The Pro Marketer’s Product Launch Checklist for 2018 – Whiteboard Friday

The Pro Marketer’s Product Launch Checklist for 2018 – Whiteboard Friday

From listing audience members and influencers to having the right success metrics to having a rollback plan, Rand shares his best advice in the form of an actionable checklist in this Whiteboard Friday. So many of you are undoubtedly in the business of doing things around SEO and around web marketing, around content marketing, around social media marketing in service of a product that you are launching or a feature that you are launching or multiple products. ☑ A defined audience, accompanied by a list of 10–100 real, individual people in the target group So to start with, very first, top of our list, a defined audience. That outreach plan should include why each target is going to care about the problem, about the solution, and why they're going to share. If you can build a successful one of these, that list, especially if before you even launch, you know that 20 of these 500 people have said, "Yes, I'm going to amplify. I can't wait until you give me permission to share it or release this thing or send me the version of it." ☑ List of influential publications and media that influencers and target audience members consume Next, similarly, just like we have a list of influential people, we want a list of influential publications and media that many influencers and many of your target audience members read, watch, subscribe to, listen to, follow, etc. That could be before launch we're doing a bunch of things around private beta or around sharing with some of these influential people and publications. We're going to cut all spend if we fall below metric Z. That tends to do very, very well for product building and product launching.

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What goes into a truly exceptional product launch? To give your new product a feature the best chance at success, it’s important to wrangle all the many moving pieces involved in pulling off a seamless marketing launch. From listing audience members and influencers to having the right success metrics to having a rollback plan, Rand shares his best advice in the form of an actionable checklist in this Whiteboard Friday. And make sure to check out the last item — it may be the best one to start with!

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The Pro Marketer's Product Launch Checklist 2018

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we are chatting about crafting a professional marketer’s product launch checklist for 2018.

So many of you are undoubtedly in the business of doing things around SEO and around web marketing, around content marketing, around social media marketing in service of a product that you are launching or a feature that you are launching or multiple products. I think it pays for us to examine what goes into a very successful product launch.

Of course, I’ve been a part of many of these at Moz, as part of many of the startups and other companies that I advise, and there are some shared characteristics, particularly from the marketing perspective. I won’t focus on the product and engineering perspectives. We’ll talk about marketing product launches today.

☑ A defined audience, accompanied by a list of 10–100 real, individual people in the target group

So to start with, very first, top of our list, a defined audience. That can be a demographic or a psychographic set of characteristics that define your audience or a topic, a niche, a job title or job function type of characteristics that comprise the profile of who’s in your group. That should be accompanied by a list of 10 to 100 real people.

I know that many marketers out there love using personas, and I think it’s fine to use personas to help define this audience. But I’m going to urge you strongly to have that real list. Those could be:

  • Customers that you know you’re targeting,
  • People who have bought from you in the past and you’re hoping will buy again,
  • People who maybe you’ve lost and are hoping to recapture, maybe they use a competitor’s product today or they’re notable in some way.

As long as they fit your characteristics, I want you to have that list of those real people.

The problem with personas is you can’t talk to them. You can’t ask them real questions, or you can, but only in your own mind and your imagination fills in the details. These are real people that you can talk to, email, ask questions, show the product to, show the launch plan to and get real feedback. They should have shared characteristics. They should have an affinity for the product that you’re building or launching, hopefully, and they should share the problem.

Whatever the problem, almost every product, in fact, hopefully every product is actually trying to solve a problem better than the thing that came before it or the many things that came before it. Your audience should share whatever that problem is that you’re trying to solve.

☑ List of 25–500 influential people in the space, + contact info and an outreach plan

Okay. We’ll give this a nice check mark. Next, list of influential people in the space. That could be 25 to even hundreds or thousands of people potentially, plus their contact information and an outreach plan. That outreach plan should include why each target is going to care about the problem, about the solution, and why they’re going to share. Why will they amplify?

This is in answer to the question: Who will help amplify this and why? If you don’t have a great answer to that, your product launch will almost certainly fall flat from a marketing perspective. If you can build a successful one of these, that list, especially if before you even launch, you know that 20 of these 500 people have said, “Yes, I’m going to amplify. Here’s why I care about this. I can’t wait until you give me permission to share it or release this thing or send me the version of it.” That’s an awesome, awesome step.

☑ List of influential publications and media that influencers and target audience members consume

Next, similarly, just like we have a list of influential people, we want a list of influential publications and media that many influencers…

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