There’s a lot more to launching a great product than meets the eye. Besides the quality of the merchandise itself, packaging design, online store functionality, and customer support team efforts, there’s one more aspect that will determine the success of your venture: The way you introduce the product to the market.
Without effectively marketing your product, you can’t even begin to make accurate sales forecasts and establish your business as an important player in your niche. There are many different ways to tackle this challenge, and here are the 5 most effective ones.
1. Press coverage
Did you believe that advertising a product in a newspaper ad was old-fashioned and outdated? A lot of new entrepreneurs make the same mistake, thinking that ads in print are something only 19-century businessmen would do.
Although we live in a digital age, never underestimate what printed media can still do. However, before you start purchasing spots for your ads in the renowned newspapers, make sure to check if your target audience buys and reads them in the first place.
2. Social media marketing
The on-going social media fever is here to stay for a long time. These platforms are no longer just a vast digital space for users to connect with one another and tell stories about their lives. It is a huge marketplace where companies and individuals compete to snatch the attention of their audiences and make sales on the spot.
Social media marketing is one of the crucial aspects of launching any product on the market. Luckily, all the effort you put into leaving an impression on your audience on Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn will be very worth your while.
3. Email marketing
Although the public perception of this method is often misguided, email marketing is still one of the most efficient ways to market your product on the Internet. However, the way many inexperienced professionals use this tool is often outdated.
People like to buy things, but they don’t like to be sold to. Planning an effective email marketing strategy, therefore, should ideally be left to professionals. Still, even if you can’t afford to hire outside help, you can still learn how to avoid the most common email marketing mistakes and craft your strategy in-house.
4. Search engine optimization
Today, every company worth their salt needs to do everything they can to appear on the first page of their preferred search engine, before the competitors who sell a similar product to the same target audience.
Making your website fast and responsive and competing to rank highly for keywords important for your industry or niche are only some of the crucial SEO aspects you should know of.
Feel overwhelmed yet? Don’t worry: SEO is a serious business and no entrepreneur is expected to know all these things. However, it’s important to know that, unlike some marketing efforts you can make in-house, SEO should be handled very carefully and by experienced professionals in order to bring notable results.
5. Affiliate marketing
Once upon a time, word-of-mouth was the most important marketing strategy. Satisfied customers would brag about the product they bought and used, recommending it to people around them. These days, the situation is a bit different, but the good old word-of-mouth practice is still at large.
Hoping that your customers will bring in a huge revenue with their recommendations alone, however, is simply unrealistic. This is why marketers created one more amazing tool to launch new products and maintain an interest in the existing ones: Affiliate marketing.
If done attentively, using affiliate marketing to boost your product launch will truly do wonders for your business.
Conclusion
No matter how useful and well-designed your product may be, in this time and day, there are simply no inventions that just “sell themselves”. The competition is tough and consumers are, rightfully so, more demanding than ever. Launching your product the right way can give your sales a boost no other effort can match.
Investing all available resources in creating an effective marketing strategy is no longer a useful option: It is a necessary condition of success. The ideas suggested above will help you make a great start, after you tweak them to fit your company’s needs and goals.
Jane Evans is a seasoned essay writer and blogger from York who loves to travel, meet new people, and talk about literature and modern art. Her writing niches include business and entrepreneurship, new technologies, and marketing. Interested to learn more about Jane? Find her on Facebook.
Product marketing stock photo by mozakim/Shutterstock
