New Business Tips—Market Your New Product or Service

Welcome to the New Business Tips series—a series of posts for new businesses on how to expand your clientele, manage your business and understand the ins and outs of marketing. We hope it’s going to become a useful resource to grow your business!

For this first installment, we’re going to cover how to market your new product or service. For any new business, getting yourself known is usually the first step, but even when you’re known, it can be difficult to market a new product or service. Here are some tips to help you let the world know!

Building a launch calendar

Building mystery and hype around a new product or service can help you garner interest and even pre-sales. Many businesses use the “launch” technique as a way to announce changes to come.

Here’s a basic launch calendar that you can apply to any product or service:

  • Launch planning. This first phase is meant to determine the product or service, the purpose of the launch and other business goals related to it. There, you develop your goals and objectives and figure out how you’re going to measure success.
  • Pre-launch work. During this second phase, you start building content related to your product or service. This is where you think about how you’re going to talk about your product or service, who you’re going to talk to and how you’re going to reach them. This phase involves things like writing copy, building landing pages and websites and starting to mention an upcoming product or service to your current clients and on social media. Get a few bloggers to agree to publish content about your new product or service on launch day.
  • Launch day. Today is the day! Send your press release and your newsletter, put your new website or landing page online and start spreading the word. Publish a blog post about your new product or service and check what your bloggers have to say. Share as much as you can on social media.
  • Post-launch activities. Once a product has been launched, there is still work to do. You need to keep up awareness, evaluate your success through the metrics you decided in the first phase and get feedback from customers.

This is only a bare-bones calendar for a new product or service launch. Feel free to adapt it to your needs and budget! Depending on the size of your project, the entire launch cycle can take a few weeks to several months.

Is there any topic you would like us to cover in this series? Contact us to let us know!

Word cloud by David Erickson