Get my Free New Biz Jumpstart Kit<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nMarketing Teams<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
So the marketing team is arguably just as important as the sales team with relation to a launch, when it comes to your product release, you’re gonna wanna make sure that you’re thinking about every single possible way that somebody is learning about your business or service and having your marketing team work on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That means doing things like creating blog posts, where you detail all of the new product releases that are coming up. In this blog post, you’re gonna wanna include GIFs as well as explainers to what these features are and why you built them. You might also find it useful for your marketing team to put together a product release video.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This will be a place where a marketer is going to explain some of the new features and why people should get excited about these sorts of features. If you wanna see a company, do this really effectively, check out what Pipedrive does with all of their releases for their CRM tool. I’ve also often had the marketing team push out email newsletters to people that are on our opt in and email marketing list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For example, on the blog list or on freebies list in the past, and also launch live events where I’m sharing some of the things that might connect with some of the sales related events that the sales team released too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you do some sort of marketing live event, I encourage you to do the same thing that I said in the sales section, which is to really focus on the sort of value or transformation that your new product release is going to have. Sell transformation as opposed to features and that will always get you a higher conversion rate from your prospects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I also recommend you do is to work in some social media posts around your product release, do it before it actually comes out the day of the actual release that links to that blog post, as well as even afterwards. You’ll often find that people often don’t hear about product releases just in the first week or two. So don’t be afraid to still be talking about your product release a month or even a few months after your initial release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When it comes to marketing, you’re often going to be educating past initial launch and that means that you wanna be working in a content strategy even three months or even six months after your initial release. Aside from a social media calendar, it can be also useful to spend some paid advertising with relationship to your launch. This can be a PPC campaign where you target people that have previously visited your site, but maybe not created accounts yet, or it can be past expired free trials to really drive people towards those sales workshops or those general marketing workshops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then the last thing I’d recommend with respect to your marketing team is that in the case where you have some sort of partner marketing effort out there, what I recommend is that you educate your partners on the upcoming release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This can be as simple as hosting one or two different mini training sessions to make sure that they know how to communicate the new value that your product is going to have. It can also be useful to line up some sort of giveaway here with your partners to get them and their email list excited about this release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Customer Success team<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
We tackled three of the four teams. The last team that we need to talk about today is the customer success team. The customer success team can be an underrated team when it comes to product releases, because one of their core focuses is often customer education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first thing that I recommend your customer success team focus on is pre-sell the launch and start building a hype list. It can be really useful for example, if they’re running a weekly live customer workshop to start talking about the features that are coming up and get customers excited and opted into being notified when the release drops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aside from building a hype list, it can be useful as well to start planning a customer only event. These are gonna be events where you’re going to want to have some sort of appreciation aspect to the event where you’re gonna thank the customer for them continuing to be a loyal customer of yours. But then also talk about all these exciting new use cases that experienced users of your product or tool are going to be able to experience now with the new release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Notice how this is a little bit different than the sales or the marketing advance. In which what we’re doing is we’re thinking about what are some of those intermediate or advanced use cases that customers can now realize with this new feature. And then what you’re gonna find really effective here is to tie that sort of customer only launch event to a giveaway or a launch only offer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Typically, I’ll work that into the very end of those live events, because that can be a great way to really hook the customer on taking action today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the past, I’ve offered an extra month off an annual plan, or I’ve even offered something where it’s been like a 30-day money back guarantee where if the customer upgrades, because they think they’re interested in the new product release and they aren’t satisfied for whatever reason, we will credit whatever they paid us to their original plan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So this way it completely mitigates any form of risk to the customer in choosing to want to take part in this new product release and this upgraded package. The other things that can be useful for your customer success team to focus on are targeted in-app queus. This can be something like a post announcement where you share some of the things that the marketing team put together, as well as to create new onboarding tours of some of the new features in order to educate customers about what you’ve just release.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The last two things I’ve had customer success teams do in the past is reach out to previously canceled or churned customers. These can be great customers to re-engage because it can be something where maybe they left your business because you weren’t able to do the one thing that your feature release now does. It can be a great way to, again, reinitiate contact with people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then the last thing I’d recommend your customer success team do is to do some target outreach. It can be really useful to take a look at some of your product usage stats and see exactly who are some of your super users or users that simply are going to get a lot of value out of this new release. From there, just invite them to the customer event and then convert them from that sort of giveaway or launch only offer that you’ve prepared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Overall, when it comes to your product release, I recommend that you try to start planning at least a month and a half in advance. At least three weeks out of your launch, start to have everything in place and start to be building that pre hype. From there, when it comes to the launch, I recommend that you launch it for at least three to four weeks and then continue to work things over the next three to six months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the marketing world, they say that it takes people seven times as seeing something before they really understand or see it. And so keep that in mind when it comes to all the different things that your teams should be doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you liked this article, be sure to\u00a0check out my YouTube channel<\/a>\u00a0to get new videos every single week. I\u2019ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning how to plan a successful product launch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n