Hone Your Pitch

After spending so much time obsessing over every detail of your product, you’re going to be excited to talk about it publicly, finally. You could ramble on for hours about every nuance and impressive feature. But most people aren’t going to give you very much time to grab their attention. If you’ve only got two minutes to pitch about your product launch, what would you say?

Work with your marketing team to place these limits on yourself. It forces you to figure out what the most important and compelling points are.

You’re going up against short attention spans and busy schedules. Convey the value, the solution, and give justice to the dedication involved in producing this product.

You never know under what circumstances you’ll need to discuss the product, its reason for being, its main benefits, who its main competitors are, and who it’s for, to name a few.

A prospective customer at a conference might have a full minute or even longer. But you may only have a few seconds with a CEO. Be ready to make your case in both instances.

Make Some Noise

Your launch date is set, and you’ve communicated to everyone throughout your organization who needs to know. Now it’s time to let customers and prospects know what’s coming officially. The big reveal is an exciting step, but it’s also a high risk-high reward moment in your product launch process.

While you’d love to expound for hours on everything the product can do, nobody has patience for that. Briefly articulate your value proposition. Share the elevator pitch that you developed in the last step. Remember, features and functionality are irrelevant. What matters are the beneficial outcomes it provides to customers.

Map out the most relevant and resonating use cases and focus your follow-up announcement on those. There will be plenty of time later to highlight all the other things your product can do.

Parse out the news

You can’t talk about everything all at once. Work with marketing to implement a staged messaging campaign highlighting other remarkable capabilities and benefits post-launch. You’ll maintain momentum and win over holdouts that didn’t connect with your initial messaging focus.

Check back in with your target market and choose when the target market is most apt to be receptive and responsive to your messaging.

Research your buyer personas and identify where and how they prefer to gather their news and updates.

Meet prospects where they are by leveraging channels they’re already using. Depending on the product and target audience, that could range from snagging a featured review in The New York Times to advertising on a Twitch stream.

Then, identify an ideal launch date. It might be timed to coincide with a related event, industry conference, or even a holiday. While you might feel impatient sitting on a finished product for a few weeks, you only get to launch once, so make the most of it.

The Real, Deal Product Launch

You’ve done your work and shepherded this from conception through birth. Now it’s time for the big debut and a round of congratulations. We don’t get many moments in life where we can pat ourselves on the back, but this is one of them. However, you didn’t get here alone. Take time to celebrate and acknowledge the contributions of others on your team.

Read more in the Anatomy of a Product Launch, below.