Welcome to My Blog

If your product team is working on the next big thing, there ought to be an equally awesome launch plan in the works to accompany it. 

While some companies are guilty of drafting a press release, crossing their fingers, and hoping that the users will come, there’s actually much more to it than that.

Quite simply: If you have big news, you need a big plan. And that’s where the product launch comes in. From establishing the proper messaging and creating the assets to enabling your sales team and keeping momentum, there’s a lot that goes into putting together a solid product launch plan.

At HubSpot, I work on the product marketing team, and we’re responsible for launching all of HubSpot’s new products. Our experience has shown us that there are three distinct phases of a product launch: pre-launch, launch, and post-launch. Let’s walk through them below.

18 Foolproof Product Launch Tips

Pre-Launch

Before you launch, take the time to get really close to the product. Work with your product team to understand the problem they are trying to solve. Join them as they do users tests. Chat with them about their product philosophy. And most of all, ask a ton of questions — especially if you’re not familiar with the space.

Focus on understanding their vision and becoming a product expert. Outside of the product manager, the marketer launching the product should be the most knowledgeable person at your company about that product.

1) Research the space in-depth.

At most companies, the product manager will own the problem that the product solves. They’ll have a deep understanding of who the end user is and what their unique needs are.

The product marketer’s job is to understand the market. They must be able to answer questions like:

• What’s the larger narrative around this space?
• How do current customers feel about it?
• What do people like and dislike?
• Is it growing and cutting edge or old and getting disrupted?
• What are the leading strategies and tactics in this space?
• What is your company’s unique point of view when it comes to this space?
• How does your new product fit in?

2) Focus on a single buyer persona.

You may not need to reinvent an existing buyer persona, but you should outline who amongst your target audience is a great fit for this new product. What kind of challenges do they have? How do they work? How big is there team? Talk to people who fit this profile to really understand their needs and goals.

If you need help organizing this information, check out these buyer persona templates or this handy tool.

3) Write a mock press release.

At HubSpot, we write a mock press release before we launch a product. We do this very early on in the product’s life to ensure that everyone involved in the launch is aligned on the messaging.

To give you a better sense of how this exercise unfolds, here’s an example: 

But we’re not the only ones practicing this approach. In fact, the folks at Amazon use this exercise, too. The idea is that when you work backwards and start with the press release, it’s easier to put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

If the press release doesn’t sound very interesting or fails to conjure a reaction, it’s likely that there’s more work to be done.

(Need some help getting started here? Check out these free press release templates.)

4) Build your messaging — but don’t marry it.

Messaging or positioning is mostly about refining your product narrative to focus on only the most valuable aspects of the new product via a simple message.

This is tough.

Most product people have the urge to communicate how great individual features are –something you want avoid in launch messaging. At launch, you may only have someone’s attention for a few minutes or seconds, so your messaging needs to be persuasive, simple and unique. It needs to communicate what your product actually does and communicate its high-level value.

You want to get this right, but don’t over commit to messaging. It can (and should) change as you share your messaging with internal folks and customers.

Elements of good position often include:

• A tagline
• The problem it solves
• A list of core features
• The value prop
• A 10-word positioning statement

In the screen shot above you can see some of these elements in action on the HubSpot Ads product page.

5) Share your messaging with everyone.

It’s time to take the messaging you’ve been slaving over and get it in front of your coworkers, customers, and prospects.

This is often the least fun part of a product launch. Mainly because no matter how good your positioning is, it takes time to get the pitch down, and not everyone will get it.

It’s good to start with individuals who may be a little more forgiving and honest before presenting to executives. Use every meeting to pitch people and ask questions. You want to gather as much info as possible here and root out any confusing or bad messages.

6) Get involved in the beta.

Having a group of beta testers evaluate your product before you release it to the public is a really important step. At HubSpot, we release products to a group of folks — our beta testers — that have opted-in to give us feedback in exchange for early access.

If your company does this, make sure you are talking to the customers using the tool in the beta. Capture their stories, review their performance, and validate your value prop with them. This is your opportunity to test your messaging and build real-world proof to support your pitch with an audience that is ready to share feedback.

7) Change your messaging and find the best hook.

After talking to prospects and salespeople, and seeing how beta users use the product, it’s likely that you’ve uncovered a thing or two about your messaging that you might want to adjust. That’s good.

If you’ve done things right, this won’t mean drastic changes, but most likely a tweak to the value prop or tagline.

8) Set ambitious goals.

You need to be deliberate and ambitious with the goals you set, and that can be challenging when you have a new product without benchmarks. To combat that, we ask the question: “If everything went exactly right, what is the highest possible number — whether that be leads, users, etc. — we could achieve?”

This sets a ceiling for your campaign — a number that is realistically almost never achieved.

If I project that the highest possible number of leads the campaign can generate is 500, and I end up with 450, I know we got just about everything right. If I generate 550 leads, it means I probably didn’t do a great job of setting a realistic ceiling. And if we only generate 300 leads, we know some tactics didn’t work at all.

The image below can be a useful slide as part of your go-to-market plan:

9) Take the time to get the market ready.

If you’re launching a new product that enters your company into a new space — potentially a space where your company doesn’t have a ton of authority — start creating content about that space pre-launch.

You’ll want to seed this content for SEO purposes and to establish your company as experts in the market. It’ll also give you a chance to see what kind of content resonates prior to the launch, as well as help you surface any issues.

10) Build compelling creative assets.

At this point, you’re close to launch and it’s time to start building launch assets. But before you start writing emails or building landing pages, think about the customer journey:

• How do people make purchase decisions in your space?
• What do they need before buying?
• Is it a free trial? A demo?
• Is it best for them to talk to a sales person?
• What do they need to know before they get to that point?

Once you’ve answered those questions, outline your conversion path. How will you first get people’s attention? Perhaps it’s and email, that drives people to a landing page, where users are encouraged to fill out a form.

Once you have this, get to work building the actual forms, site pages, videos, social posts, emails and other tactics that will drive users down your funnel and to your conversion point.

(If you’re looking for inspiration, check out this list of the best promotional product videos we’ve ever seen.)

11) Assemble your go-to-market strategy.

All the elements I’ve mentioned should come together in a deck or a doc — something that is clear, complete, and easily shareable.

This is your go-to-market guide: A holistic document of all launch activities, planning, and goals. This can include pricing recommendations, market research, competitive analysis, and any other relevant information you might need.

Launch

This phase is much shorter than pre-launch: it can take a day, or a week — depending on how long you feel you need. As you prepare to move on to the launch, you want to stay focused on the execution and be ready to put out any fires.

12) Choose the right channels.

During the planning phase you should have outlined the channels you want to use to share your message. This is not a “the more the merrier” sort of thing — a mistake new product marketers often make.

Be sure to avoid channels where the audience may not be the right fit. Pick one main channel — an event, a Product Hunt post, or blog post — and use email, social, paid, and other channels to support that main post.

For example, earlier this year HubSpot re-launched Website Grader on Product Hunt. We choose Product Hunt because it serves as a great way for startups and technology companies to introduce new products to a community of product-centric influencers.

17) Revisit your “go-to-market” doc for reporting.

With all the work that’s going into launch, you don’t want to have to retroactively figure out what to report on. If you’ve done a good job with your go-to-market doc, you should be able to create a new slide and fill in your results with real numbers.

Once you’ve had a little more time away from your launch, spend some time to analyze the results. Where did you campaign succeed and fail? What did you not anticipate? What did you learn? Post these to your internal wiki or as a public blog post.

18) Shift your focus on retention.

Now that you’ve successfully launched a new product, shift your attention to retention. Marketing can generally play a bigger role in driving new users, but it’s important to work with your product team to figure out how you can help keep those users around.

This means more ongoing education like post-launch product webinars, as well as sharing case studies and success stories to show your users what they can achieve with your product.

What did I miss here? What sort of product launch lessons have you learned? Share your ideas below.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2013 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

Let’s face it: 2016 (so far) has brought about a number of shocks, surprises, and setbacks for businesses — from stock market instability to events like Brexit. And as a result, it’s likely that many people are likely feeling a little less certain about their strategies than they did a year ago.

Now, I’m not suggesting this heralds the return of the wartime CEO, but a lack of certainty always forces business leaders and marketers to look at ways they can add more predictability to their organisations. They want to increase operational efficiency so no spend goes to waste, but also balance this by investing in sales and growth.

Thankfully there’s an existing playbook marketers can follow to help navigate uncertainty. Below you’ll find five smart ways that marketers can think ahead during times of transition and change.

5 Smart Ways Marketers Can Prepare for Unexpected Changes

1) Double down on testing.

If your competitors are tightening their belts and scaling back marketing investments, use this to your advantage by doubling down on testing. The most effective marketing leaders encourage a culture of testing within their teams and run experiments to A/B test and optimise activity at every stage of the marketing funnel. Doing this helps to improve the operational efficiency across the board.

Using a marginal gains approach you can and should run a number of small tests to see which variants — from website copy to landing page design — perform better.

At HubSpot, the conversion rate optimization (CRO) team continually runs tests to improve upon our existing efforts and identify new solutions for the future. A few recent examples include:

• The historical blog optimization project which increased organic search views of old blog posts by an average of 106%
• A series of technical SEO updates which increased organic traffic by over 50% in just one month.

And the best part? We didn’t need to invest in the creation of new content.

Others may see uncertainty as a reason to pause or cut investments, but you should consider it an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what moves the needle on your marketing efforts.

If you’re looking for A/B testing inspiration, work your way through these conversion optimization case studies or check out this handy A/B testing checklist.

2) Focus on the value in your value proposition.

In uncertain times, many organisations look to curb spending on nonessential items. This makes clearly communicating the value your product creates to prospects and clients more important than ever.

Developing your product’s value proposition is both part art and science. You need to craft compelling copy, but also test different versions to see which works best. While it can be tempting to focus on product features, always bring it back to the job to be done and what the end-user values most, such as helping them do something faster or better, or by enabling the user to make more money.

Amazon is well known for making developers draft a product’s hypothetical press release and FAQ announcement before even a line of code is written. This helps the company to fully define the product’s value proposition and how it will be pitched to customers.

Here are three examples of very different businesses that effectively communicate their value proposition to give you a better sense of how to approach this:

Stripe

Stripe spells out exactly what its product is, who it is aimed at, and the value it generates. Ecommerce and online payments are notoriously complex industries with high barriers to entry, but Stripe shows how it enables developers to quickly and easily get businesses set up to send and receive money online.

Tortuga Backpacks

The value proposition communicated by Tortuga Backpacks is that its backpacks make traveling easier. This is important to its target persona — urban travelers who value convenience and want to avoid checking their luggage — which adds cost and an unwanted visit to the luggage carousel.

Unbounce

The value proposition here has two clear strands. First up, Unbounce mentions that marketers can use its product to build, publish, and A/B test landing pages — activities that help marketers generate results that create value for their business. Secondly, marketers can achieve this without the help of IT, which highlights how the product saves both time and money.

How do you position your products and services? We recommend partnering with your product and sales leaders to define your product’s “must have” value proposition.

Want to see some more examples of effective value propositions? Take a look at this post, or this one from IMPACT Branding & Design.

3) Invest in predictable lead generation.

All businesses need to sell their products or services so they can generate revenue to grow and invest in the future. But in order to sell effectively and hit quota each month, sales organisations need a pipeline of leads.

To that end, marketing teams run programs that create a consistent pipeline of high volume, quality leads. But what’s the most effective way to generate leads and customers?

For one, investing in the creation of content such as ebooks, webinars, whitepapers, blog posts and more, will help your business attract qualified traffic to your website. This is because content has a compounding impact that increases in value over time, whereas many traditional tactics are quick to lose steam.

Some organisations adopt a blended approach where they use inbound marketing for the majority of their lead generation activity, and occasionally top up their marketing funnel with PPC advertising.

How you approach it will be determined by the unique demands of your organisation, however, the important thing is that there are numbers to prove that the inbound methodology works. Just check out this HubSpot ROI Report.

In short: the businesses best placed to ride out any uncertainty have a pipeline of quality leads that is consistently topped up, as well as a marketing team that knows the right levers to pull to increase lead flow. Investing in predictable lead generation is what leads to predictable sales and revenue growth.

4) Explore new and emerging markets.

If a market becomes less attractive to do business in, then you should rightly look at alternatives.

Entering new markets doesn’t necessarily mean building a bricks and mortar store or opening a shiny new office. You can take the first steps by creating a local market website and launching marketing activity specifically targeted at that market. This nimble and “digital first” approach will enable you to test your hypothesis on whether or not a new market is right for your business at that time.

Tools like Google’s Global Market Finder can show you online search volume as a proxy for potential customer demand for products and services. This coupled with the location data of your customers and leads will help you make more informed decisions about customer demand and where to plan future investments.

Why is this important? Organisations that understand high potential markets can more easily move to overcome changes in the business environment, such as currency fluctuations or economic uncertainty. Strategic marketing leaders know not only where the customers of today are, but more importantly where the customers of tomorrow will be.

5) Make marketing a profit centre.

With marketing becoming more data-driven and trackable, there’s growing consensus that marketing should be viewed as a profit, rather than cost centre. Much marketing activity now directly drives revenue, so it stands to reason that it should be considered an investment in future growth instead of an expense.

When marketing is viewed as a driver of growth, the idea of an annual marketing budget seems at best outdated and at worst a threat to the bottom line. But the reality is many business leaders still see marketing as a discretionary cost that can be topped up or cut each year.

You can take the first steps to making marketing a profit centre within your business by identifying spend which directly drives measurable revenue and looking at the ROI of this activity. If a particular marketing activity generates sales within an acceptable acquisition cost, marketing leaders should have the flexibility to invest more heavily (or perhaps infinitely) in this activity, rather than be constrained by budget.

Positioning marketing as a profit centre is a bold move, but uncertain times calls for new and innovative thinking. Importantly, this approach gives marketing leaders the opportunity to move from functional experts to full business partners and drive growth for the organisation.

In uncertain times, some businesses see a threat and look to consolidate, while others spy an opportunity to move quickly and gain an advantage over the competition. Admittedly, this is something of an oversimplification, but the best way to approach the challenge posed by uncertainty is by focusing on both today and the future. This means striking the elusive balance of increasing operational efficiency to reduce costs, while also investing in the future growth of the business by continuing to spend on marketing, sales, and research and development.

This approach — although easier said than done — can help you lay the groundwork for future success in more certain times. And while the tips we’ve suggested are by no means a one-size-fits-all solution, the important thing is that you and your team start thinking about these things sooner rather than later.

How does your business plan for change or uncertainty? Share your best tips below.

If you were in a room full of inbound marketers a couple of years ago, advertising on Google wasn’t a strategy you heard too much about. However, with the ever-increasing competition online, it’s becoming a more talked about topic for getting your content in front of the eyes of your potential customers. So, why has it taken so long for most inbound marketers to adopt Google AdWords?

For this answer, let’s take a look at the top 3 myths that might be keeping you from implementing a successful AdWords campaign.

Myth #1: People Don’t Click On Google Ads

This is the easiest of the myths to debunk. Remember, Google is a publicly traded company and just about anyone can access their financial records with a little bit of digging around.

How much money do you think Google makes in one day on AdWords alone? $1 million? $10 million? Can you believe that Google generates over $100 million in revenue every day from people clicking on their ads? With an average cost per click between $1 and $2 (source: WordStream), that’s well over 50 million clicks per day.

So yes, people definitely click on Google ads. Everyday Google experiments with the appearance of their ads to entice more users to click them. After all, why would the most popular search engine want to present you with a free, organic result at the top of the search results page when they could showcase several ads that all generate revenue?

Myth #2: My Competitors Can Just Click On My Ads All Day, Costing Me Money

Google has extremely sophisticated technology in place to prevent “click fraud” and “invalid clicks”. This goes beyond tracking the IP address to see where clicks are originating, and involves the analysis of several click pattern factors.

What’s more, Google provides very good reports on AdWords campaign performance, and any suspicious activity is quickly exposed. If a business is concerned that they are the victim of click fraud – i.e. if they see that there’s an unusual number of clicks from a geographic area that is traditionally not part of their target market, they can contact Google directly to launch an investigation. Any questionable clicks are reimbursed.

Myth #3: AdWords Is An Outbound Marketing Tactic

When most people think of Google AdWords they think of paying for advertising. Advertising is typically synonymous with outbound or traditional marketing. But, AdWords is different; it’s designed to showcase your content when potential customers are using Google to search for an answer, information, solution, etc. Unless you have access to Google’s ultra secret algorithm, it’s the only inbound marketing tactic that guarantees your content will rank high on Google when a user performs a search.

In some cases, AdWords actually delivers a better user experience for the searcher. Example: I have a friend in Southern California that specializes in car wraps. He has a page on his website that talks about removing car wraps. If someone in New York performs a search for “how to remove a car wrap”, they are not going to want to ship their car to Southern California to get their car wrap removed. If my friend was using AdWords to promote this page, he could specify that the ad only be shown to searchers within a 60-mile radius of his shop. This keeps the searcher in New York from calling my friend in Southern California, while ensuring that my friend in Southern California doesn’t pay for that call.

Integrating AdWords with Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Now that we’ve debunked these 3 myths, it should be easy to see how AdWords can be the perfect compliment to inbound marketing if implemented correctly. Combined with your content and SEO efforts, it allows you to dominate the search results and take traffic away from your competition. What’s even bettter, HubSpot now makes it simple for inbound marketers to create, measure, and optimize their ads right in the HubSpot Dashboard with their new Ads Add-On Product. 

I hope I’ve been able to give you some insight on how people actually perceive ads on Google. If you’re thinking about adopting Google AdWords or would like more information on how AdWords can add value to your overall inbound marketing strategy, please download this free eBook: Why Google AdWords Should Be Part of Your Inbound Marketing Strategy