Do you have a product idea that you’re convinced will sell?

If so, you’ll need to start your planning far before the launch date, whether you're launching a major project, a small initiative, or an update to an existing item. The process to launching a product is more complicated than you might imagine, though.

The process includes determining your positioning and message, communicating it to important teams and stakeholders, outlining all launch-related activities, producing assets and material, preparing all launch participants, and more.

In this article, we will break down the basics of what you need to do to successfully launch a product, provide some tips on big aspects of the process, and a checklist you can use to keep track of every task along the way.

Why Use a Product Launch Checklist?

When it comes to preparation in business and product creation, there can never be too much.

According to one Harvard Business School professor, over 30,000 products enter the market each year and, unfortunately, a whopping 95% of those products fail.

This can be narrowed down to a lack of planning and research. Having a solid product launch plan is extremely vital if you want your product to succeed.

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Tips to Keep in Mind

Do Plenty of Research

Planning and preparing are necessary once you have developed a company idea and decided to promote it. Before implementing a new company concept, conducting market research is a crucial step to assist assure your new venture will be successful.

Understanding why customers will want to buy your service or product is the goal of market research. The information you acquire will enable you to determine the requirements and preferences of your target market.

You can discover customer spending patterns and the kinds of purchases these folks make. Having this knowledge and carefully studying it may help you decide how to market your services and set their prices to draw in the largest possible audience.

You may do market research by reading up on the industry and looking into the business strategies of your possible competitors.

Interview Consumers to See if There is a Need for Your Product

The best way to understand your customers' motivations is through market research and customer development. You might be able to create and promote a useful solution by learning about their objectives, driving factors, and pain spots.

To understand your consumer, you don't need to conduct an exhaustive study for years. In actuality, you simply need to speak with 15–20 past, present, or potential consumers.

When talking to them, pay close attention when they mention that they wish a product could do something or that they are curious as to why a certain product can't do anything. When they make these claims, retort by asking questions that probe further and seek clarification. Ask them a few direct questions to get more detailed responses if they fail to mention any pain locations.

These discussions will offer you a clear understanding of their main problems and how to pitch a solution to them. You may create a buyer persona that your team can concentrate on servicing once you have learned these important characteristics about your clients.

Draft a Positioning Statement and Present it to Your Stakeholders

Making a positioning statement is the next action you must take. You must be able to describe in your statement who the product is designed for, what the product accomplishes, and how the product is different from similar items on the market.

With your positioning statement, you may even provide more specifics, such as a description of your target market, the name of the product category your product belongs to, or even evidence of how your product is unique.

You must convey your new product's positioning statement to key corporate stakeholders, such as executives, managers, or even your product development team, who are in charge of making the item you want to sell to clients, once you have created a compelling positioning statement for it.

A product is likely to be warmly welcomed by customers if the major stakeholders and team members genuinely adore the concept.

Train Your Team on Using Your Product

Make sure your business’s teams and important stakeholders are prepared before you launch and start selling the product. To keep your company informed of your launch strategy, send emails, internal presentations, or Slack messages.

Your company should also be well informed on the ins and outs of your product. Invest some time in demoing the product and training your teams on how to use it.

This is especially important to do for your sales and marketing teams. After all, they will be responsible for educating potential leads and customers on how to use the product.

Create a Product Marketing Plan

One of the most important things you’ll need to do before your product launch is to create a product marketing plan. This is the plan you'll follow to introduce and market your product.

Start thinking about the kind of material you'll use to capture a potential customer's attention during the awareness, contemplation, and purchase decision stages as you develop your approach.

Start creating material that will support and coincide with those promotional activities once you've written down your goals and planned out your go-to-market strategy.

This might include landing pages, demos and tutorials, and blog entries about your product or sector. You must create this information to establish a reasonable objective for the product launch.

Set Realistic Product Launch Goals and Test Them

What outcomes are you hoping your launch would produce? Impressions, engagement, an increased number of followers, sign-ups, and sales are a few examples.

To avoid dooming your team to failure, set attainable goals. Success indicators should show how well launch efforts are doing and provide insights for the next campaigns and customer-facing procedures.

Naturally, from this point forward, product launch checklists will start to differ. The sales staff will be concerned with purchases, whereas marketing will be concerned with clicks and impressions.

Keep in mind that you must make sure the product is essentially faultless before considering launching it. You won't be required to have every feature integrated and ready for usage, but you should make sure that the fundamental features your customers will need are available and working in various real-world scenarios.

You must thoroughly test every feature you want your users to utilize on actual browsers, devices, and operating systems. If it's a tangible item, your team has to properly test it.

Check out our Business Launch Checklist for more information today!

The Ultimate Product Launch Checklist of 2022

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