Product Launches Have Changed
Back in the day, product launches were much more binary, flip-of-the-switch events than they are now. On the day of an official product launch, you’d meet with the press, display your new product at a trade show, and kick off a big in-your-face print advertising campaign in the journals. Even if your press coverage was weak, and some giant company’s hosted events stole all the attention at the trade show, you could still count on your big ad spend to overcome the awareness hurdle and get some initial inquiries.
Remember those circle-the-number cards?
The shock-and-awe, uncloaking-the-secret product launch event (sometimes preceded by a “teaser” campaign) no longer exists. Product launches are increasingly diffuse, with various alpha, beta, early-access, pre-release, and charter customer programs occurring before the official product launch date. Marketing no longer has the option of amplifying the suspense and the surprise element of a new product in an effort to freak out competitors and capture additional attention from conference attendees and the press.
The print publication journals that are still in business would really appreciate it if you would do a big print ad campaign to make up for your nothing-left-to-announce launch event. Don’t.
Line Up Your Market Prior to Launch
If you do not make a serious effort at pre-launch marketing you’ll have a very slow start. If you then try to speed things up with a big ad spend, you’ll find that it has little impact on your order rate. So as long as you can do it without risking any unprotected assets, you might as well cop to your commercial intentions early on and get a head start on your marketing. Today’s open nature of product development means that you can co-develop your product and the market that will buy it concurrently.
How?
There are a number of market development methods to choose from, but bear in mind that any channel you select will require consistent participation over time in order to be effective. So if your launch time frame is still a ways off, or you’re unsure of your schedule for technical, supply, or other reasons, you might want to hold off on the fancy dinners for thought leaders and pricey event sponsorships.
Here’s a strong recommendation: Grab an URL that describes what your product does and start blogging. Write about things that interest the people who will form your market. Find papers and posters related to your product’s applications and write about those. Set up an automated section that posts job openings of interest to your audience. Make sure to write about all the hacks people are now using to do what your product will do for them so much better and more easily.
You’ve probably already figured out why this might be a good idea, but I’ll clarify some of the benefits for you here:
- You’ll create a live communication channel to the people you will sell your product to. When your product is ready, you can promote it to these people very directly and at practically zero cost.
- Your click stats will tell you where many of your site visitors are located, and what search term keywords they used to find it.
- At the tactically advantageous moment, you’ll already know and be able to use those keywords on your corporate web site and in online advertising campaigns.
- Your search term and page hit stats will also help you identify and rank the relative importance of different product features and applications, allowing you to make final feature set and application support decisions with the benefit of your own market data.
- You will get some contact information from people who subscribe to your blog updates.
- You will control the top position on Google’s search results for queries related to your product’s capabilities.
- At the tactically advantageous moment, you will be able to attach your blog’s traffic and search engine visibility as an instant backlink structure for your corporate site or product page, boosting its search ranking to a top position as well.
- If you include alternative and potentially competitive approaches to the problem your product solves, you’ll legitimize your market niche strategy and establish your own authority and leadership position in it.
There are a few ways to undermine the strength of this technique. Here’s a list of mistakes to avoid:
- Making a big deal of your company’s sponsorship of the site. Site visitors will assume promotional bias and stay away.
- Trying to deny your company’s sponsorship (astroturfing). Just keep it low.
- Hosting your blog inside your corporate web site or under its corporate domain name. It needs its own, separate URL.
- Writing about your product, its unrivaled sensitivity, its unsurpassed performance, its unmatched economy, or the new standard it will set for ease-of-use and automation. It definitely is OK to cover any appropriate news, papers, posters, presentations and other items coming out of your organization at a normal level, equivalent with your other content. But when it’s time for promotional copy, post it on your regular corporate site.
- Forgetting about it once you’ve set it up. Nothing positive will happen unless you update the site frequently and pay attention to what’s going on with it.
Marketing New Stuff is Hard
It takes innovation and determination to slip through the defenses of established players in the biotech lab tools arena. Whatever it is you’re working on, there’s almost certainly some form of entrenched competition. The established product may be poorly suited to the application you’re targeting, costly and troublesome to operate, a gross polluter or even a complete POS. But it bears the comforting logo of the default-choice vendor for such systems. Even if your product runs circles around the established product from a technical standpoint, there’s no market for yours until you create it. Get started.
For help introducing a product against entrenched competition, contact Matthew Wygant at matthew@wygant.net.
