Digital Product Launch Strategy that Effectively Attracts New Clients

How to do a digital product launch: 6 steps

A new product launch is a process involving many strategies that are not all implemented at once. Thus, our guide is divided into 6 steps that you should follow to successfully set your digital product in motion. Let’s begin.

1. Make a comprehensive market research

Before creating a product, you need to gain a deep understanding of the needs, pain points, and preferences of your target audience. At this level, you should:

• Analyze your competitors
• Gather data on your target audience
• Create marketing personas
• Come up with a unique value proposition

Crafting the value proposition is essential when launching a new product. It is the main element that highlights your product’s advantages and distinguishes it from those of your competitors. Therefore, at Boldare, we always look into the UVP thoroughly during the Product Discovery Workshop and proceed with the development only after understanding the selling points and user segments for a particular product.

2. Pre-launch marketing campaign

A couple of weeks before your product is ready, you should begin your traditional product’s or app’s pre-launch digital marketing campaign. There are two main reasons behind that:

• Some of the most effective strategies need time – Rome wasn’t built in a day, and so not every marketing effort will give you immediate results – SEO is an example of that. Starting the campaign earlier allows you to reap the harvest of your promotional efforts right on the premier day.
• It builds anticipation – Think how you would like to launch your product – with an aggressive advertising campaign, or with hundreds of people awaiting the premier date impatiently? Probably the latter. A pre-launch campaign gives you the possibility to hype up your product before it goes live – this provides you with a steady flow of users from day 1.

A good pre-launch campaign will create buzz by using different channels and various media – texts, adverts, and even video guides. When planning your campaign, you should make use of:

• social media
• e-mail marketing
• an SEO landing page for your product
• referral programs
• pre-order bonuses
• newsletters

3. Design an MVP

Starting with an MVP is crucial on multiple levels. This is a solution that your marketing, sales, and even customer service teams will benefit from.

The marketing team

When wondering how to launch a digital product, marketing leaders usually focus on the here and now. However, having an MVP can change that. By creating a roadmap of the updates, you can increase the excitement about your product and attract users that would possibly hesitate. It also opens the gateway for underlining the effect of feedback in marketing materials. Presenting people with the opportunity to influence your product’s development is the way to encourage more of them to try it.

The sales team

An MVP is a tool to verify a sales idea. It is much less expensive than a complex product but gives your sales team an insight into whether a particular product or service will work. Being able to test the theory in practice is a commodity not every business has, and by starting with an MVP, you gain it.

The customer service team

Every product needs customer service, but the better it is, the less help the clients need. Starting with an MVP will allow your development team to spot most issues and eliminate them while creating the final version, thus reducing the need for customer service specialists. They will be able to focus on tickets that truly matter, instead of resolving numerous, repetitive ones.

4. Make a plan for the future

Although ancient Greeks believed that at the beginning there was Chaos, we disagree that it should be so with your product. We believe in proper planning.

Launching a new digital product may seem like the end of your journey, but it is the beginning of the new one – the road to improvement. Businesses constantly develop their products and launch new ones, so you need a plan of how to keep up with this race.

Even if you want to embrace customer centricity and wait for feedback, you can already start planning your budget. Plus, you shouldn’t focus only on product development, but also on customer acquisition.

For example, you may analyze your competitors who have launched similar products – find out when the attention dropped. This way, you will be able to map out the perfect time to increase your marketing efforts. With this deadline, you can begin working on the materials and campaigns early on, and when the attention drops, boom – you immediately lift it.

When it comes to planning development itself, it is still good to create a roadmap, if possible. If you already have some certain features in mind that will be added later on, releasing such a roadmap to the users can keep more of them on board and attract new ones. You need to build anticipation both before your product launch and right after it.

A good roadmap should include estimated release times for the updates, along with the features that you want to introduce. If your digital product is not an app, but let’s say an e-learning course, you should create a roadmap with content updates and new, follow-up courses. This way, the customer will feel that they get a much more complex product, even when you started just with the basic one.

5. Consider your launch date

Even if the sales curve of a particular type of product is quite flat among all the seasons of the year, it is still prone to variations on particular days, such as holidays. When planning how to launch a product in digital or real-life space, you have to consider the time windows.

An example of that can be observed in the food delivery industry in the USA. Doordash created a ranking of the best holidays for food delivery, based purely on the demand for these particular holidays. From it, we can observe that Christmas Day is a significantly better time for food deliveries than Memorial Day. What does it mean for a person launching a new app? That it’s best to target Christmas.

The same situation might occur with your product. Perhaps, unlike the food delivery services, you should avoid holidays? Maybe summer will be better than winter, or the other way around? Analyze your industry and the data that you have to choose a time window that will boost your launch rather than hinder it.

The takeaway

So, in a nutshell, how to launch a new digital product? First, analyze the market. Secondly, start a pre-launch marketing campaign, while the development team works on an MVP. Make a detailed plan of your marketing, sales, and development efforts, choose the release date wisely, and finally – you can launch your product.