How to launch a product: Six strategies for success

You’ve worked hard to finalize your very first digital product. Now, it’s time to put it out in the world.

Let’s take a look at how to launch a product for the first time.

To successfully launch your product you will need to:

• Know your audience’s demographics and psychographics
• Engage with your audience on social
• Grow your email list and prime subscribers for launch
• Create your customer journey
• Design an effective landing page
• Get in the right and positive mindset

It might sound like a lot, but you can definitely handle it. We’ll help you along the way and detail out each step below.

1. Get to know your audience

If there’s one magical marketing “hack” of all the successful steps to launch a product, it’s this: Knowing who your customers are and what they want is absolutely vital to any product launch.

‍The world’s best business experts all recommend it because it can make or break a launch. If you try to launch a product without being completely, 100% certain that your audience wants it, you’re more than likely shooting yourself in the foot.

Everyone’s first launch is going to have some level of uncertainty, but you can reduce it by knowing who your customers are, what they want, and what they expect from you.

First, knowing who your customers are relies on analyzing demographics. Knowing things like your audience’s average age, location, income level, and even job title can help you cater your product to your customers.

Second, to find out what your customers want, you need to consult psychographics and user-submitted data. Demographics tell you who your customers are, but psychographics tell you why they purchase.

Psychographics are invaluable for understanding why your audience is interested in your product and what they expect it to do for them.

Analyzing psychographics can help ensure that your customers’ desires and expectations match up with what your product can provide. If you see any disparities between your product and your customers’ expectations, you can tweak your product as needed (or pivot your approach).

You can also ask your audience to submit data in the form of social media comments, questionnaire answers, and more.

2. Engage with your audience via social media

Once you know your audience, it’s time to engage with them.‍

Just as you want to know your audience, you also want your audience to know you. It’s impossible to successfully launch a product to an audience that doesn’t know you.

Earn your customers’ trust and goodwill by engaging with them. An easy way to do this is to warm up your audience by talking about your product via social media and email.

Social media is a great platform because most of your customers use it every day, while email marketing excels at enhancing brand loyalty and developing relationships with customers.

When you use both, you can reach your customers from multiple vantage points, increasing your chances of having a successful launch.

Be sure to use social media and email for their respective strengths. For example, you could run a teaser campaign on social media where you drip out details about your product over the course of several weeks, like the example below:

Or you could show off your product with a simple yet charming photoshoot, like Paynter Jacket:

Don’t forget to personally respond to comments and messages! This goes a long way toward building audience rapport prior to your product launch.

3. Build an email list prior to launch

Once you’ve given your product some preliminary exposure with social, it’s time to turn to email. With email, you can get your readers hyped for your new product and prime them for purchase.

Encourage site visitors to sign up for your email list by offering them free content and promotions. That way, when you’re ready to launch your product, you will already have a list of potential leads to market to.

Leading up to your product launch, create some excitement around it for your subscribers. Consider offering them early access to the product or give them a special discount for referring their friends and family.

Proactive social media and email strategies can help you prepare for launch day and get people excited weeks or even months in advance.

4. Design your customer journey

Mapping out your customer journey is a crucial step in creating a new product launch strategy. You can get people to your website, but if the purchasing experience is sub-par, those visits are essentially worthless.

You need to make sure the customer journey is as seamless as possible. Make it easy for people to buy from you, and they’ll be much more likely to do so.

A good first step is to think about the journey the buyer will take from start to finish. It’s helpful to diagram the journey like so:

Your checkout workflow might look different, but this general format is a good starting point if you’re launching your first product.

Think about the road to purchase from your customers’ perspective. Does it make sense? Is it easy to move through the different stages? Are there unnecessary roadblocks in the way? What questions would you have if you were purchasing?

Your checkout process should be snappy, responsive, and intuitive. Again, your goal is to make it as easy as possible for your customers to complete their purchases, and that means offering a streamlined checkout experience.

If you're using Kajabi, you can use a new or original checkout template to make things a whole lot easier for yourself. You can also thoroughly edit your checkout page and adjust all of the settings to create a customized experience.

You can even use Frictionless Checkout, which allows people to check out as guests (i.e. they don’t have to create an account).

This simplifies the checkout flow greatly. Customers only have to enter their email, payment info, and shipping address (if applicable).

If you’re not using Kajabi, aim to create a similar frictionless experience with whatever toolset you’re using.

5. Create an appealing product page

Let’s talk about the sales page itself. Because if you don’t have an effective product sales page with riveting copy and responsive design, your product launch will fall flat.

You don’t want to build weeks’ or months’ worth of buzz all for people to land on a page that looks like this:

Your product page will be the face of your launch. If you want to increase your product launch success rate, you need powerful product pages.

Your landing page contains much of the information that people will want to know. It’s the point at which a lead decides whether they want to purchase your product or not.

But don’t worry. You don’t need to be a seasoned pro to make an amazing product page.

What’s most important is that your product offer is crystal clear. You’ll want to tell your customers what your product is and what value it will add to their lives. Check out how Grovemade does this:

At a glance, you instantly know what the product is and what benefits you’ll get from it. The beautiful, minimal design, crisp product photos, and clean page layout make for an effective sales page that minimizes confusion and maximizes interest.

In this case, there are multiple options, and clicking on any one of them takes the reader to an equally elegant sales page:

This page goes into more detail on the specific model chosen so that readers can get to know the product they’re inches away from purchasing.

This stage is also where you’ll need to decide between a short-form or long-form sales page.

Both can be effective, but as a general guideline, long-form sales pages are better for products that offer more value (and thus demand more consideration from the customer) while short-form sales pages are better if you have a more straightforward product and want to convert people quickly.

If you’re using Kajabi, you can create a Standalone Page using one of our many professionally designed templates.

6. Develop the right mindset

Finally, let’s discuss mindset. Your mindset plays a big role In figuring out how to launch a new product successfully.. That might sound corny, but it’s true. A positive outlook plays an extremely important role in a successful launch.

If you go into your first launch assuming that everything will go wrong, you won’t have a good time.

But if you go into it with a can-do attitude, and if you’ve prepared yourself, then all that remains is to just do it. You’ll learn a lot from your first launch, but you’ll also learn a lot from your second, third, and fourth launches.

Each product launch is an opportunity to learn and grow, so make it a priority to learn from each one.

In addition, make sure you’re doing enough self-care and taking breaks when needed. If you can go into a product launch with a positive, confident mindset, you might just surprise yourself with how well things will go.

Create and launch digital products with Kajabi

At first glance, learning how to launch a product may seem daunting. It doesn’t have to be. Once you’ve taken a little time to learn some best practices, you can make a solid plan and execute it confidently.

Getting to know your audience and engaging with them on social can drive visitors to your site, and help you create a more effective launch strategy down the road. Encourage users to sign up for your email list and hype them up about the product prior to launch.

Make sure your landing pages and customer journey are clear and easy for the user to navigate. And finally, keep your head up! Launching your first product is an exciting experience.

With Kajabi, you can ensure your site looks professional with very little technical know-how. You can even run email marketing campaigns and create digital products for future launches.

It’s time to grow your business and reach your goals. Try Kajabi for free today!

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