Creating an effective product launch strategy 🔮

In Episode 2 of Season 1, Victor Lang goes through his journey building Gini, a smart financial app that allows individuals to track their spending effortlessly, and provides businesses with automated financial reporting, real-time data synchronization and instant AI-powered forecasts.

One of the drivers of Gini’s success was an effective product launch. They leveraged different channels including Press Releases and events that they held, which in turn attracted the right audiences for Gini and kickstarted their success in growth.

An effective product launch strategy supports your product in building awareness, interest, and validates your product positioning, and there are many ways of doing so! But here’s a guide on the steps of creating one:

🔮 Steps to creating an effective launch strategy

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📑 Step 1: Refine your messaging and prepare pre-launch documentations

Pre-launch documentation ensures everyone, including your team and new potential users are on the same page by the time the product is launched. Your team needs clear information about what the product is and should be perceived, and belief in the product to get users to download, purchase or sign up to your product. Documentation for your users helps you better prepare as well for what’s to come post-launch.

💬 Refined Messaging

Powerful messages are not just well formatted, but are also consistent. You and your team needs to have a consistent presentation and description of your product to help your users understand it better. It should describe the product, show off its features and the differentiators from your competitors. Think about:

• The easiest description to describe your product - ½ sentences should be ample
• How you want your product to be perceived
• Which features to focus on “selling”
• What values it brings, or pain points it solves

🎤 Press Release

You can create both an internal and external press release for your product launch. An internal press release for your team, and an external to share with editors, news agencies, journalists, networks and other publications. Like in your refined messaging, it should focus on:

• Why anyone should care - what’s so special about the problem you’re trying to solve?
• The benefits the product brings to customers/users - give them numbers if you have them at your advantage!
• Why your product is better than other options

🔖 How-to guides / user manual

Every product requires some understanding to properly utilize it, and a user manual will help ease your launch when users start using them and have their questions. Put yourself in your user’s shoes, and create an easy-to-follow manual on how they can engage your product. Follow the user journey, and if your product has several user segments, you can also create more user manuals.

💻 FAQ page/section

Like the user manual, a FAQ page helps with frequently asked questions that many of your users might ask. Think about any question that you think may arise, and include the team in it! This is a good place to also make anything obvious.

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📣 Step 2: Build suspense for your product (while validating product positioning!)

Anticipation is part of well-being, which provides eagerness, gratification and comfort to look forward to something amazing that’s to come - your product! Try to build hype in advance of your launch to have your users anticipate it’s release.

Use your website, social media platforms, and any other channel your users are on. And if it’s working well, you should be able to see more engagement or interest on social media / the channels you use, and an increased number of sign ups or people getting on your waitlist.

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🔄 Step 3: Implement your product launch strategy, get feedback and keep iterating

Now that you’ve got your messaging refined and built suspense around your product, it’s time launch - as big as possible!

♟ Deploy multi-channel promotions

A “launch” wouldn’t be heard if you just launched your product in a single event or communication channel. Use a variety of channels so you can also test out which channels work best for your product, and attracts the right people. These can include:

• Creating a website/landing page/homepage section for your product, highlighting all your users need to know
• Writing a blog post on using your product
• Posting on social media platforms
• Building email campaigns
• Utilizing influencers
• Setting up webinars or PR events
• Targeting with in-app messages or push notifications
• Post on Product Hunt
• Use your creativity - even Reddit could be a good channel!

The key to product launch success is consistency. Leverage as many channels as you can, but ensure your brand and messaging are easily recognizable and also consistent to build awareness and trust.

🕺🏼 Collaborate with influencers

Influencers are influencers for a reason - they are liked and their opinions are valued by others. This makes them a great team player in spreading the word! See which influencers you can work with and support them in:

• Writing special/guest blog posts
• Reviewing and giving feedback to your product
• Host sponsored content
• Become a partner and give them perks

💰 Create paid campaign ads

You can leverage paid ads as well across different channels. This can be internal like your social media platforms, or external like reaching out to companies to feature your product in their newsletters. You can be as creative as you want - just know where your audiences hang.

• Google Ads
• LinkedIn Ads
• Sponsored website Ad
• Podcast Ad
• Email Newsletter Ad

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✅ Step 4: Analyze your efforts, and iterate along the way

Analyze both qualitative and quantitative data from all of your product launch strategy efforts. By doing so, you get an overview of the progress of your launch and how you can improve moving forward.

Product launches aren’t also just about the launch, it is the perfect time to communicate and welcome audiences to giving feedback! Tell them about your journey and focus on telling your story of why you built the product in the first place, and that the product is in its early stages so it might have a few bugs here and there.

To create a successful product launch strategy, you need to have consistent, refined messaging to communicating your product, use multi-channel promotions, build suspense, and launch big! Focus on telling a story about your product, get feedback and optimize your efforts along the way.

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💥 Bonus:

Victor’s top tips for entrepreneurs

🚀 Be ambitious. You are more capable than you think you are.
🤸‍♀️ Find the best people for your company. Focus on building a strong team.
🦾 Trust your gut. People will talk, but stay true to your beliefs.

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🎧 Listen now on your favourite podcast channels

Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Other channels

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• Suggest a guest
• Give me feedback

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