Inbound marketing is a no-brainer for those companies who wish to expand their business.
Inbound Marketing is normally implemented at a macro company strategy and often many organisations dont consider developing specialised campaigns leveraging inbound marketing for product launches.
The process is slightly different and needs additional care and attention to get right but, when you do get it right, this is a process that is incredibly effective when it comes to launching a new product and services across any business and industry.
Getting the Basics Right
The first stage is to define your offering and who to aim it at. If you have read our earlier blogs on buyer personas this should be relatively simple – if not I highly recommend you think about who you are selling to and start from there. This will help you frame exactly what role your website is going to play in your launch strategy.
What do I mean by this? Is it a B2B lead generating site or a B2C ecommerce site where visitors can purchase the product directly? Knowing your persona gives you the foundation of how your website should look, sound, read etc. – everything should be geared to your persona.
This will also determine which social media sites you need to be on, so ensure that these are all set up and optimized in advance. You can learn how to optimize your Company Linkedin page here.
As with any new strategy and initiative all these components are to be constantly evaluated and analysed for optimal return and therefore it’s likely there will be iterations of the strategy and execution throughout the launch campaign.
Finally, to ensure that you can constantly align and evaluate the effectiveness of your launch campaign you will need to implement some analytics and reporting into the mix. We use HubSpot and work exclusively with HubSpot customers. There are other cheaper and free alternatives out there but remember free isn’t always cheap.
Creating Some Buzz
If you have an established business, you should, at this stage, start to talk to your current customers about your upcoming new product launch via your social media channels and email marketing. Use this as an opportunity to harness free market research to a captive audience, one that if you follow the Inbound Marketing methodology and ethos will already be promotors of your company.
The feedback you get at this stage will be vital when it comes to taking this to the wider market. Use your social channels here, listen and engage with these customers actively and encourage them for feedback and thoughts.
One of the best ways in which to get word about your product launch is to go to the places that are already actively talking about either your company or similar products to what you are offering. Use this as an opportunity for influencer outreach - you should get in touch with these companies to find out how they can help. In a lot of cases, they will be more than happy to write you a review/testimonial and, subsequently, drive new and interested people towards your website though an integrated link. This is an important SEO factor also and usually a win-win for both your business and the other company/reviewer. You only want your link on sites which can deliver genuine and relevant traffic to your site. Don’t get caught out by vanity metrics, anyone can buy web traffic off the shelf – it’s useless unless it’s relevant and matches your personas.
It’s time to also leverage your blogging and social media skills. Think of your blogs as your route to establish trust and credibility with your target market and social media as your method of amplification. If you are launching a new financial product for example, everything you write about in your blogs should help Finance decision makers solve a problem and help them do their jobs better. If it’s a legal product - write for lawyers. Get into their mind and consider what pains they are trying to solve when the do online research. If you don’t know what pains your customers have go back and ask them as part of your buyer persona research.
With these red hot relevant blog topics use Social Media to extend its reach to the relevant audience. Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Linkedin Groups are your vehicles here. It’s useless unless it’s being read, liked, and shared across the social universe. Once you start to ‘Solve for The Customer’ as HubSpot advocate then you start to attract them to your website. This is the Strangers to Visitors shift – and can have dramatic effects on growing companies.
Depending on your industry you might also start to consider things like contests and giveaways via social, especially on channels like Facebook. People will enter your contest, share it with their friends and family and they will, ultimately, be thinking about your product.
Facebook contests are becoming ever present in recent years and they continue to produce results (likes, shares, comments etc.), same for Twitter and no doubt will be come ever present across platforms like Pinterest, Instagram etc.
Even if they do not win, they will know what you offer and they may come back to you in order to make a purchase later on. Key here is following through on your promise and not engaging in any shady practices that could ultimately damage your brand due to social media mismanagement.
Assumptions vs Actionable Intelligence
Whilst this is all going on, you will start to see the volume of traffic to your site increase and provided you continue to solve for the customer by making it easy for those visitors to convert have fresh leads and/or online sales.
Don’t stop here. Let your competition do that while you overtake them by leveraging your data.
Here you will see why we included analytics and reporting as a basic. Perhaps the biggest issue many companies have when they embark on their inbound marketing journey is understanding the value of thier website as an asset and the leads that asset delivers. Not every lead is hot/sales ready. Not every channel is effective at producing traffic and qualified leads. Your website has some pages that will be your main lead gen assets while others don’t contribute any. Without analytics and intelligence it is very difficult to know where the most money and effort should be placed into your inbound marketing strategy. Focusing on one part of the inbound marketing funnel at the detriment of another is not sustainable and often the numbers can mislead you. Having the data to back up your hypothesis is what separates an assumption from actionable intelligence and allows you to double down on particular strategy and channels that are working better than others.