Develop a sturdy framework
Breaking your digital product launch down to its very foundation is essential for ensuring you have established a quality journey from concept to launch. Your digital product launch framework maximises the value of your digital product for both your company and its customers. A structured approach means your product managers can be sure they’re balancing factors such as market demand, customer needs, business strategy, and tech advancements. Your framework will cover five key project phases:
Ideation
Validation
Development
Testing
Launch
A framework gives your product team a roadmap of sorts, helping them keep track of priorities, budgets, timelines, and overall goals. Ensuring you have a quality framework also minimises risk and streamlines the transition from development to launch.
Planning a digital product launch
The first thing you should do when planning a digital product launch is make sure you have a specific plan with set, measurable goals. Are you looking to acquire more users? Increase engagement rates? Build revenue? Identify and set specific goals you want to achieve, this will guide the choices you make throughout the launch plan.
Develop your strategy
Ensuring you have a robust digital product launch strategy is crucial. Break your strategy down into into key focus areas to be sure you’re on track.
- Market research and planning: This means identifying your ideal target audience, understanding their pain points, and communicating clearly how your product solves or addresses their challenges.
- Brand messaging and positioning: Curate a compelling narrative that aligns with your brand values and resonates with your audience. Make sure your message is unique and engaging to be sure you’ll stand out.
- Content and asset creation: Prepare your launch-related assets and content. This means landing pages, email campaigns, ads, social posts, demo videos, and align your communications to ensure consistency.
- Marketing channels and campaign planning: Select channels and platforms for organic, paid, influencer partnerships, and so on, that will reach your audience. Think back to your audience research to make sure your content will appear where they already are.
Get on board with a soft launch
For your soft launch, you’ll be looking at a pre-launch or limited release to test the waters and get feedback from your audience so you can refine your product before you launch it on a fuller scale.
Soft launches are incredibly important for identifying early bugs, getting initial feedback from users, and making iterative improvements. You may have several phases to your soft launch.
Be prepared for mistakes
No launch is perfect, much as we’d all like to hope ours would be. The most common mistakes businesses make when undertaking a digital product launch all come down to not giving themselves enough time.
Skipping user research could lead to missing needs or preferences due to a lack of deep audience understanding. Rushing the resting phase can lead to bugs and poor user experience. A lack of attention to brand positioning can mean your messaging struggles to attract attention. And underestimating your marketing budget can hinder your growth potential.
It’s crucial to give yourself enough time to prepare and pivot at each stage in your launch journey, so you can be sure you’ve addressed every step of the process adequately.
Take it step by step
Step 1: Validate your digital product concept and define your value proposition
Ensure your product idea is meeting a genuine market need and has a clear point of differentiation from other products.
Step 2: Develop and test a minimum viable product (MVP)
Launching an MVP can allow you to test core functionalities of your product and gather initial feedback that will only make your end product, but your final digital product launch stronger.
Step 3: Soft launch your product
As mentioned above, soft launching allows you to gather feedback, adjust pricing, messaging, and many other aspects of your product to refine your approach and ensure the success of the full release.
Step 4: Full launch preparation
Create a checklist for your team to be sure you’re covering every necessary detail required for your digital product launch. This means finalising marketing campaigns, securing partnerships, and preparing your customer support team so they’re raring to go come launch day.
Step 5: Digital product launch day and post-launch strategy
Once you’ve made it to launch day, it’s not time to relax! It’s crucial that you monitor your KPIs defined earlier in the journey, and gather data on user-behaviours following the launch. Continuous iterative improvements are essential to ensuring your product meets user needs. Make sure you continue to optimise your product based on both feedback and analytics, even after it’s fully released.
Measure your success
Not sure what to track? A good handful of metrics to keep an eye on post-launch are your user engagement, retention rate, customer satisfaction, and revenue. These will give you a good base to continue improving your product. These insights will let you know what’s working, what’s not working, and where you need to put in work.
Adapting based on your user feedback and data is the most important part of the launch process. In order to set yourself up for success, it’s best to view the launch as your starting point. Imagine you’re in a race: the launch is your starting gun. The more you optimise, the more success you can expect to see in the long run.
Looking for a stellar launch strategy? Give us a call. We’ll help you develop a digital product launch strategy for long-term success.
