with the support team to enable them to drive home the necessary talking points when approached by prospective customers.

Analyze your in-app marketing strategies to improve customer retention

As earlier noted, a good product launch plan goes beyond the activities of the launch day. As you begin acquiring customers, your focus must shift to retention.

One way to ensure customer loyalty is by regularly improving the product. Analyze how customers interact with your product and ask yourself:

• Which features do they interact with the most?
• Are they interacting with key features?
• Are there any barriers keeping them from finding/using key features?

A solid long-term in-app marketing strategy will unlock your product’s value, eliminate friction, and improve the customer experience.

Examples of successful product launch marketing plans

Thankfully, there are tons of examples of successful SaaS product/feature launches. Consider a few of them:

ChatGPT captured the world’s attention sometime in November 2022. But this was no accident. ChatGPT’s success wasn’t simply a result of its captivating features either (although that certainly helped!).

Instead, it resulted from a carefully orchestrated product launch marketing plan. First, the packaging of the model as a digital assistant made it easy for experts and noobs alike to use it.

Likewise, ChatGPT was very quickly promoted by influencers and thought leaders who encouraged users to ask the assistant any questions. People soon fell in love with its candor, versatility, and consistently factual answers.

The rest, as they say, was history.

Notion already existed long before it released its AI assistant to users, giving it an existing customer base to launch to. Still, they had to get the marketing just right.

First, Notion sent emails and used strategic in-app marketing to introduce users to Notion AI. Interested users were invited to a waitlist. They also used social media marketing to build anticipation within a larger audience.

By the time Notion AI was released, about two million persons had signed up for its alpha waitlist.

Userpilot’s AI writing assistant

Userpilot released its own integrated generative AI writing assistant in May 2023. But, like the two examples above, Userpilot users were already in anticipation of it.

The feature was first introduced in-app and released to a limited number of users. These users tested the feature and left their feedback and insights.

As launch day drew closer, the feature was teased on social media before it was launched on Product Hunt. This created a buzz on Product Hunt, where users saw a demo video of the product’s capabilities.

Finally, by the time the feature was fully released, Userpilot used in-app onboarding and marketing to drive feature adoption.

How Userpilot can help you with your product launch marketing plan

You, too, can replicate Userpilot’s successful in-app marketing strategy for your product launch. In fact, Userpilot provides you with a code-free selection of tools to help you:

Create in-app messaging with different UI elements

Userpilot provides a range of UI elements for announcing new features and running full-scale in-app onboarding or marketing campaigns.

This includes slideouts, modals, banners , tooltips , and more. The first three are ideal for in-app announcements and can contain anything from text content to embedded images, videos, GIFs, etc.

Conversely, tooltips are great for feature explanations. They can also be combined into a series for feature onboarding.

Segment customers acquired for a personalized experience

Create as many user segments as you desire and personalize their in-app experiences.

Userpilot enables you to build user segments based on a variety of factors – code-free. For instance, you could segment users based on their sign-up date, demographics, engagement data, and more.

You can also launch in-app surveys and match users to segments based on their responses to these surveys. Then, you will be able to create flows, messaging, etc. unique to the needs of each segment.

Analyze customer interactions to improve customer retention

Finally, Userpilot enables you to track how users use and interact with your product. In-app engagement analytics reveal which features, buttons, messaging, etc., that users engage with the most.

This will help you identify low-engagement or underperforming features, enabling you to locate and fix any friction points in your product.

A solid product launch campaign gets you off to a great start. It enables you to reach the right customers early and increases the chances of product success.

If you’d love to learn more about how Userpilot can supercharge your in-app marketing campaign, book a demo today!

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How to Create a Marketing Plan for a New Product (2022)

You have developed a new product, hurray! The only problem is that products don’t sell themselves – we need a way to introduce them to our potential audiences. In this article, we will explore different ways of how to create a marketing plan for a new product.

What is a product marketing plan?

A product marketing plan is a map for getting your product out in front of different audiences in the most efficient way possible.

A product marketing plan will help you to conduct market research, find your strengths, explore potential audiences, develop your core marketing messages and choose the right tools for the job. A plan will also keep you on track with different activities you have done and are doing in the future so that you will know what works and what doesn’t.

Now that you know the why’s, let’s start creating the product marketing plan!

1. Know your product

To know where your product stands in the market, we need to start with some research.

Start by answering these questions:

• Example: Our hand sanitizer removes dangerous bacteria from people’s hands and thus reduces the risk of getting sick.
• Example: Our hand sanitizer is easier to apply than most of what is available on the market.
• Example: It’s cheaper, more comfortable to use and smells better .

Depending on your control of the product, we added some advanced ideas that could be useful to you when you start building your product marketing strategy. These include a bit of competition research as well.

When answering these questions, keep your mind open – you could find a unique selling point you didn’t think about before.

• Where will you sell your product?

Will it be sold locally, through an online store or both?

Example: We found out that hand sanitizers are widely available both online and offline. We will try to differentiate from our competitors by only selling hand sanitizers in our online store.

• What is your potential selling price?

Example: We saw hand sanitizers in our size formats be sold between $5 and $15. Because we are trying to be an affordable premium type of product, we will try pricing our hand sanitizer somewhere in the middle.

• What are your costs for producing the product? Are there any other associated costs (shipping etc.)?

If possible, calculate your potential profit margin in different scenarios. This will be crucial when you begin budgeting your marketing efforts.

• How many SKU-s (stock keeping unit) will your product have?

Example: Our product will be sold in 3 different variants.

• Product size

How large is your product? Can you only sell locally or will international selling be a possibility in the future?

• Product durability

How durable is your product? This will affect shipping and handling.

• Consumable or disposable?

Is your product consumable or disposable? Perhaps you could consider a subscription-based marketing strategy?

• Is your product perishable?

Does your product have a long shelf life?

• Are there any specific regulations your product will have to follow?

2. Conduct market research

It’s time to find out how much interest there could be for your new product. There are many ways to conduct market research, but you don’t need to go super-specific on the first go.

You will need to start with some assumptions. For example, if you are selling hair gel for men you could identify how many men there are in the area where you sell, find sales statistics from bigger companies who sell similar products and try to play them out in your numbers.

If you are looking to introduce a new product, you might interview a set number of people to see how they react to your proposition.

To analyze existing needs on the market we could use some tools on the internet. Let’s see what tools we could use to find out more about the potential market size on the  internet .

When researching, keep these 3 things in mind: potential market size, market trend, and seasonality.

• Google Trends

Google Trends  is a great tool to look at different keywords from Google’s perspective. This tool is useful for identifying if your product is in a growing, falling or flat market. It also helps to identify the seasonality of your market.

Check out our guide on how to use Google Trends for market research!

• Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a part of  Google Ads . With this tool, you can see search volumes for different keywords, which could give you some indication and also show signs of seasonality.

https://buzzsumo.com/  is a great tool for seeing what kind of content gets shared around on social platforms. You have to insert a keyword related to your new product to get the information.

3. Define your audience

Now that you know the properties of your product inside-out, it’s time to find out if there’s a good market for it and if so, where.

Let’s start by determining the perfect audiences for your product. Without knowing your audiences, it will be difficult to assess the potential market size.

What is a target audience?

Let’s start by defining what a target audience is.

A target audience is a group of people who share similar behaviors, interests and/or specific demographics. Target audiences are crucial for making marketing strategies, allocating budget, attracting new customers and developing your product.

For example, if you know that your product is mostly used by females, you could try to develop it in a way that is more appealing to women. This is an over-simplification – in reality, you can go much deeper into this topic.

• Find your target audience

Your target audience(s) should be defined by some characteristics like:

This process will be much easier when you already have some data about your buyers. In that case, you could just start from going through the data and identifying who buys your products the most. If you don’t – no worry!

You can make audiences by making logical assumptions about your new product. Some questions that you could ask are:

• Who could be potentially interested in your new product? ( Don’t say “everyone”. Try to go into as much detail as possible. Example: middle-aged women )
• What similar interests do these people have? ( For example, these people could be grouped as “parents”, “students” etc.)
• What topics bind these people together? ( For example, parents might be interested in topics such as “childcare”, “baby food” etc. )

Although these questions only scratch the surface, they could give you some ideas to start developing your target audience(s).

You can find out more about finding target audiences in this wonderful  article  by Hubspot.

• Create a buyer persona (Optional)

The next more advanced step could be to create a buyer persona for your new product.

What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is the profile of your ideal target customer built on audience research. Buyer persona mainly describes who your perfect customer is, but it can go as deep as illustrating their interests, buying decisions, groups they belong to, etc.

Read more about creating buyer personas in this  article  by Hootsuite.

4. Analyze your competitors

Knowing your competition is crucial to stay in the game. More often than not, analyzing competitors will give you a good hint about market dynamics, promotion strategies, targeted audiences and common themes about what things work to bring more sales. Let’s dive into it!

1. Identify your competitors

To find your competitors you could start by searching the internet using platforms like  Google ,  Amazon  and even  Facebook . If your new product doesn’t classify under the standard categories, try to find the closest similar competing products.

2. Sort your competitors by relevancy

After you have found some companies, it’s time to sort them by importance – which ones are more important to follow and which ones you can occasionally check on.

Easy way to categorize your competitors is to sort them in three categories:

• Primary Competitors:  These are the companies that you are competing with head-on. They are selling similar products and to similar audiences like you. These are the companies that your customers might compare you to ( for example BMW and Volvo) .
• Secondary Competitors:  These are the companies who are selling similar products as you but to a different audience ( for example a brand store that sells clothes vs general store which is also selling clothes, but at a different quality and price level) .
• Tertiary Competitors:  These are the companies which do not sell similar products to you, but they market to a similar audience  (for example if the target audience is “college students”, a company that sells school supplies can be a tertiary competitor to a company which sells clothes for younger people) .

When categorizing your competitors, make sure you track the basic information like:

• Name of the company
• Core products
• Strengths and weaknesses

You can add more tracking points as you conduct your research.

Learn more about in-depth competitor analysis  here .

5. Set Goals

After you’ve analyzed your new product and did some market and competition research, it’s time to determine the goals you want to achieve through your new product marketing plan.

Your marketing goals will set the tone for marketing messages, strategy and budget. The most common method for setting marketing goals is using the SMART system, which means your goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

An error many people make in the beginning is setting too broad goals:

• We want to increase sales
• We want to rank number one in Google
• We want to have more website visitors.

Goals like these don’t have a beginning or an ending – they are not specific enough, are difficult to measure and aren’t time-bound. For example, although increasing sales is realistic and attainable, it’s something that should be happening through your marketing activities anyway.

Instead of setting broad goals, you could specify them a bit, for example:

• We want to increase monthly sales revenue by __%
• We want to rank in top 3 on Google for the keyword “best hand sanitizer”, which should bring us around 1500 new visitors each month
• We want to have increase website traffic by 100 monthly visitors

A good resource on setting marketing goals we recommend reading:  How to come up with 2020 marketing goals based on business goals .

6. Develop core marketing messages

Now that you have your goals set, let’s define your core marketing messages which you will use in your marketing strategies. The core marketing message is how you explain your unique value proposition (UVP) to your potential customers. It sets the frame for your strategies, which could be social media advertising, Google Ads, video marketing and so on. Every piece of content you produce should align with your core marketing message. The core marketing message helps you build a recognizable brand voice and gives people something to connect with.

How to develop your core marketing message

• Explain why your product is different and how it can help people.

Try to describe some specific pain points that your product solves for people. Use your competitor research to see how they position themselves and be creative. Find ways to be different and perhaps you can cover some points that your competitors missed in their core marketing message.

• Incorporate stories in your core marketing message

Can you find a way to make your product more personal? Perhaps there is a story as to why you started making your products. For example, some companies include family heritage, secret recipes that have been passed on or some other interesting stories in their core marketing message.

• Don’t make fake promises

Tell people the truth. If there is no basis for miracle benefits that you promise, people will find out eventually. Be as genuine as you possibly can and accurately describe your product.

7. Develop a marketing strategy (game plan)

We have finally arrived at the actionable part of your new product marketing plan! This is the stage where you take your research, market knowledge and start finding ways to reach your marketing goals.

There are countless ways you could reach your potential customers. To keep things from getting too confusing, start by thinking of some categories you could list your ideas under. Since you are selling products, this means you could have 2 different categories, for example,  local marketing strategy  and  international marketing strategy .

For the sake of this example, some ideas for the local marketing strategy could be:

• Participating in different local events;
• Making pop-up stores in malls or places where many people walk by;
• Making locally-focused social media advertisements;
• Writing press releases, content marketing.

Some ideas for your  international marketing strategy  could be:

• Getting your product to Amazon (or other resellers);
• Ranking your website for keywords that describe problems that your product solves;
• Running digital marketing campaigns to sell your product.

 After having these broader topics of what you want to do, you can build out each idea into a roadmap where you will include all the tools and approaches that you will need to implement the idea.

8. Set a budget

The reason we didn’t list the budget before marketing strategy is, that we don’t want to hamper the flow of ideas too early. You might not have a budget for some activities right now, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t put those ideas aside for the future.

We believe the most important things to know when setting a budget for new product marketing activities are  operational costs  and  ROI  (return on investment) needed for justifying the marketing activity cost.

We already know our operational costs from the research we made in the first chapter ( 1. Know your product ) and now it’s time to try to estimate potential ROI different marketing strategies can have.

Sadly, there are no guarantees there, but you can set a minimum ROI needed to keep or leave a marketing strategy. If you know that for example, Google Ads is bringing in a steady 3.0 ROI (for every $1 spent on ads you get $3 in sales), you can calculate what your net profit is and decide if you want to keep advertising there or not.

Keep in mind that on many strategies you could start seeing a return on investment over a longer period (for example branding activities or SEO), so don’t get too eager if you don’t see a return right away. Which brings us to the next point:

9. Tracking progress

Decide on how you will track the progress of different marketing activities. Digital marketing has made our life much easier because we can have all the statistics in numbers – website visitors, online buyers, advertising budget spent per purchase, etc.

We must remember though, that bigger part of marketing still goes on outside of the screens, where it’s not so easy to measure progress and numbers. When doing more traditional marketing, the best way to measure success is by comparing your activities to the sales revenue.

We like to think of marketing as making connections between different things: if you can find a profitable link between marketing activity and an increase in sales, you have already won half of the battle.

10. Set a timeline

Finally, it is crucial to have time boundaries for your activities.

Make a roadmap for when do you want to have your:

• Marketing goals met;
• Set strategies implemented;
• Marketing activities assessed.

Remember, marketing is all about testing and finding the right combinations for your new product.

Good luck with making your new product marketing plan!

Looking for a professional team to scale your online revenue through paid advertising? Contact us today!

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The Beginner’s Guide to a Product Launch

• Table of Contents
• The Product Launch
• Kickoff the Product Launch
• Product Development and the Product Launch
• The Role of the Roadmap in the Product Launch
• Cross-Departmental Engagement
• Set the Stage for Product Launch Success

Product Launch Metrics

• Hone Your Product Launch Pitch
• Download Book

We’ll be discussing the term “product launch” plenty of times throughout this guide. It’s important that we’re aligned on the definition before diving in. A product launch refers to a company’s planned and coordinated effort to debut a new product to the market and make that product generally available for purchase. Product launches help organizations build anticipation for their product, gather valuable feedback from early users, and create momentum and industry recognition for the company.

Start with the end in mind

Before you get too deep in the trenches of building your product launch, it’s valuable to determine what you’d like to achieve. Just building the product and shipping it is not a success in itself. If you’re building a minimum valuable product (MVP) for example, think about the type of product and business you want to be five or ten years down the line. How are you going to get there? This is the product vision—every product manager needs to have one.

By defining a high-level product vision, you can get the executive team, marketing, support, engineering, and the rest of the organization onboard with the product launch strategy.

Product launch goals:

As you read through this guide, always keep in mind the goals of your product launch. What does your product team hope to achieve? Good goals are clear, measurable, and have an expected time frame.

Goals that businesses are typically hoping to accomplish with a product launch, range from:

• Find a product-market fit
• Capture new customers
• Increase in revenue
• Build product awareness
• Build the company’s reputation in the industry

Who needs to be in your product launch kickoff?

The upcoming product launch activities will include the involvement of representatives from most departments in your organization. Although they may not be assigned any tasks until the final stages of the launch, it’s essential to have every stakeholder identified and included upfront at the product launch kickoff. Not all teams need to be involved/represented in the product launch kickoff, but there should be clear communication regardless.

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1 http://mediafiles.pragmaticmarketing.com/Framework-Files/LeadersGuide_1307.pdf

Product launch kickoff meetings can run longer than other meetings. When you’re ready to schedule a meeting, 90 minutes will be enough to do everything while leaving time for any housekeeping items.

When everyone is all together, the first thing to do is inform each representative that they’re speaking on behalf of their department. Once you get confirmation that each individual represents their department, select someone to take notes throughout the meeting. A visual of how each department will contribute to the launch can be a great asset at this stage t.

When everyone is onboard from day one , no one can claim they were unaware of things further down the road. It also offers them an opportunity to chime in with ideas and opinions earlier in the process instead of second-guessing things further down the line. By inviting them into the feature launch kickoff process, they know they’re valued and have something to contribute.

Ensure all attendees know what the product kickoff meeting is for and what the ideal outcomes should be before leaving the room. Then address everyone’s roles, what they are actively responsible for, and how you anticipate everyone working together.

Kickoff communication

Before the meeting wraps up, let everyone know how you’ll be communicating any future next steps, whether in meetings, online video chat, in the roadmap, or notes. Some product launch kickoffs can occur months or even years out from the eventual product launch, so you’ll want to set up a good system for future communication.

Remember, you don’t want to alienate anyone in the meeting. The fastest way to estrange anyone is by speaking in the terminology they don’t understand. Try to be conscientious of not over-using your favorite acronyms. It adds a tiny bit of extra work for you to be inclusive but will help you leaps and bounds later on. Take the time to explain the concept and state that it will be a recurring topic. This cues the opportunity for questions and makes it clear that you aren’t just throwing acronyms out there for the sake of it.

Emphasize the value of the product

At this early stage, your product launch kickoff should focus entirely on the new product’s value (or the next version) will deliver to customers. The details are likely to change, so it’s better to avoid confusing functionalities with overarching value.

During the kickoff, harken back to the vision, themes, and goals of the product. These should become the emphasis for a successful launch. This conversation will drive messaging, channels, activities, and target audiences.

The kickoff conversations should answer the following questions for meeting members.

• What problems is the product solving?
• How does this align with the company vision?
• What pain points is it addressing?
• Whom is it helping?
• Why are we building this?

At the same time, it’s a good idea to come to terms right away because your product won’t be all things to all people.

Getting too aggressive with your goals from the get-go usually leads to product failure and disappointment. While your organization can have lofty goals of world domination, an individual product release can only do so much. Accepting that this product will not be all things to all people upfront helps temper organizational expectations.

Delay the product details

Launch kickoffs can be months or years before the actual product launch. As such, avoid getting deep into any specifics. With so much time between now and when the product ultimately is released, there are bound to be tweaks and changes along the way.

Couching the product strategy in themes gets people out of the habit of focusing on specific functionality and back to primary objectives. The goal is to communicate the why more than the what . Work with your team to understand the why and the jobs to be done before development begins to commit time and resources.

You should still deliver something solid in terms of commitment, though. That commitment can sound like, “When delivered, our customers will be able to x,y, and z.”

The early stages are more about roles and responsibilities and less about the details of implementation and execution. For instance, avoid conversations around pixels and buttons. Because you’ve got such a head start, there will be plenty of opportunities to flesh out those topics at a later date.

Then, conduct a product launch pre-mortem where your product launch kickoff team thinks through possible missteps that could hurt your product launch and prepare plans of action in advance. Knowing there are strategies in place (understood by others, not just you) relieves pressure for if/when something goes awry.

Demonstrating the value this product will bring to the business, and its customers can be undervalued in product development . But it’s as essential as ensuring sales and marketing comprehend these things.

Product development has an enormous responsibility in this phase of the product launch to implement the vision. That weight means they’ll rebuff following orders blindly and would rather understand what it is they’re trying to build and why.

Product development ownership

Instill a sense of development ownership. If they feel like they’re part of the process, they’ll help you identify compromises and opportunities. For example, they’ll let you know if there are better technologies that may solve the problem faster.

Why is this outcome so crucial? Uninformed equals unengaged. Developers have to make hundreds of decisions during a project, all of which can impact that project’s scope and impact. When they get what you’re trying to do and the broader context, they’re far more likely to code conscientiously and consider their decisions’ long-term ramifications.

Innovation springs forth when engineers and designers feel like they’re part of the team. They’re then able to accurately judge compromises and opportunities based on their impact on the end goal.

Roadmaps aren’t just helpful in product management. They’re useful for a myriad of different roles and departments, including the product launch.

Your product roadmap serves as your guiding strategic document, communicating transparency, and where you want to take your product eventually for your entire company. The roadmap will notify everyone of any shifts in your product launch strategy.

Various departments will be interested in the different phases and functions of the product launch. So keep the roadmap as updated as your one source-of-truth to increase curiosity, engagement, and efficiency.

You may need to create different versions with varying levels of detail for different cohorts of stakeholders. Because some of your stakeholders will need to be attuned to changes down to the sprint level, but other departments may just need to know by quarter.

Don’t over-communicate dates early on in the project, but provide enough context to keep stakeholders engaged and confident.

Jumpstart the Product Feedback Process

Product launches for software products typically happen only after several levels of testing have been completed.

“Regular” employees often don’t get their hands on products until after they’ve been through a formal QA process, have proven capable, and have moved into alpha testing.

Alpha testing is a product’s first round of end-to-end testing, usually done by its employees. When the product clears this level, it’s ready for beta testing, which involves real users but is still before the product’s official commercial release.

But that delay between QA and alpha is precious time. As much usage as possible by your employees will uncover more bugs, reveal enhancement opportunities, and test the product’s scalability. By not waiting until it’s passed acceptance testing, you’ll get the rest of the company more familiar with exactly how the product works.

Additionally, this serves as an opportunity to confirm the product does what it was intended to do. Employee testing verifies the product is heading in the right direction, solving the problems it was designed to address, and adding value for future customers.

Different parts of the organization need different things to prepare for launch. Carve out time with each department, pursuing a specific agenda each time. This agenda provides them with the information they need and ensures those departments will complete their deliverables on time and accurately.

You may need to set aside more time than anticipated, given that these departments are not ones that you engage with on a daily or even weekly basis. Alignment in engineering and development can often occur naturally and often because of the extreme overlap; however, this may not be the case for marketing, sales, and support.

Every new product launch needs people outside of your internal team to:

• Be aware of the product launch.
• Understand the value the launch provides.
• When to expect the official product launch.

All those things won’t happen unless the marketing team is involved. Marketing will craft compelling messages and talking points that speak to the product’s unique value proposition. To ensure accuracy, it needs to be done in collaboration with product management .

Don’t make a mistake and put off talking with marketing until you’re ready to speak to sales. The role of marketing, particularly product marketing, comes into the product launch process much earlier. Marketing sets the stage and initiates the processes that will make the sales team successful.

Give a clear priority to marketing when you’re developing the value proposition. The team must understand users and buyer personas and how the product fits into the competitive landscape to generate compelling, on-point materials and execute successful campaigns for the new product. If they don’t have that solid foundation to build on, things can go wrong very quickly.

Product management should have the opportunity to review everything for accuracy early enough that they can catch and correct any errors. If looping in marketing happens late, though, this crucial opportunity can be taken away in the interest of shipping messaging and positioning for the sake of the launch.

Training up the sales team is essential to bring in the revenue your strategy was built to generate.

Before getting into the product itself, the sales team requires some foundational education—train sales on the product’s value proposition, benefits, and ideal customer profile. Explain how the product you designed and built offers specific benefits to a particular target audience. Set some parameters around what makes for a good prospect and realistic use cases for the product.

Without conveying this information to sales, there’s no telling whom they’ll try to sell it to and what promises they’ll make. Left to their own devices, you risk getting inundated with square peg-round hole scenarios if there isn’t a match.

Sales Collateral

Consistency across the sales team is crucial. This consistency is where assets like slide decks, collateral, and sell sheets come in. There should be a robust catalog of resources, tailorable for different target segments, and follow-up materials for each sales funnel stage. Ensure sales has the quality and comprehensive sales tools that you’ve verified for accuracy and quality.

Sales Demos

Almost every customer will want to see the product in action before buying it, which means you’ll be swamped with requests to provide customer demos. It’s not a particularly scalable solution. Train sales on the product, so they’re comfortable and knowledgeable enough to give their own demos.

Please don’t underestimate the time it takes to become enough of a product expert to demonstrate its value and confidently sell it to prospects. It’s particularly challenging if the product is breaking new ground or requires pre-existing technical acumen.

Of course, those demos and presentations will inevitably lead to questions from prospects. You’ll want to prepare sales for when things go off-script as well—arms sales with FAQs, talking points, and responses to common objections.

While some things can be anticipated ahead of the launch, others need to be added based on real-world experiences in the field.

Support (or customer service or customer success) is instrumental in successfully adopting and utilizing your product. If the support team feels lost or stuck, you can bet your customers will feel even more confused. Don’t leave your dedicated support crew in the dust in your excitement to move the product along.

Your future self will thank you for thinking far enough ahead and making the support team product experts. When other departments or customers have questions, support can be the go-to, and you’ll only be called in when things require escalation.

You’ll also want to develop an escalation and feedback process for more difficult product issues (or more difficult customers). A process should be in place to document all contact your support team has with users.

Decide how to unleash your product

At this point, product development is wrapping up their work. It’s time to think about unleashing this fantastic offering upon the world. Work with your marketing team to create a PR and go-to-market campaign. That includes establishing a prepared way to explain the product’s pricing structure.

Don’t overlook this step just because it falls outside of strategic product planning and product development. It’s your job to not only create a great product but to make it a successful one.

Heavily mine beta data.

Consider the public beta your “soft” launch. A “soft” launch is an opportunity to gather massive amounts of feedback. You can tweak as many things as you want without an official product launch’s constraints and responsibilities.

But remember, you never get a second chance at a first impression, and the beta is making first impressions. They’re the early adopters and influencers that could pour cold water on your release before it’s even out the door if things seem shaky.

Your beta-launch’s goal isn’t to offer up perfection; it’s to generate feedback and spot potential problems. Better to push out a beta that needs some adjustments than to delay it for so long that you won’t have enough time left to do much with the feedback you receive.

Make the most of your dress rehearsal so the final product reaches its full potential.

Implement effortless onboarding

In most cases, you won’t be personally shepherding each prospect through the discovery, trial, and purchase phases. You’ll need to put a scalable onboarding solution into place. The goal here is to move prospects as quickly as possible to that moment when they realize the value proposition is real, and the product is helping them do their job or live their lives better.

You can minimize setup time with pre-set defaults. But asking people to check a bunch of boxes and flip a bunch of switches before they’ve even started using the product is both off-putting and misguided. How will they know what they want until they’ve got some experience?

Instead, give them a robust and common starting point and then let them tweak it themselves after they’re more familiar with the product and see how it applies to their particular needs.

When a product has a steep learning curve, many new users will bail out before realizing any value. Acknowledging that users need a little education to be successful is essential.

Train the Trainers

Sometimes onboarding a user requires an internal team member’s personal touch. In those cases, your peers across the organization will need to be trained on the product. An efficient approach is to train your trainers. The trainers are your peers across the organization, such as a sales engineer, that can train others rather than relying solely on the product team. Making sure those people are ready before the product launch is key.

Training users

Training doesn’t necessarily mean a week-long class or a giant user manual. It can be as simple as short how-to videos for specific tasks or interactive webinar walkthroughs. Just make them easy to access and discover, with a mix of self-service and full-service options.

If your product is digital, you can build some onboarding capabilities directly into your product. Identify which behaviors are crucial to converting trialers into adopters. You can proactively nudge them toward those actions with helpful prompts in the user experience. Also, make sure there are implemented means for users to offer direct feedback about the product experience.

Whatever your research has indicated as key moments that generate customer delight, do everything possible to usher users there. On-screen pop-ups and highlights, helpful hints, and in-app walkthroughs are things you can do to decrease the time-to-value.

No matter how intuitive your product may be, people will still have questions about using it. Make it easy for them to overcome obstacles and complete tasks. Make sure support documentation has been developed, reviewed, and made easily accessible.

This documentation could include FAQs on your website, a help section built into your product itself, or a printed product owner’s manual (if you’re selling a physical product).

If things go great, you may soon find yourself overwhelmed with new users, all clamoring for help and guidance to make the most of your product. All the new users mean it’s time to create a strategy for scalability.

When the masses descend, a lone product manager can’t be onboarding and training hundreds or thousands of customers each week. Support will play a crucial role in training customers. It’s Customer Support’s time to shine.

Otherwise, turn to self-service or broadcast methods to get users up to speed. Save personalized support for strategic customers.

Nature vs. nurture

Once a user gets hooked on your product, your job isn’t done. You’ll need to prevent complacency from kicking in after that initial rush of success.

Craft a strategy for maintaining momentum, such as new assets, for the long-run. Once you’ve established an initial user community, continue to offer them additional tidbits to encourage usage and adoption. These can highlight other features glossed over at launch, provide more in-depth training or tutorials, and include case studies demonstrating how real customers realize the value in various ways from the product.

The communication strategy should leverage notifications, emails, and prompts. Ideally, base these on programmatic triggers keyed off user behaviors in the product (or a lack thereof).

With your product about to hit the market, everyone will be dying to know how it performs. You need to get the whole organization on the same page about what matters. Revisit the strategic goals for the product that were proposed before and during the product launch kickoff, and create consensus on concrete success metrics.

Sales, revenue, new users, page views, and adoption make a sizable metric pool. However, many metrics are entirely irrelevant if they don’t align with the organization’s KPIs. There are many dangers in using such vanity metrics to taint the lens of viewing your product, so don’t fall prey to this. Metrics that answer questions about the overall product strategy should always be the focus.

Beyond purely figuring out if you’re achieving your goals, you’ll also want to establish additional measures to track early on. Develop your plan for what key metrics to track that is most important for your team.

Identify Product KPIs

Identify those product KPIs and automate data collection and reporting. These include the red flags to watch out for (such as high churn and abandonment) and positive trends (such as repeat users and conversions from trials to paying customers).

You’ll want to regularly check these figures, so make sure it’s not an overly manual process to get your hands on them. By tracking this data right away weekly or on a schedule you’ve predetermined, you’ll be able to spot hiccups early on. You can then intervene before problems fester and damage the momentum of your launch.

Over time you may need to augment the KPIs you looked at on day one as you learn more about what moves the needle and matters most.

After spending so much time obsessing over every detail of your product, you’re going to be excited to talk about it publicly, finally. You could ramble on for hours about every nuance and impressive feature. But most people aren’t going to give you very much time to grab their attention. If you’ve only got two minutes to pitch about your product launch, what would you say?

Work with your marketing team to place these limits on yourself. It forces you to figure out what the most important and compelling points are.

You’re going up against short attention spans and busy schedules. Convey the value, the solution, and give justice to the dedication involved in producing this product.

You never know under what circumstances you’ll need to discuss the product, its reason for being, its main benefits, who its main competitors are, and who it’s for, to name a few.

A prospective customer at a conference might have a full minute or even longer. But you may only have a few seconds with a CEO. Be ready to make your case in both instances.

Make Some Noise

Your launch date is set, and you’ve communicated to everyone throughout your organization who needs to know. Now it’s time to let customers and prospects know what’s coming officially. The big reveal is an exciting step, but it’s also a high risk-high reward moment in your product launch process.

While you’d love to expound for hours on everything the product can do, nobody has patience for that. Briefly articulate your value proposition. Share the elevator pitch that you developed in the last step. Remember, features and functionality are irrelevant. What matters are the beneficial outcomes it provides to customers.

Map out the most relevant and resonating use cases and focus your follow-up announcement on those. There will be plenty of time later to highlight all the other things your product can do.

Parse out the news

You can’t talk about everything all at once. Work with marketing to implement a staged messaging campaign highlighting other remarkable capabilities and benefits post-launch. You’ll maintain momentum and win over holdouts that didn’t connect with your initial messaging focus.

Check back in with your target market and choose when the target market is most apt to be receptive and responsive to your messaging.

Research your buyer personas and identify where and how they prefer to gather their news and updates.

Meet prospects where they are by leveraging channels they’re already using. Depending on the product and target audience, that could range from snagging a featured review in The New York Times to advertising on a Twitch stream.

Then, identify an ideal launch date. It might be timed to coincide with a related event, industry conference, or even a holiday. While you might feel impatient sitting on a finished product for a few weeks, you only get to launch once, so make the most of it.

The Real, Deal Product Launch

You’ve done your work and shepherded this from conception through birth. Now it’s time for the big debut and a round of congratulations. We don’t get many moments in life where we can pat ourselves on the back, but this is one of them. However, you didn’t get here alone. Take time to celebrate and acknowledge the contributions of others on your team.

Read more in the Anatomy of a Product Launch, below.

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Product Launch Plan: 17 Tips to Ensure a Seamless Launch

Published: July 20, 2021

If your product team is working on the next big thing , there ought to be an equally awesome promotion strategy to spread the word.

While some companies are guilty of drafting a press release, crossing their fingers, and hoping that the users will come, there's actually much more to it than that.

Quite simply: If you have big news, you need a big strategy. And that's where your product launch marketing plan comes in.

Product Launch Plan

A product launch is the coordinated effort of bringing a product to market and announcing it to the world. The marketing plan outlines the messaging and marketing strategy for doing so effectively with the end goal of getting customers to adopt the new product.

From establishing the proper messaging and creating the assets to enabling your sales team and keeping momentum, there's a lot that goes into putting together a solid product launch plan.

At HubSpot, I work on the product marketing team, and we're responsible for launching all of HubSpot's new products. Our experience has shown us that there are three distinct phases of a product launch: the pre-launch, the launch, and the post-launch.

Free Product Go-to-Market Kit

Free templates to ensure that your whole team is aligned for your next product launch.

• Product Launch Template
• Product Roadmap Template
• Sales Plan Template

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Before you launch, take the time to get really close to the product. Work with your product team to understand the problem they are trying to solve. Join them as they do users tests. Chat with them about their product philosophy. And most of all, ask a ton of questions -- especially if you’re not familiar with the space.

Focus on understanding their vision and becoming a product expert. Outside of the product manager, the marketer launching the product should be the most knowledgeable person at your company about that product.

By understanding the product and performing market research, you'll be able to align your messaging strategy with the product. The primary goal will be to bridge the gap between what the prospects' pains are and what the competition is not doing to address them.

• Where you'll advertise (e.g. search engines, social media, traditional channels)
• Where you'll promote your message organically (e.g. social media, blog, website homepage, events)
• How you'll get picked up by media outlets (i.e. your PR strategy and media outreach)
• Who you'll rely on to spread the word (e.g. partners, communities, forums, third-party marketplaces)

During the pre-launch phase, you'll have decided what channels to promote on, established relationships with any partners who will help you do so, and created the assets that will draw attention to your messaging on these channels.

The launch phase is simply the execution of all your planning. This phase is much shorter than pre-launch: it can take a day, or a week -- depending on how long you feel you need.

As you prepare to move on to the launch, you want to stay focused on the work and be ready to put out any fires.

Post-Launch

The work isn't over simply because the product is launched. In the post-launch phase, you'll do a retrospective, pulling together the data to determine what went well and what didn't go so well.

In addition, a product still needs to be maintained and improved upon beyond its launch, taking into account customer feedback in order to maintain adoption and retention.

This is, of course, a high-level overview of a product launch. However, there are some specific tactical things that you can do to help your launch go off without a hitch.

Product Launch Tips

• Research the space in-depth.
• Focus on a single buyer persona.
• Write a mock press release.
• Build your messaging, but don't marry it.
• Try out your messaging.
• Get involved in the beta.
• Change your messaging and find the best hook.
• Set ambitious goals.
• Take the time to get the market ready.
• Build compelling creative assets.
• Assemble your go-to-market strategy.
• Choose the right channels.
• Activate your sales team.
• Make it an event.
• Lean into the momentum.
• Revisit your go-to-market doc for reporting.
• Shift your focus on retention.

1. Research the space in-depth.

At most companies, the product manager will own the problem that the product solves. They’ll have a deep understanding of who the end-user is and what their unique needs are.

The product marketer's job is to understand the market. They must be able to answer questions like:

• What’s the larger narrative around this space?
• How do current customers feel about it?
• What do people like and dislike?
• Is it growing and cutting edge or old and getting disrupted?
• What are the leading strategies and tactics in this space?
• What is your company's unique point of view when it comes to this space?

2. Focus on a single buyer persona.

You may not need to reinvent an existing buyer persona, but you should outline who amongst your target audience is a great fit for this new product. What kind of challenges do they have? How do they work? How big is their team? Talk to people who fit this profile to really understand their needs and goals.

If you need help organizing this information, check out these buyer persona templates or this handy tool .

3. Write a mock press release.

At HubSpot, we write a mock press release before we launch a product. We do this very early on in the product’s life to ensure that everyone involved in the launch is aligned on the messaging.

To give you a better sense of how this exercise unfolds, here's an example:

But we're not the only ones practicing this approach. In fact, the folks at Amazon use this exercise , too. The idea is that when you work backward and start with the press release, it's easier to put yourself in the customer's shoes.

If the press release doesn't sound very interesting or fails to conjure a reaction, it's likely that there's more work to be done.

(Need some help getting started here? Check out these free press release templates. )

Free Press Release Template

A free guide and template to help you run your company's PR.

• Company Announcements
• Promotion Checklist
• Guide to PR Best Practices

4. Build your messaging -- but don’t marry it.

Messaging or positioning is mostly about refining your product narrative to focus on only the most valuable aspects of the new product via a simple message.

This is tough.

Most product people have the urge to communicate how great individual features are --something you want to avoid in launch messaging. At launch, you may only have someone’s attention for a few minutes or seconds, so your messaging needs to be persuasive, simple, and unique. It needs to communicate what your product actually does and communicate its high-level value.

You want to get this right, but don’t over-commit to messaging. It can (and should) change as you share your messaging with internal folks and customers.

Elements of good position often include:

• The problem it solves
• A list of core features
• The value prop
• A 10-word positioning statement

In the screenshot above you can see some of these elements in action on the HubSpot Ads product page .

5. Share your messaging with everyone.

It’s time to take the messaging you’ve been slaving over and get it in front of your co-workers, customers, and prospects.

This is often the least fun part of a product launch. Mainly because no matter how good your positioning is, it takes time to get the pitch down, and not everyone will get it.

It’s good to start with individuals who may be a little more forgiving and honest before presenting to executives. Use every meeting to pitch people and ask questions. You want to gather as much info as possible here and root out any confusing or bad messages.

6. Get involved in the beta.

Having a group of beta testers evaluate your product before you release it to the public is a really important step. At HubSpot, we release products to a group of folks -- our beta testers -- that have opted-in to give us feedback in exchange for early access.

If your company does this, make sure you are talking to the customers using the tool in the beta. Capture their stories, review their performance, and validate your value prop with them. This is your opportunity to test your messaging and build real-world proof to support your pitch with an audience that is ready to share feedback.

7. Change your messaging and find the best hook.

After talking to prospects and salespeople, and seeing how beta users use the product, it’s likely that you've uncovered a thing or two about your messaging that you might want to adjust. That's good.

If you’ve done things right, this won’t mean drastic changes, but most likely a tweak to the value prop or tagline.

8. Set ambitious goals.

You need to be deliberate and ambitious with the goals you set, and that can be challenging when you have a new product without benchmarks. To combat that, we ask the question: “If everything went exactly right, what is the highest possible number -- whether that be leads, users, etc. -- we could achieve?”

This sets a ceiling for your campaign -- a number that is realistically almost never achieved.

If I project that the highest possible number of leads the campaign can generate is 500, and I end up with 450, I know we got just about everything right. If I generate 550 leads, it means I probably didn’t do a great job of setting a realistic ceiling. And if we only generate 300 leads, we know some tactics didn't work at all.

The image below can be a useful slide as part of your go-to-market plan:

9. Take the time to get the market ready.

If you’re launching a new product that enters your company into a new space -- potentially a space where your company doesn’t have a ton of authority -- start creating content about that space pre-launch.

You’ll want to seed this content for SEO purposes and to establish your company as experts in the market. It’ll also give you a chance to see what kind of content resonates prior to the launch, as well as help you surface any issues.

10. Build compelling creative assets.

At this point, you’re close to launch and it’s time to start building launch assets. But before you start writing emails or building landing pages, think about the customer journey:

• How do people make purchase decisions in your space?
• What do they need before buying?
• Is it a free trial? A demo?
• Is it best for them to talk to a salesperson?
• What do they need to know before they get to that point?

Once you've answered those questions, outline your conversion path. How will you first get people's attention? Perhaps it's an email, that drives people to a landing page, where users are encouraged to fill out a form.

Once you have this, get to work building the actual forms, site pages, videos, social posts, emails, and other tactics that will drive users down your funnel and to your conversion point.

(If you're looking for inspiration, check out this list of the best promotional product videos we've ever seen. )

11. Assemble your go-to-market strategy.

All the elements I’ve mentioned should come together in a deck or a doc -- something that is clear, complete, and easily shareable.

This is your go-to-market guide: A holistic document of all launch activities, planning, and goals. This can include pricing recommendations, market research, competitive analysis, and any other relevant information you might need.

12. Choose the right channels.

During the planning phase, you should have outlined the channels you want to use to share your message. This is not a "the more the merrier" sort of thing -- a mistake new product marketers often make.

Be sure to avoid channels where the audience may not be the right fit. Pick one main channel -- an event, a Product Hunt post, or blog post -- and use email, social, paid, and other channels to support that main post.

For example, in 2018, we launched HubSpot's free email marketing tools on Product Hunt . We choose Product Hunt because it serves as a great way for startups and technology companies to introduce new products to a community of product-centric influencers.

Before you launch, do a final check to ensure that everything works -- buttons are functioning, forms are working, copy and creative looks good, and so on.

If you’re at an event, make sure you’re over-communicating with your team. At this point, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Be prepared for that.

13. Activate your sales team.

Work with your sales team to coordinate meetings and outreach the day of the launch, or directly after. And use signals from your marketing efforts to drive the hottest leads to sales right away.

If you running an event, make sure your sales team has the opportunity to talk to customers in an organized way. That might mean ensuring there is a comfortable space for them to meet with customers, computer access, or a system for booking meetings.

14. Make it an event.

Even if your launch isn’t a live event with speakers, you can still make it an occasion.

Host a webinar or Hangout On Air, do a Reddit AMA, or try out a live social chat. Leverage apps for startups to manage and host events for free. ( Here's a helpful guide to get you started on the right track with Facebook Live. ) Invite influencers to check out your product. Bring customers and press into your office for a live demo of the new product from your product team.

Whatever you do, strive for an in-person element. It'll help propel your launch even further.

15. Don’t lose your momentum.

You’ll reach a lot of people with your launch, but it often takes several touchpoints before someone is convinced to start a trial or get a demo. Make sure to continue to move folks who’ve raised their hands as "interested but not ready to buy" down your funnel.

This means nurturing emails, free trials, demos, and more in-depth, product-focused webinars and activities. Build extra creative, like a longer video or social media posts that you can save for after the launch. This will give you fresh assets to share.

And don't forget about educating your sales team. It will take a while before all your salespeople feel comfortable with this new product, so it’s important to arm them with amazing sales collateral (demo video, one-pagers, etc.).

Beyond that, you can make a big impact by joining their calls: Getting on the phone and pitching the product with them the first couple of times will give them the confidence they need to carry the torch.

16. Revisit your "go-to-market" doc for reporting.

With all the work that’s going into launch, you don’t want to have to retroactively figure out what to report on. If you’ve done a good job with your go-to-market doc, you should be able to create a new slide and fill in your results with real numbers.

Once you’ve had a little more time away from your launch, spend some time analyzing the results. Where did your campaign succeed and fail? What did you fail to anticipate? What did you learn? Post these to your internal wiki or as a public blog post.

17. Shift your focus on retention.

Now that you’ve successfully launched a new product, shift your attention to retention. Marketing can generally play a bigger role in driving new users, but it’s important to work with your product team to figure out how you can help keep those users around.

This means more ongoing education like post-launch product webinars, as well as sharing case studies and success stories to show your users what they can achieve with your product.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

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Use this template to organize the best product launch ever.

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The Product Marketers Guide to Launching a New Product

Launching a new product is a multi-dimensional endeavor that requires meticulous planning and strategic execution. Product marketing, at its core, involves bridging the gap between product development, marketing, and sales. A successful product launch isn’t just about unveiling a new item; it’s about crafting a compelling narrative that resonates with the target audience and creates a lasting impact.

Preparing for the Launch: Laying the Foundations

The preparation phase lays the foundation for a triumphant launch. It begins with comprehensive market research and customer profiling, ensuring a deep understanding of industry trends, customer pain points, and preferences. This essential analysis sets the stage for aligning your product with the target audience. By identifying your ideal customers and crafting strategies to reach them, you create a solid groundwork for a successful product launch.

Competitor analysis is a cornerstone of effective product launches. It provides valuable insights into industry benchmarks, successful tactics, and market positioning. This understanding enables you to position your product uniquely, whether you’re entering a saturated market or pioneering a new space. By knowing where you stand among competitors, you can create a strategic approach that stands out and resonates with your audience.

Clear objectives serve as the guiding stars throughout the launch journey. Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals ensures that every effort is purposeful and aligned with the broader business objectives. A product launch is not a singular event but a part of your overall business strategy. These objectives help in creating a cohesive strategy that guides every decision, ensuring that your efforts are streamlined and purpose-driven.

A well-structured launch timeline and budget are the blueprints that keep your launch on track and resources optimized. It’s a roadmap that ensures every task and activity is assigned a timeline, from concept to execution. Additionally, a carefully allocated budget safeguards against resource limitations, enabling you to allocate resources effectively for marketing, advertising, and other critical aspects of the launch. Whether you’re launching a B2B product or targeting a broader consumer base, a well-defined timeline and budget provide the structure needed for a successful and impactful launch.

Crafting the Value Proposition: Connecting with Customers

Crafting the value proposition is an art that distills your product’s essence into a compelling message. The process begins with identifying the unique selling points (USPs) that differentiate your product from others in the market. These USPs encapsulate the features, benefits, or qualities that make your product stand out. Aligning these USPs with customer benefits and pain points ensures that your proposition resonates with the target audience on a profound level. By demonstrating how your product addresses their needs and solves their challenges, you create a relatable and impactful value proposition.

Weaving these elements into a compelling brand story adds emotional depth to your value proposition. A brand story is more than just a marketing tool; it’s the narrative that embodies your product’s journey and resonates with the values and aspirations of your audience. It’s about forging a connection that goes beyond transactional interactions. A well-crafted brand story positions your product in a larger context, creating an emotional resonance that builds trust and loyalty.

Building Launch Assets: Enhancing Visual Appeal and Content

Building launch assets involves a blend of visual appeal and engaging content. Designing captivating product packaging and branding materials aligns with your brand’s identity and values. It’s the first impression your product makes, and it should capture the essence of your brand while conveying the product’s value. Compelling multimedia content, including videos, images, and infographics, further enhances your product’s allure. In today’s digital age, visual content is a powerful tool that can effectively communicate complex information, evoke emotions, and create lasting impressions.

In addition to visual assets, designing optimized landing pages and product pages is crucial for a seamless user experience. These pages are virtual storefronts where potential customers interact with your product. User-friendly design, clear navigation, and persuasive content are essential to guide visitors from curiosity to conversion. Well-optimized landing pages that align with your messaging and branding create a cohesive and immersive online experience. Furthermore, interactive elements and captivating visuals on product pages can help potential buyers explore the product’s features and benefits in depth.

Planning the Go-to-Market Strategy: Navigating Sales Channels and Collaborations

Navigating the go-to-market (GTM) strategy requires a careful selection of sales channels, pricing strategies, and collaborations. Online platforms, retail outlets, distributors, and various sales channels present unique opportunities and challenges. Choosing the right approach depends on factors such as your target audience’s preferences, your product’s nature, and your overall business goals. For B2B product launches or consumer-focused releases, selecting the right sales channels sets the stage for success.

Determining pricing and promotion strategies is a delicate balance that influences how your product is perceived by the market. Pricing sets the perceived value of your product, and it should be aligned with customer expectations while considering your production costs and profit margins. Strategic promotion tactics can increase visibility and drive demand. Balancing discounts, bundles, and limited-time offers can create a sense of urgency and attract potential customers.

Collaborations with channel partners and influencers amplify your reach and credibility. Partnering with distributors, retailers, or other complementary businesses can extend your product’s distribution network. Influencers, with their established audiences and credibility, can help showcase your product to a wider audience. Collaborations can enhance your product’s visibility, generate buzz, and leverage existing networks to create a successful launch.

Internal Alignment and Training: Synchronizing Efforts

Internal alignment is the cornerstone of a cohesive launch effort. All departments, from marketing and sales to product and support, need to work in harmony to ensure a successful launch. Effective communication and coordination are essential to prevent disjointed efforts and conflicting messaging. This alignment ensures that every team member understands the product’s value proposition, target audience, and launch strategy.

Training sales and support teams is critical for a seamless customer experience. Sales teams must be equipped with in-depth product knowledge, enabling them to confidently convey the product’s features, benefits, and value proposition to potential buyers. Support teams need to be prepared to assist customers and address inquiries effectively. Cross-functional coordination among departments ensures that marketing, sales, product, and support teams are aligned in their efforts and messaging.

Pre-Launch Marketing Activities: Creating Anticipation and Buzz

Creating anticipation and building excitement before the launch is essential to capture the audience’s attention. Teaser campaigns, sneak peeks, and pre-orders generate buzz and curiosity. Teasers can include intriguing visuals, cryptic messages, or countdowns that pique interest and create a sense of anticipation. Offering pre-orders or early access programs allows eager customers to be among the first to experience your product. These strategies can create a sense of exclusivity and incentivize early adoption.

Engaging with influencers and media outlets amplifies your product’s reach and credibility. Influencers, with their established audiences and authentic voices, can provide genuine endorsements and recommendations. Media engagements, such as interviews or guest articles, position your product as an industry leader and generate media coverage. These activities expand your product’s visibility and build excitement among potential customers.

The Launch Day: Coordinating Activities and Responding

The launch day is the culmination of extensive planning and preparation. Coordinating activities ensures that everything unfolds seamlessly, from online events to physical launches. It’s a moment of excitement, and proper execution is essential to make a memorable impression. Monitoring real-time customer feedback is crucial for refining strategies on the fly. Engaging with customers on social media, addressing inquiries, and showing appreciation for their support can further enhance the launch day experience.

Additionally, addressing technical glitches or challenges swiftly is paramount. In the fast-paced digital landscape, unforeseen technical issues can arise. Ensuring a swift response and resolution demonstrates your commitment to customer satisfaction and minimizes any negative impact on the launch experience. A successful launch day goes beyond the product; it’s about the overall experience you provide to your customers.

Post-Launch Activities: Sustaining Momentum and Enhancing Retention

After the launch, sustaining momentum is essential for continued success. Analyzing launch performance against established key performance indicators (KPIs) provides insights into the effectiveness of your strategies. It helps identify what worked well and where improvements are needed. Continuous marketing and sales efforts maintain the momentum created during the launch phase. Consistent communication with your audience, sharing success stories, and delivering valuable content keep your product in the spotlight.

Customer retention efforts focus on enhancing loyalty and building long-term relationships. Offering post-launch promotions, exclusive offers, and loyalty programs can incentivize repeat purchases and foster brand loyalty. Engaging with customers through personalized communications, surveys, and feedback loops allows you to continuously improve your product based on their preferences and needs.

Handling Challenges and Learning: Building for Future Success

Challenges are inevitable, but they also offer opportunities for growth and learning. Identifying common launch pitfalls and developing contingency plans prepares you to navigate unforeseen challenges. Post-launch reviews play a vital role in assessing the launch’s overall success and identifying areas for improvement. Reviewing the entire launch process, from planning to execution, sheds light on what went well and what could be refined for future launches.

In the dynamic landscape of product launching, this guide equips product marketers with the insights and strategies needed for a successful product launch. From the initial stages of preparation to the culmination of the launch and beyond, mastering these elements sets the stage for a triumphant market entry.

Ready to launch your product with confidence and impact? Let Aventi Group be your strategic ally in navigating the complex landscape of product marketing and launch. Contact us today to discover how we can elevate your product launch to new heights.

Zoe Quinton

After working in fiction publishing for 15 years, Zoe Quinton started as a product marketing consultant with Aventi Group in 2018. When she’s not reading for either work or pleasure, you can find her drinking good coffee, gardening, or spending time with her family at their home in Santa Cruz, California.

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New Product Development - The 7-Step Process Explained

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Delivering innovative products can help you gain a competitive advantage, but maintaining that advantage requires continuously delivering new products that keep pace with your customers' evolving needs. New product development is the key to building and keeping market share and customer loyalty.

What is new product development?

New product development is the end-to-end process of creating a product that has never been brought to market—from idea to concept, prototyping, developing, testing, and launch. It involves building a product strategy and roadmap to successfully guide cross-functional teams and stakeholders through the entire process.

Unlike product enhancements and upgrades that modify and improve existing products, new product development addresses the unique challenges of designing and delivering brand-new products. This article discusses the seven stages of new product development, some challenges Agile teams face along the way, and how you can succeed.

The 7 stages of new product development

Successful Agile software development takes careful planning and good project management practices . The seven stages of new product development guide you through the process by breaking the work into stages or steps.

1. Generating ideas

Every new product begins with a problem and ideas to solve it. Ideas may come from within the company, such as the customer service team, or from outside via customer and market research. In this phase, it's important to gather all ideas without discrimination. The more ideas you can brainstorm, the better.

Products such as Jira Product Discovery help product teams structure the chaos of prolific ideas. Ideas can be supported by data, customer feedback, sales input, support tickets, and more to help shape what the product team should focus on, creating ongoing feedback loops. Idea generation is most effective as a team activity with the outcome of developing the essential elements for a new product. 

To help you prioritize ideas, methods such as a SWOT or Competitive analysis take the guess-work out of the process. When generating ideas, having a clear understanding of where opportunities exist and knowing how the competition stacks up can lead to brainstorming disruptive and game-changing ideas.

2. Screening ideas

Agile teams can use Jira Product Discovery matrixes to view a large number of ideas, using criteria such as impact, effort, and confidence level before scoring and selecting which ideas to move into the next phase. Gathering and organizing product ideas in a centralized tool makes it easier for product teams to prioritize which ideas or features will drive the most impact.

Scoring ideas by product development effort versus the overall impact of the solution is an excellent way to focus on those with the most impact. The SWOT and competitive analysis templates from step 1 can provide the foundation for where to place priorities. 

You can also identify good ideas that are simply not right for this new product but may be suitable for future products and the goals of the team. Screening ideas can be difficult, but aligning each good idea to your goals and comparing its impact to other ideas will help identify the most impactful opportunities.

3. Creating a product strategy

After selecting ideas to develop into a new product, it's time to create your product strategy. This is a concise definition of the need that the new product meets. A good product strategy includes the vision, target market or user, position in the industry, features and benefits, and the value the new product brings to the business. This phase involves creating a clear definition of the requirements.

Confluence offers a strategic plan template that can help you refine your strategy messaging, remove ambiguity, and clearly communicate the goal. From here, the Confluence requirements template walks you through the process of outlining your objectives and success metrics, listing assumptions and options to address them, and adding supporting documentation. These efforts include prototyping and validating with customers, ensuring the product being built will be something that customers actually want.

4. Building a product roadmap

A product roadmap is an action plan. It outlines product functionality and release schedules and helps you manage new product development. Think of the roadmap as the core communication tool for short- and long-term efforts that align with your business goals. It's a shared source of truth for a product’s vision, direction, priorities, and progress over time. Creating a great product roadmap keeps your entire team working together and moving in the same direction (try our product roadmap template ). They also make it easy to check in on the work at any time throughout the product development life cycle.

Product teams using Jira Product Discovery can then share their product strategy using always-up-to-date, custom roadmaps to present which ideas will be built, when, and why.

5. Prototyping

Time to market is critical for new product development, and your ability to rapidly prototype and develop products ensures viable solutions. Jira Product Discovery’s integration with software development tools like Jira  makes it easy to seamlessly connect your entire software delivery lifecycle.

Defects and change requests are simply a fact of new product development, but concise tracking and issue management keep everyone on your team informed, organized, and on schedule. Testing can span both internal quality assurance (QA) teams as well as customers and end users engaged in alpha, beta, or user acceptance testing. Jira  is the leading tool that Agile teams use for testing, in part because it optimizes the QA workflow by writing and managing test scripts, tracking test cases, and managing defects. 

The product roadmap template from the previous step, along with other Confluence project planning templates , also inform testing and help ensure you miss nothing.

7. Product launch

You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and launching a new product requires careful planning and delivery. Every step in the process is a building block to a successful launch. Confluence’s product launch template helps ensure a smooth launch.

Additionally, sales and marketing, HR, and legal teams are already using your product strategy and roadmap to align messaging, identify opportunities, and ensure regulatory compliance. Using Jira , they can seamlessly connect their work with the product team’s. It provides a streamlined UI and integrations with the tools they use daily, such as Gantt charts and spreadsheets.

4 main types of product development

There are four types of product development, including:

• New product development : These are products that haven’t been released in the market before, such as software applications that solve new or novel customer problems. 
• New product categories : These products may not be new to the marketplace, but they are new to the company developing them. For example, a software company may expand their offering to include products within the category they currently develop, such as adding tax accounting to their portfolio of personal finance applications. 
• Product line extensions : These expand the products offered within the organization’s existing range of products, such as adding new industries within a category. For example, a company may develop accounting software for the construction industry and decide to extend their accounting software to the airline industry.
• Product enhancements : These are new features and capabilities within existing products. Companies generally design them to provide customers with new or added value. Enhancements respond to changes in the market, performance issues, or new competitive products. 

Example of new product development

Whether creating a new product that hasn’t been seen in the market before, or expanding an existing application to address new geographic locations, understanding the time it will take to develop is essential. 

Jira insights help teams make data-driven decisions based on their own historical progress. Insights can come from every aspect of the product development process and provide continuous improvement opportunities with each new product development project.  

3 challenges teams encounter in the new product development process

Great tools can help alleviate the challenges of new product development. Understanding these challenges and how to address them can keep your team on track for a successful launch.

1. Defining clear requirements

When speed is important, the requirements often become an ironclad set of instructions. While clear requirements are necessary, Agile teams must have a shared understanding of and empathy for the customer. Include various members of your team in requirements-gathering activities, such as customer interviews. When designers, developers, and QA share an understanding of user stories, they can produce results more quickly and accurately without maintaining rigid rules.

Confluence’s requirements template gives you the power to capture and update assumptions, use cases, UX design, and scope together.

2. Estimating the development effort

Working with realistic project timelines is essential for bringing new products to market and gaining a competitive advantage. However, product development tasks are notoriously difficult to estimate, and new product development can be even harder. Break work into smaller tasks for more accurate estimates. In addition to giving you more flexibility with resource assignments, smaller tasks minimize the impact on your overall project when something takes longer than expected.

Many Agile teams have switched from traditional estimates to story points—units that measure the effort teams require to fully implement a user story. A user story is an informed explanation of a feature from the user's perspective. With Jira, Agile teams track story points, reflect, and quickly recalibrate estimates.

3. Siloed tools

Collaboration is a critical component in your team's success and the success of their products. Development teams use a variety of specialized tools, such as visual design tools for creating mock-ups and instant messaging apps for hosting team discussions. No single tool can provide the specialized functionality for all the needs of the development team. Jira Product Discovery and Jira integrate with a wide range of specialized development tools to easily collect and incorporate important information.

How long does new product development take?

The time to develop a new product can vary widely based on the complexity of that product. For example, developing an application that securely processes credit card payments may take magnitudes longer than developing software to track exercise statistics. But a few tips can help reduce the time to market while maintaining quality. 

Expert tips from Atlassian for new product development

Understand the customer.

Begin with the customer’s needs in mind. The time you spend early, interviewing customers and gathering input, helps create a clear product strategy. The entire team should understand the problem they are solving for the customer. It will keep the team on track when they make decisions during development. 

Foster team collaboration

When the team has the tools for seamless collaboration, generating ideas, prioritizing issues, and solving problems is much easier. Today’s product development teams include a wide range of cross-functional roles. The best way to prevent silos and keep the team working together is with collaboration, respect, and genuine appreciation for each other’s contributions. Centralized tools such as Jira Product Discovery and Jira help foster this.

Define the requirements

A good product specification outlines the purpose, what the client needs the product to do, the technical and functional requirements to achieve that, design mockups, and even release plans. This foundational document takes time to create, but it helps teams refine and clarify fuzzy requirements and align on the scope of the project. 

Optimize resource allocation

Resource allocation is among the hardest aspects of new product development, so the roadmap must be well-defined before you begin. Understand the tasks included in the project, their dependencies, and the resources required. Visual workflows can help teams identify when you underutilize or overcommit resources. They can also highlight bottlenecks and roadblocks to allow teams to quickly adjust and stay on track. 

Jira makes new product development easier

Jira  provides success tools for new product development teams to collaborate on and manage work from idea to product launch. Agile teams have made Jira the leading solution for new product development.

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With Jira Product Discovery matrixes and criteria, you can easily select which ideas to move ahead with, enhancing the experience of product development.

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Marketing Management Assignment: A New Product Launch By Unilever

• Present a critical assessment of the organization’s current internal organizational environment and its external market environment and the potential impacts on your chosen organization’s future marketing strategies.
• Critically examine Market Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning Analysis for the product or services launched by the organization and formulate the strategic marketing plan for the new product/service.
• In the light of the above findings and employing as appropriate, state and justify Marketing Performance targets for each of the next 3 years for sales volume, sales value and organizational profit contribution.
• Based on the targets that you have set for your organization. Undertake a Marketing Mix analysis (either 4 or 7 Ps) to develop and critically discuss an action plan to deliver these performance targets over the next 3 years.
• Within the action plan (as mentioned in 4), include a brand building strategy. Justify your choices of plans and strategies

Executive Summary The following marketing management assignment entails a detailed overview of the British company Unilever and the launch of their new product, non-dairy ice cream. The environments, in which the business operates, both internal and external, have been studied. SWOT analysis and Ansoff Matrix are used for these purposes. It also contains details regarding the product mix and the performance it wishes to achieve. The report ends with a justification of the strategies undertaken to ensure the success of the business’s new product.

1.0 Introduction Unilever plc is a multinational company dealing with consumer goods and is based out of London in the United Kingdom. The company has a diverse range of products available for manufacture and selling. Their product lines span over items like energy drinks, candies, food items, baby food, frozen goods, juices, beauty products, soft drinks, ice-creams, bottled water, and even toothpaste to name a few (Unilever global, 2018). The company has a turnover of greater than 50 billion and is regarded as the largest manufacturer of body soap in the world.

The current product in question is a new addition to the company’s dairy-free range of ice-creams under its Magnum brand. They plan to introduce this new flavour, i.e. Sea Salt Caramel soon.

Environmental Analysis Assessment of the External Environment

Assessment of the Internal Environment

Critical Evaluation In the case of the external environment analysis, the following points can be noted. Political: The Company operated across a wide range of countries, and most of them are politically stable. This eases business functions and boosts performance (Bessière et al., 2019).

Economic: The Company operates in two forms of countries, developed and developing. IN the case of the former, economic Stability is prevalent, and the company can enjoy a significant market share. On the other hand, in developing countries, even if the market share is presently low, the growth rate of expansion policies is tremendous (Bessière et al., 2019). Both these boost business performance.

Social: There is a palpable shift in global consumer behaviour from regular products to those which focus on environmental conservation and wellness of health (Pant and Ramachandran, 2017).

Technological: The operating costs of businesses are going down globally due to the advancements in the field of automation and robotic (Goryakin et al., 2015).

Environmental: There is a growing thought amongst consumers to align themselves with businesses that promote environmental conservation and green practices. Since the brand already operates on this forte, they can tap into this demand (Rao-Nicholson, Khan, and Marinova, 2018).

In the case of the SWOT Analysis The business is quite strong along these lines. They have an established presence in almost all countries of repute like America, Germany, India, Britain, Ireland, etc. (Zhang and Fan, 2020). The FMCG sector in which Unilever operates is a highly competitive global battlefield that is dominated by several big players (Nwagwu, 2020). The business should focus on optimizing its global consumer base to promote co-creation and brand loyalty to derive the maximum value possible. The current economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus is a very real threat to the drivers of the business. Its effect has touched all industries and countries, and the business needs to optimize itself accordingly to make it out (Carvalho, 2020).

Influence on External Environmental Factors towards the Future Marketing Activities

Influence on Internal Environmental Factors towards the Future Marketing Activities

2.1 Proposed Segmentation Plan There is a definitive demand in the market for non-dairy items. People who prefer these types of products come from all ages, geography, and income demographics (Bali and Singh, 2015). This means that the key point where the segments are split is that of the consumer’s rationale and customer psyche (Bali and Singh, 2015).

By splitting the prospective consumer base along the psychographic lines, the business can better decide just whom to cater their products for. In the case of psychographic demarcations, the best-suited segments for this non-dairy form of ice-cream are vegans, lactose-intolerant individuals, and other health-conscious individuals who wish to cut out dairy (foodbusinessnews, 2019). The choice to adopt veganism rests completely upon an individual, and hence they are willing to pay more for their preferred product (foodbusinessnews, 2019). This has created a generous amount of demand in the market that the company can penetrate by proper segmentation. Subsequently, the company will also move towards converting lactose intolerant individuals who stay away from dairy into loyal consumers (foodbusinessnews, 2019).

2.2 Proposed Target Market The target market for Unilever is not restricted by any geographical boundaries. This is because of their dedicated global supply chain and international presence. Their target market also isn’t restricted by age groups (Taylor-West et al., 2018). The key point of their target market is that they are ‘conscious customers’. This means that the company is targeting individuals and groups who are sustainability inclined and prefer products that represent the same. The company has undertaken its share of research and has found out that over 53% of individuals in a random survey sample size prefer sustainable products (Chan, 2019). Their marketing and advertisement campaigns have evolved into a more detailed view of the positive impact of the product on society rather than the product itself. By a combination of correct segmentation and targeting strategies, the company can easily win over customers from all strata on a global scale.

2.3 Proposed Positioning Strategy The company has always promoted sustainability, quality, and utility in its positioning strategies. Going forward, the company has decided to go for a positioning strategy with the concept of ‘vitality’ at the centre (Unilever global, 2020.). This means that the company has identified the shift in global trend from traditional lifestyles to an alternative healthy lifestyle. The top management of the company has claimed that the positioning strategy with Vitality will include a renewed focus on how all their product lines can be made more sustainable and healthy for their consumers. The brand Unilever anywhere in the globe, the first thought they should have is that this company makes healthy products of high quality (Ren et al., 2020).

3.1 Identification of the Strategy Direction The strategic direction that the company should look towards as per the Ansoff Matrix is Market Development and Diversification Strategies. This means that the company is looking to introduce its current product portfolio in new markets (Hallam, Thomas, and Beach, 2018). The company is also opting for a diversification strategy, which means that they are developing new products for new markets as well. For e.g. Neem and Turmeric based toothpaste for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc. By employing a mix of these two strategies, the company already has a significantly widespread product range. In the future, their drive for innovation, quality, and sustainability is sure to give rise to some exciting items. Hence the strategic direction can be proposed to be Product Diversification (Fan et al., 2015).

3.2 Proposed Performance Targets for Next 3 Years Proposed performance targets for the next three years of the business can be

Specific: The targets are specific. Based on organizational strategies and present global scenarios, the targets have been set to represent fixed quantitative amounts (Ren et al., 2020).

Measurable: The goals are measurable as growth in sales volume has been taken as 20%. This means that calculations can be done easily with the real data whenever available to see if the business performance targets are being met (Ren et al., 2020).

Attainable: The goals are quite attainable for a company like Unilever. A 20% growth rate in new markets is a prudent estimate for small companies, so one with the financial resources and operational expertise of Unilever should not have any problem in attaining the mentioned targets (Ren et al., 2020).

Realistic: For a company with the resources and expertise of Unilever, these are quite realistic goals. There is a very low chance of the product failing in the market as the company does its fair share of market research before the development of a new product (Ren et al., 2020).

Timely: The goals are timely in the sense that they relate to specific operating cycles of the business (Ren et al., 2020). This means that each financial year can be taken as one unit and the business processes remain ongoing throughout the given period.

• It is a non-dairy form of icecream that is targeted towards vegans, lactose intolerant individuals, and others (Fan et al., 2015).
• The product is to be launched under the banner of Magnum. This is their premium range of icecream, which uses high-quality Belgium chocolate.
• The flavour is an offbeat variation of what is normally available in shops. It is a caramel and sea salt variety (Fan et al., 2015). This makes it a niche and interesting flavour that is guaranteed to entice customers.

Figure 1 Non Dairy Ice cream Source: (Godairy, 2020)

• Since the product is a new and innovative variation of what is existing in the market, there is a high chance that it will become popular in the market and increase the units sold (Bocken et al., 2016).
• Units sold per geographical location will give feedback on market demand.
• Since the product is only available in the form of a big family size tub with a comparatively higher price, the sales volume in units will reflect directly into high sales amounts.
• Higher sales through the years signify consistent buying behavior (Bocken et al., 2016).
• The profits of the business will be quite lucrative because this is not a new product that they are developing.
• The company already has a preexisting production and supply chain for both dairy and non-dairy ice cream (Bocken et al., 2016). This means the company already enjoys cost-efficiency and economies of scale, which will drive up the profits.

4.2 Pricing Decisions 4.2.1 Pricing Strategy The proposed pricing strategy for the product can be a value-based pricing strategy. Under this strategy, the business fixes the price of the goods based on the value they are giving to their consumers. Since this is a premium brand that offers offbeat ingredients to a niche set of customers, the pricing will be kept on the higher side (Tao et al., 2017). It should be noted, however, that the business will not charge significantly more than what they charge for their dairy-based varieties as this may provoke customers about price discrimination (Tao et al., 2017).

Brand price Source: (Robertson 2019).

• Keeping the price of the non-dairy variant similar or close to the dairy variants will ensure that the products are being sold regularly and in high quantities.
• Low prices for a premium product will result in high sales.
• Since the magnum brand is priced at the premium level, the sales amount will reflect it.
• The sales amount will rise since it’s a premium-priced good.
• The premium pricing and the low costs will ensure stable profitability for the business.
• Profits will be rising through the years as business achieves more efficiency.

4.3 Place Decisions 4.3.1 Place Strategy The company will decide to use their entire supply chain to distribute the commodity globally. If they do not, it would be the improper utilization of company resources. The psychographic segment which the business is targeting is prevalent all across the globe so the company should rise and meet the demand.

Place strategy Source: Author

• Ensuring global distribution will ensure that the number of products sold will increase dramatically.
• Optimizing distribution channels will ensure that the product reaches the customer on time.
• The product characteristics and the price levels will provide enough sales revenue globally for the company.
• Sales amount trends will provide input on global market demand.
• The profitability of the business will also rise dramatically with global sales revenue.
• Profitability may vary across geographical areas due to exchange rates.
• The promotional strategy of the company will be centered on proper advertisement activities.
• The company should focus on highlighting g their sustainability and green initiatives. Along with the superior features of the product and its high quality.
• The units sold will be directly dependent on the success of the advertisement campaigns undertaken by the company. Brand awareness is necessary to boost sales.
• There should be a general buzz about the product post-launch. The more people are excited and curious about the product, the more they will be enticed to buy it.
• There will be a proper reflection of the positive effect of advertisement campaigns upon the sales amount. Seasonal trends can also be established from this data.
• Significant sales will also be achieved when the customers buy the products. An increase in subsequent years can be attributed to customers turning loyal to the brand.
• The business profitability will not be hampered by the expenses made on advertising because this will directly translate to a greater amount of sales both in units and in revenue.
• A cost-benefit analysis will always give a positive result as more sales to make the profits stable and rising.
• The company has decided to target the psychographic segment in relation to healthy and alternative minded individuals.
• The target audiences can be from any age or geographical segment (Beer and Loeprick, 2017).
• The values that the company wish to convey to their customers is that of health, Vitality, and sustainability. They should clearly communicate this to the necessary people (Beer and Loeprick, 2017).
• The advertisement strategy that the company will choose to adopt should also convey the same message. This will create organic goodwill in the market.
• The competitors in the same non-dairy industry should be researched and analyzed to understand pricing, flavours, and ad strategies (Beer and Loeprick, 2017).
• Other companies in the FMCG sector should be analyzed to understand distribution channels, supply chains, procurement costs, etc.
• Unilever should focus on creating a unique environment in the mind of its consumers. The company has already the image of a sustainable and green company that deals in a superior quality of products. They should utilize this.
• Their product is already focused on a healthy lifestyle. The value proposed should be Vitality so that consumers identify the product with concepts like veganism. Providing happiness to those who cannot enjoy dairy is also a unique feature to be highlighted (Beer and Loeprick, 2017).
• The company should decide upon specific guidelines on which agendas to support as a brand. While they choose to support environmental conservation, they may remain silent on political issues.
• Guidelines regarding flavours and packaging should also be set up. This is to ensure that the brand gets enough time to properly cement themselves in the mind of the consumers.
• The brand will be developed by following the above steps. This will ensure that the company forms a robust brand that holds a special place in the consumer psyche.

5.2 Justification for the achievement of the action plan 5.2.1 Achievement of the performance targets The performance targets will prove successful across all verticals. Primarily, the forecasts haven’t been made that steep. This prudent approach towards going into business will ensure that the company can properly realign themselves in case of a below expectations performance. This is, however, not expected as the business will prove successful across all dimensions (Agostini et al., 2015). In the case of sales quantity, a globalized supply chain to reach consumers in time will help the sales quantity improve. The sales amount will generally be rising along with the sales quantity. The product is priced at a premium level, and thus the sales amount will reflect a healthy stream of revenue (Agostini et al., 2015). This will increase through the years because customers will turn into loyal followers of the brand due to their salient features and superior quality. The profits of the business can be attributed to their well-managed supply chain and distribution network. This ensures that the logistics and manufacturing costs are kept at a minimum and profits are boosted. Through the years as the business gets more proficient, the profits also increase (Homburg, Schwemmle and Kuehnl, 2015).

5.2.2 Achievement of the marketing mix The marketing mix is bound to be successful in creating a perfect setting for the product. The product itself is a very thoughtful and elegant product. It is a non-dairy caramel and sea salt flavoured icecream which has bits of white chocolate in it (Moon, Park and Kim, 2016). Ice-cream already has mass appeal, for those whom it was not an option, e.g. vegans, lactose intolerants etc. this is an enticing and new offering in the market. The price of the commodity has also been kept quite low. This indicates that more customers will be enticed to buy the product (Moon, Park and Kim, 2016). Since the company already exists globally, there are very good reasons for them to make the provide available worldwide. There has already been established that the demand for a non-dairy healthier alternative is being felt worldwide. More and more people are choosing to shift to an alternative lifestyle (Veiga and Weyl, 2016).

CONCLUSION In conclusion, it can be stated that the product of the company Unilever will be successful in the market. By mobilizing all the available resources, they possess the company can penetrate the global market beautifully. Overall there are very few reasons the product may fail upon launch. Great success is anticipated.

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Meta is ramping up its generative AI tools for advertisers. Here are the current details and what's in the road map.

• Meta is expanding its AI ad product, Advantage+, with generative AI tools.
• The new tools will create ad visuals and text.
• Eventually, the tools will reflect an advertiser's tone and voice.

Meta is giving advertisers more generative AI tools.

For the past couple of years, Meta has leaned heavily into its AI ad product, Advantage+, which helps advertisers find the best platform and ad to place in front of someone. The tool is designed to steer advertisers toward finding audiences that lead to strong ad performance, which is measured in metrics like sales or website traffic.

Now, advertisers can begin using Advantage+ to create the visuals and text of those ads. Meta's AI can create full image variations — though advertisers need to feed an image to Meta to create an ad. For example, a retailer may upload a photo of a red dress, and Meta's AI can create variations of red dresses with different background colors and text overlays that are designed for multiple platforms like in-feed and Reels. Meta also said it plans to roll out text prompts that allow advertisers to type in what they want their ad to look like. 

Meta also said that it is testing a way for gen AI text to reflect an advertiser's tone and voice based on previous campaigns, and the technology will soon be built using Llama 3, Meta's new large language model.

Meta said that it has started rolling out the generative AI features and they will be available globally to all advertisers by the end of the year.

Related stories

John Hegeman, VP of monetization at Meta, told reporters at a press event that tests using creative tools with Advantage+ decreased the cost per click of ads by 28% compared to other types of testing creative.

"What we are hearing from advertisers is that these generative AI tools are saving time and resources while increasing productivity," he said.

In April, Meta announced that it would begin labeling gen AI content on its platform this month. Hegeman said Meta is "working through some of the specifics" about how that policy applies to ads created with gen AI.

One of the problems advertisers have experienced with Advantage+ is a lack of control over where their ads appear and capping their ad spend — similar to Google's AI ad product called Performance Max.

Alvin Bowles, VP of Meta's global business group, said that Meta is working with agencies and brands to educate them on how to use generative AI tools to make their jobs more efficient. 

"It really is about making sure that we're taking some of what we believe to be more mundane tasks and unblocking the opportunity for people that are schooled and trained in their vocation to be able to actually allow those skills to shine in ways that surprise and delight all of us," he said.

Watch: Accenture CMO Jill Kramer talks about how generative AI will enhance, not diminish, the power of marketing: video

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Apple’s New iPad Ad Leaves Its Creative Audience Feeling … Flat

An ad meant to show how the updated device can do many things has become a metaphor for a community’s fears of the technology industry.

By Tripp Mickle

Tripp Mickle has been writing about Apple since 2016.

The trumpet is the first thing to be squished. Then the industrial compressor flattens a row of paint cans, buckles a piano and levels what appears to be a marble bust. In a final act of destruction, it pops the eyes out of a ball-shaped yellow emoji.

When the compressor rises, it reveals Apple’s latest commodity: the updated iPad Pro.

Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, posted the advertisement, called “Crush,” on Tuesday after the company held an event to announce new tablets. “Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created,” Mr. Cook wrote, adding, “Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.”

Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create. pic.twitter.com/6PeGXNoKgG — Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 7, 2024

For decades, Apple has been the toast of the creative class. It has won over designers, musicians and film editors with promises that its products would help them “Think Different.”

But some creators took a different message from the one-minute iPad ad. Rather than seeing a device that could help them create, as Mr. Cook suggested, they saw a metaphor for how Big Tech has cashed in on their work by crushing or co-opting the artistic tools that humanity has used for centuries.

The image was especially unnerving at a time when artists fear that generative artificial intelligence, which can write poetry and create movies, might take away their jobs.

“It’s unusual in its cruelty,” said Justin Ouellette, a software designer in Portland, Ore., who does animation work and is a longtime Apple product user. “A lot of people see this as a betrayal of its commitment to human creative expression and a tone deafness to the pressures those artists feel at this time.”

Apple didn’t respond to requests for comment.

It was the latest in a series of recent promotional slip-ups by a company that is widely considered to be a marketing juggernaut. Its marketing of the Apple Vision Pro , released in January, struggled to help that device break through with many customers. Last year, Apple was criticized for making an awkward sketch that cast Octavia Spencer as Mother Earth , lording over a corporate meeting about the company’s effort to become carbon neutral by 2030.

Apple has been regarded as an advertising visionary since the 1980s. Its “ 1984” Super Bowl commercial to introduce the Macintosh computer is among the most famous commercials ever made. The ad, which was developed by the Chiat/Day agency, showed an actor throwing a sledgehammer through a screen projecting the face of a “Big Brother” figure that was meant to be a metaphor for IBM.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after 12 years away, he sought to reclaim its marketing magic. Together he and Lee Clow, the advertising creative behind the “1984” spot, developed the “Think Different” campaign. It paved the way to the famous “Get a Mac” spots, featuring a Mac and PC , and the original iPhone ad , which showed people in classic films and television shows picking up a phone and saying, “Hello.”

Apple’s marketing pitched its products as easy to use. It billed PCs and Android phones as devices for business executives working on spreadsheets, while Macs and iPhones were tools for film editors, photographers and writers.

But Apple’s advertising has been uneven over the last dozen years or so. It yanked a 2012 campaign that showcased its Apple Store “geniuses” on planes. Critics dismissed a subsequent spot, “Designed by Apple in California,” as “ lame .”

In the wake of those hiccups, Mr. Cook shifted oversight of advertising from Phil Schiller, the company’s longtime head of marketing, to Tor Myhren, a former president and chief creative officer at Grey, the ad agency that created the E-Trade baby.

Under Mr. Myhren, who joined in 2016, Apple has developed some of its ads with its own creative team and others in collaboration with an outside agency, Media Arts Lab. It has been recognized at the Cannes Lions Awards, the leading event for the ad industry, for a spot on AirPods called “Bounce,” which showed a man bounding off the sidewalk as he listened to music. Last year, Apple was named Creative Brand of the Year because of its “R.I.P. Leon” ad, in which a man sent an iPhone message saying a lizard in his care had died, then deleted it when the lizard suddenly rolled over off its back.

Mr. Myhren and Media Arts Lab didn’t respond to requests for comment about who was behind the “Crush” spot.

Michael J. Miraflor, the chief brand officer at Hannah Grey, a venture capital firm, said on X that Apple’s ad had effectively offended and turned off its core customer base, achieving the opposite of what it had done with its “1984” commercial.

“It’s not even that it’s boring or banal,” Mr. Miraflor wrote . “It makes me feel … bad? Bummed out?”

Tripp Mickle reports on Apple and Silicon Valley for The Times and is based in San Francisco. His focus on Apple includes product launches, manufacturing issues and political challenges. He also writes about trends across the tech industry, including layoffs, generative A.I. and robot taxis. More about Tripp Mickle