You’ve been developing a new product for your business, and you’re keen to launch it. Products come in countless formats – from physical goods to software applications – but they all need to go through a set of vital steps before you launch them to the consumer market. Some steps are obvious; others aren’t as clear yet remain equally important.
Following that thought, this article will give you a new product launch checklist. Actually, it’s more of a pre-launch checklist, as you’ll see all the vital steps to follow before launching your new product. The steps will help you learn more about your product and avoid costly mistakes during its development.
Identify the Why, Who, and Where of your product
Why does your new product need to exist? Who is it for? Where do your biggest competitors lie?
Figuring out the why, who, and where of your product helps you carry out extensive market research. To begin, you need to know why your product should be on the market. What purpose does it bring to its target audience? That’s where the “who” comes in; you must work out who your target market is and what your product can do for them.
If you’re reading this article, then you’ve likely got a product idea in your brain. You know what you want to create, but will it serve a purpose? There’s no point serving up something that already exists because why will anyone buy it? You must figure out the key selling points for your product, which involves zeroing in on your target audience’s pain points and how your product solves them.
Then, it’s a case of finding where your biggest competitors are hiding. What products are they selling to compete with yours? This will help you refine your idea by tackling some of the key areas where your competitors are lacking. In the end, you come up with a product that serves a true purpose for a specific audience and is a step above what your competitors already produce.
Cover all the legal bases – IP, regulations, etc.
Before you go too far down the product development and launch rabbit hole, make sure you cover all the necessary legal bases. This is one of those things new entrepreneurs don’t think about until the time comes. When you see new products on the market, you forget how much red tape they have to pass through to even be allowed to exist.
There are loads of legal issues to navigate, starting with intellectual property and copyright laws. It goes without saying that you don’t want to accidentally invent a product or create something that infringes on someone else’s existing IP rights. If you do, then it’s the easiest way to bag a lawsuit and end your product before it takes off. All businesses must carry out an IP scan in the early stages of product development. Companies can handle this for you, and it consists of an in-depth scan of the market to establish any potential IP or copyright infringements. If it all comes up clean, then you know your product is legally sound in this department.
Following this, you must conduct compliance and regulatory checks for your product. Different products must remain compliant and fit within certain regulatory guidelines, depending on what they are or who they’re sold to. The obvious example is a food product – it must meet specific safety standards, or it can’t be sold.
Never launch a product unless you’ve covered all the legal bases and get the all-clear.
Test the product using prototypes
Product testing is a crucial step on the pathway to bringing your idea to life. Everything can seem like a good concept in your mind – but how does it live up to reality? Prototypes are early versions of your product that can be used for various testing purposes.
Who should test your products? The people you’re selling them to!
Establish a testing procedure where you look for people who are willing to test a new product. They should fit within a certain demographic for the most accurate testing results, and you need them to try all the different elements of features of your prototype.
You can never be too thorough here. If anything, too many businesses clearly don’t take testing seriously. Have you ever seen a new product or witnessed a company launch a new version of a product and thought, “How the hell did this pass tests?!” You need people to test your product in all the situations in will usually be in and then collect their feedback.
From here, you use their feedback to make tweaks to your initial prototype and develop a second version for testing. The goal is to continue with this until you reach a prototype that hits all the right spots. Then, you’re ready to mass produce this for your target market!
Plan a pre-launch marketing strategy
The second-to-last step in the pre-launch process is setting up a marketing strategy. There are loads of different things you can (and should) do to promote your product, but you should consider a few things:
- Your target audience
- Your budget
- The timing of your marketing efforts
Businesses can adopt all kinds of marketing strategies, but the best ones will revolve around your target audience. Think about the best ways to reach them by looking at the ideal channels to target. If you’re a B2B company with a product for businesses, you’re unlikely to devote large chunks of your budget to social media marketing or television adverts. On the other hand, if your target demographic is the Zoomer market, then you’ll blow most of your budget on social media content.
Speaking of your budget, there’s no “golden rule” for this, but most of the experts out there suggest spending between 2-5% of your revenue on marketing. If you’re starting a brand-new business and this is your first product, then you’ll probably spend a tad more.
As far as timing goes, you need to promote your new product a few months before it launches. Start drip-feeding little pieces of information and slowly ramp it up. With a few weeks to go, you should be full-throttle creating content and making everyone get excited about your new product launch.
Establish a pricing strategy
You’ll end with the toughest part of launching a product: pricing it!
The price of your new product will depend on three key factors:
- How much it truly costs to make your product
- How much profit you want to make per sale
- How costly other products like it are
Do the first of these things by calculating the true production costs of your product. Look at how much it costs to manufacture it by considering labor costs, materials, and production. Also, throw in the cost of marketing and run some calculations to get the total cost per unit.
Profit margins are generally set between 10-20% per product. So, if it costs $100 to make one unit, you want to sell each product for 10-20% more than this to secure a decent profit. Both the profit margin and the cost of making your product will be influenced by how costly other products like yours are already selling for.
That’s a crucial thing to think about when making your product, as you don’t want to overprice it. If similar products sell for $200, but yours costs $300 to produce and market, then you’re already selling it for close to twice the amount of the existing products. It’s really hard to convince people to pay extra for your goods – you either need a killer marketing approach or should figure out how to keep the production costs down.
Bring these steps together to create the ultimate pre-launch checklist for your new product. It will help you establish a good order to do things while also ensuring you launch your product with more success than ever before.
