When planning a launch for your small business, you want to make sure that everything you’ve done up until the date of the actual launch has been beneficial to both yourself and your business. Making sure to avoid common pitfalls is just as important as making sure that you’ve got a product people are ready and willing to buy. However, what’s the best way to go about making sure you’ve got everything put together? How do we make sure that we’ve done everything possible to secure successful product launches?
That’s where Lesley Clavijo comes in. An expert on the art of teaching small businesses how to launch, Lesley has over 8 years of experience under her belt, and her passion for creating products—and working on all things tech—puts her in the perfect place to give us the best advice on successful product launches and what any small business owner should do when attempting to plan a first time launch of a brand new product.
Successful Product Launches and The CLICK Technique: “C” for “Curiosity”
Before we talk about the details surrounding successful product launches, however, we can’t forget to talk about The CLICK Technique! A five-day crash course of my own invention, The CLICK Technique will help anyone who needs a nudge in the right direction of getting more traffic and leads. If you’ve found that your website is sitting dead in the water, then following these five steps are exactly what you need! Each letter of the word “CLICK” stands for a different step you should be taking to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your content and your website.
When it comes to successful product launches, we’ll be focusing on the first “C” in the work “CLICK”, which stands for curiosity. Before you’ve even gotten your foot in the door with advertisements and setting up various landing pages, you need to make sure people are interested in what you’ve got to offer, first. You have to pique their curiosity and make sure that they’re ready to take the next step—visiting your website, and giving you the initial traffic you need to get going.
With successful product launches, the very same can be said! Before you start making the product, you need to make sure that people are actually interested in what you’re offering, first. If people aren’t curious about what you’re generating, there’s a large chance that what you’re planning won’t succeed, making you start back at square one. To ensure that what you’re planning will go off without a hitch, make sure that you’ve got the right product in mind. From there, things should fall into place naturally.
Successful Product Launches: 3 Steps To Success
Now that we know where to start, successful product launches don’t seem as daunting as they did before. Truthfully, when you’ve got a marketable product in mind, you can ultimately start from scratch and build your way up to websites, landing pages, and everything that people always tell you to have first, instead of second. And while, in most cases, that may be true, product launching works a little differently than normal marketing and advertising does.
The most important thing to know is that your idea is something that’s worth selling, and something that people are interested in. By ensuring that you’ve got a strong and sturdy foundation, you have a great place to start, and an even bigger road ahead of you.
Step 1: Validate Your Ideas
The first—and without a doubt the most important—step in the process of successful product launches relies on making sure that you’ve validated your idea. What this means is that, through a variety of ways, you’ve found validation through your audience and collection of peers that what you’ve got is a good idea and worth pursuing into creation. Making sure that this is done first and foremost is extremely important, due to the fact that, without validation? You could be creating a product that no one wants to use and no one will end up buying, therefore wasting your time, creativity, and money.
Luckily, there’s a lot of different ways to validate an idea, starting with content you’ve already created. By focusing on that content and looking into the sort of questions that people are asking about what you’re producing, you can get a feel for what they need, and therefore expand and create a digital product based on what they’ve already got on their minds.
Additionally, if you find that certain content you’ve created is receiving traffic on a higher level than normal—almost a viral level, for example—then you can determine that people are highly interested in the subject discussed. From there, you can expand on that content, and decipher a way to create a product, and successful product launches, out of it.
Outside of the content you’re creating and curating, make sure to look into the interactions you have with your audience. What are people sending you through emails? What sort of comments are people leaving on your social media posts? More specifically, what posts do people seem drawn to?
Don’t be afraid to reach out and seek validation within your Facebook community as well. Put out polls, ask open-ended questions, and let them tell you what they’re struggling with and what they’re trying to resolve. Looking at the content you’re putting out and seeing what people tend to gravitate towards answers your question for you and gives you a very strong place to start in terms of successful product launches, ideas, and creation.
Step 2: Pre-sale Your Product
Once you’ve gotten past the validation stage, the focus shifts towards marketing the product itself. Successful product launches rely heavily on the functionality and interest in the product itself, and though validating the product is essential in making sure you’ve got an idea that people are willing to work with, marketing the product is its own category.
The best place to start when it comes to pre-selling your product is interacting and engaging with your email list. By creating a place where people can go to find out more information about what you’re selling—a landing page, if not a full website—you can grow and expand your email list.
This gives you a place to reach out and ask these people, your prospective audience, what they’re struggling with and how you can help them with these issues. By knowing what your niche is and knowing what you’re trying to teach people, you’ll find yourself happily settled with a product and an idea that you’re passionate about, rather than something you’re stuck with out of convenience.
Through email conversations, you can create and nurture potential prospects, and get them to a point where you can ask them what they’re having problems with. Their answers give you a launch idea to build off of, as well as connect a foundation of trust with your audience. After you’ve garnered this idea, you can start with simple advertising and attempt to get this product in front of said audience.
That’s where the idea of pre-selling comes in. Even if it’s just a beta version of what you’re trying to put out, giving them something to work with in order to receive feedback is part of the entire process. Once the product itself has been launched, you can enlist the help of online marketing experts (such as myself) to help you find a way to funnel that product and make a profit off of it.
Successful product launches rely on pre-selling due to the transparency and honest interaction between you, the seller, and your audience, the buyers. In fact, many people pre-sell products before they’ve even created them!
Though it may seem unorthodox, people often create products without thinking, which means people aren’t purchasing it upon its initial release. By pre-selling a digital product that isn’t complete, you’re receiving true validation by asking your audience you’ve carefully built up if they’re interested in what you’ve got and trusting that they’ll be interested enough to say yes to something that doesn’t exist yet. It creates a sense of urgency, and using that to your marketing advantage by explaining to people that they’re the first in line to test out something brand new will definitely increase the hype around what you’ve made.
Step 3: Avoid Pitfalls
The final step in successful product launches revolves around avoiding very common mistakes that people tend to make when attempting to start something new. It’s important to know what to avoid in order to find success, and though it’s impossible to know everything that could go wrong, finding ways around the most common mistakes can save you further stress down the line.
First and foremost, you must make sure that you’re keeping in touch with your e-mail list as frequently as you can! Even if it’s only once a week or biweekly, that interaction is important and will make you seem more genuine and interested than falling off the face of the planet after you’ve gained e-mail addresses for your list.
By communicating frequently, you’re nurturing these relationships from the beginning, assuring that you’re in it to win it. If you attempt to initiate contact after months of radio silence, they’ll know what’s going on, and chances are they won’t appreciate being treated as a convenience rather than a dedicated and interested prospect. Urge people to stay interested and communicate with you on the questions they’ve got, and successful product launches will go a lot smoother down the line.
Secondly, though it goes without saying, you must make sure your idea has been validated before you go through with any large marketing commitments! A major pitfall of successful product launches lies with thinking that you’ve got an amazing idea without validating it first, thus leaving you to potential fall back. You have to make sure that what you’re creating is something that people want, not just what you think people need. In order to meet your goals and make sure the product is a success, make sure your ideas are validated.
Lastly, don’t assume that viral traffic means that you can go ahead with producing and selling a product without any sort of support behind the idea. Creating products off of posts that gain a lot of traffic without any sort of validation or pre-sale technique usually ends up with little to no sales, even if the amount of traffic is unlike anything you’ve seen before.
The main issue, there, is that people aren’t always paying attention, and that’s where cultivating relationships comes in handy. If you build a relationship with the people creating this traffic, you’ll convert more of them into buyers, and the product launch will go off without a hitch. So many people are competing to sell online, and people are getting smarter with every second that passes. Make sure they can trust the person they’re buying from, and you’ll save yourself a lot of hassle in the end.
Successful Product Launches: Make Sure To Create For Everyone
In the end, successful product launches come down to cultivating and sustaining a strong relationship with the audience you garner over a long period of time. Through those interactions—and through various channels of validation—you can rest assured knowing that you’ve got a product worth creating, and success will follow.
Just make sure that you’re willing to put in the hard work in the end. Success doesn’t come for free, and creating products from scratch and launching them into the internet abyss can be a little daunting for those who’ve never done it before. So long as you know you’ve got something special on your hands, you can achieve your goals!
