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Why Building Hype Is The Key To A Successful Product Launch And How To Do It
(This is a contributed post)
When you’re launching a new product, building hype around it before the release date is the best way to guarantee immediate sales. If you look at some of the most successful companies in the world, you’ll see that they all do this. Apple host events where they showcase their latest innovations and unveil new products. By the time these products hit the market, there are thousands of people queuing up to buy them. The video games industry does this brilliantly as well by hosting events where they give teasers of the new games that they are developing. On release date, you get crowds of people waiting outside stores for a midnight release and they see a huge influx of sales immediately.
If your new product is going to be a success, you need to do the same. You need your customers to be counting down the days until the new product is available so they’re desperate to buy it straight away. That’s not too difficult for big established companies like Apple, but for a smaller business, it can be very difficult. You need to catch people’s attention months in advance and maintain their interest until the product is launched and that’s a tall order. If you’re currently developing new product lines and you want to ensure a high volume of sales on release, these are some of the best ways to build hype.
Identify The Market Segment
When you’re trying to build that excitement, targeted marketing is very important. People are only going to follow the progress of the product and eagerly await the release if it’s something that they really want or need, so the first step should always be to identify the market segment that will respond to the product. There’s a big difference between knowing who your customers are and identifying the market segment because it’s not always likely that every single existing customer will be interested in the product. For example, if you’re a shoe manufacturer and your new product is a men’s running shoe, the market segment that you’re going for is men that exercise regularly. There’s no point targeting women or men that only buy leather dress shoes from you because they aren’t going to be that bothered about the product.
The best place to start is by thinking about the features of the product and the problems that it solves. This will give you an indication of the kind of person that is likely to buy it. You need to build a very clear customer profile so you know exactly who you should be targeting with marketing campaigns.
Boost Your Digital Marketing Investment
Social media is one of the best places to build hype around your product. People will share and comment on posts that you make about the launch and if you manage to gain some traction, things can pick up speed very quickly. Viral marketing is one of the most effective ways to start building excitement around a product before launch so you need to boost your investment in digital marketing if you’re going to be successful. Handling your digital marketing in-house is fine when you’re just using it for lead generation but when you’re trying to encourage interest in an upcoming product launch, you’ll need a more coherent marketing strategy. In a lot of cases, it’s best to hire experts like digital marketing agency White Chalk Road, for example, as they will have a lot more experience than you in this area. They will be able to advise you on how to target your digital marketing and craft posts that are most likely to get comments and shares. Engagement is the most important thing when you’re trying to build hype on social media and that can be very hard to achieve if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Tell The Story
Seeing the progress of the product is a great way to get people interested in it because they feel like they’re a part of that journey. If they’re following along the way, they’ll be more invested in it and so they’ll be far more likely to buy the product when it is released, that’s why you need to tell the story of your product. Post pictures of initial product development meetings and tease that something new is in the pipeline. Then, when you have your first designs or a prototype ready, you can post pictures of those. When you start getting closer to the launch, you can post a countdown to build anticipation. If you get it right, people will be following your social media closely and they’ll feel as though they’ve been through that production process with you, so they’ll be eager to get their hands on the finished product when it is finally ready.
Host A Marketing Event
Pushing the product online is important but there’s still something to be said for more traditional marketing strategies as well, particularly marketing events. It gives you the opportunity to get some face to face interaction with potential customers and, most importantly, they get the chance to see the product up close. Seeing pictures and videos is a great way to get people interested but it doesn’t compare to actually being able to use the product themselves. If you want to host a business event, you’ll have to invest a bit of money so it’s important to ensure that you’re seeing some return on that. Inviting the right people is key so don’t just go for numbers, always go for quality of guest over quantity because there’s no point packing the place out with people that are never going to buy your products.
It’s a good idea to host a few events in the lead up to launch where people can see working prototypes of the product and learn more about its features. At these events, you can encourage people to pre-order products as well so you’ve got some guaranteed orders. Then, you can have a larger event on the day of launch to publicise the release of the product.
A lot of money goes into developing, testing, and manufacturing a new product and if you just launch it without building a bit of hype around it first, you won’t get the initial orders that you need to recoup that investment quickly.
