In today’s marketing social media plays important role. If you will launch your product soon, you might want to know your best strategy could be using social media. In the past, television or newspaper could be your best strategy, but all that have changed now.
The figures proves everything. There are more people on the internet daily than your television or newspaper could ever reach in years. That sets social media apart from other mediums when launching a product.
Facebook has crossed the 2 billion user mark. Instagram is in its 1 billionth plus, while twitter is heading for the 500 millionth users. You see reason you should launch your product soon on social media? The figures don’t lie.
Why Launch Your Product On Social Media
Inasmuch as social media has the huge traffic potential for launching a product, its also tough to truly get to the right audience through the tick crowd. For example, Instagram has over 500 million daily users. And over 50 billion pictures are shared daily.
You are competing against these billions of posts per day to reach your target audience. And that’s not as simple as one thinks when you compare to huge daily users of 500 million potential customers.
Facebook on the other hand has over 2.4 billion active users, of which 2.2 billion of them are mobile users. And it’s daily active users are around 1.5 billion. And the total number of tweets sent per day is over 500 million on Twitter.
Draft A Product Launch Plan
In launching a product on social media you will need to plan. There are over 65 social media platforms today. Although Facebook, twitter, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat and others have dominated the circle, you may not have heard of YY, RenRen and others.
There may be also some local social media sites that your target audience uses that you may need to be aware of when planning to launch a product. It’s usually quick to just roll with the popular platforms. But the not too popular ones might be more useful and cost effective as well.
So, know what’s best for your product launch campaign even before you start the promotion. A good product is not the only component of a good launch. Below I have also listed seven of what may impact greatly on successfully launching a product.
{1} Know Your Audience
The best place to start is to research your target audience. No matter how good your product is, if you don’t know who needs them you can’t have a perfect product launch. Your audience are those who would buy your product when you launch it.
You need to know who they are, where they are online, on their preferred social media platforms, and what are their interests. Until you know how to reach your audience your product launch is not about to begin.
Your target audience could be people like yourself. Until you know them and perfect your campaign strategies on how to appeal to them with your product launch, you shouldn’t be launching a product.
For example, the best audience for your product may even be those that doesn’t directly need your product. Sometimes the right buyers don’t need your product but they use it as gift for those who really need it.
{2} Build Anticipation
If you are launching a product, building anticipation is a prerequisite. The anticipation helps you gauge the possible outcome of your product launch. Sometimes, what gets your audience excited may not even be the product itself but all the razzmatazz around your launch.
Your campaign teaser helps your build such strong anticipation even among audience who may not know about what your product is designed to do. But good anticipation would help build word of mouth publicity around your launch. And that would increase online sharing.
The power of social media is high when something is new or about to happen. People want to be the first to break it to their friends that something new is about to happen or has happened. If you give your audience such power to be proud of themselves you will have a perfect product launch.
{3} Create Brand Hashtags
Hashtags are important ways to deepen your online campaigns and make it viral beyond even your own control. If people find your hashtags appealing they will share it. That’s why you need to create good teasers to build strong anticipation. It’s this anticipation that would make your hashtags go viral.
However, consider branded hashtags. It sets your campaign apart and avoid being drawn on the different posts on a general hashtag. You can widen your reach by including general hashtags but make sure you have your own tags that is exclusive to your product launch.
{4} Produce Videos Of The Product
Packaging and launching a product means you need to create visuals. Although pictures and most popular, videos works more magic for product launches. If a picture can tell a thousand stories, a video tells a million stories.
Make sure you package inspiring and appealing videos in launching a product.
Videos have a way of getting more attention of the target audience, no matter who they are than any pictures. And with video you can tell a better story than what picture could do.
{5} Find Relevant Influencers
In the world of social media, influencers have taken their rightful place in how we launch products. You might not succeed in launching a product on social media without help from relevant influencers.
Advertising on social media is good. But the power of influencers is better. Your adverts creates awareness. But influencers push their followers to take action. That’s what makes them more powerful than your other advertising strategy.
However, you have to find relevant influencers for your product launch success.
{6} Hold Contests
And when you have the right influencers you need to give them something to help sell your product launch to their fan base. One of such is contest.
Having a good contest will help increase the level of anticipation, win you new Customers and prepare the ground for launching a product.
{7} Provide A Clear Call To Action
But the real reason for launching a product is to make your audience do something. You must provide a clear call to action. There should be what you want your audience to do once they come in contact with your campaign.
A clear call to action could be to drop their email for more information. To subscribe to your membership drive or preorder your product ahead of launch date. Whatever you want them to do should be very clear that no one needs to be asking question about what to do.
And this call to action should be in every of the product launch campaign. You can also use different call to action strategy to get different target audience to do something different. Like, some might be asked to signup to a newsletter, others get to preorder products, while some would be asked to join your exclusive membership.
Whatever drive you choose must make them do what you want done in each campaign.
Conclusion
Launching a product should be well perfected with a clear goal in mind. While you set your goals, make plans for analytics to monitor their effectiveness. How best your launch is doing should be monitored daily. And as you measure each campaign, you adjust to optimize for better results.
Note that every of the seven tips for launching a product via social media is important and unique to achieving your goals. Don’t substitute or exclude any of them. Each tip has its own unique role and you must tap their benefits fully.
Another thing you should consider when launching a product is full details of the benefits and features of the product. These are what you will highlight in all your campaign materials and be consistent.
