A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Better Product Launch

It doesn’t matter if you’re building the next Facebook. Without a solid strategy in place to promote your new product and spread the word, no one is going to listen. That’s where creating a product launch plan comes in.

A product launch plan is a strategy that outlines your specific goals for a new release and how to promote it in your market. It helps you align with different team departments, better understand your customers, and find ways to step up your SaaS product.

However, creating a product launch plan consists of multiple phases that each play a vital role in the success of your SaaS product. If you skip any of these phases, you risk not reaching the goals of your product release and underperforming.

First Phase: Preparing for the Launch

Before you start creating your product launch plan, there are a couple of things to consider. Here are the prerequisite steps to take before setting up your product launch:

1. Identify Your Target Customer

The first step of any product launch is to know who you’re selling to. If you don’t identify who needs your product in the first place, your launch is bound to fail. Make sure to track down your target audience based on the following criteria:

• Demographics: What is the age, sex, location, education level, and income of your target customer?
• Industry: What market(s) does your ideal customer currently work or specialize in?
• Company size: How big is the company that your target customer is working for?
• Challenges: What are your customer’s most significant frustrations, and how does your product solve them?
• Goals: What goals is your target audience trying to achieve in their lives or careers?
• Role: What position does your target customer hold (for example, are they a CEO, developer, project manager, etc.)?
• Buying motivation: What psychological factors influence your target customer to purchase your product?

2. Do Competitor Research

Next, you’ll have to research your competition, so you can better understand their strategy behind getting customers and find ways that you can stand out from the crowd. This competitive analysis will include:

• Differentiators: What features or experience are they offering to customers that makes them unique in the market?
• Strengths: What areas do your competitors excel in and why?
• Weaknesses: What do your competitors lack in their strategy or product experience, and where are they behind?
• Marketing Strategy: How do your competitors reach out to customers and generate new users? For example, what are their most-used channels to engage prospects?
• Revenue: How has the company been growing or decreasing sales and revenue over the past 5–10 years? What are the causes of this growth or stagnation?

3. Identify Your Product Positioning

Product positioning is essential to building a product launch plan. It consists of defining the unique value that your product brings to the industry and how it improves the life of your target customer. Here’s how to identify it for your SaaS company:

1. Find Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP): What unique value are you offering to customers? For example, is it your particular set of features?
2. Understand Why Customers Use Your Product: What leads customers to choose your product over the competition? How is your product solving their challenges or helping them achieve their goals?
3. Create a Mission Statement: A mission statement is a short sentence of what your company stands for. Ask yourself: Why does your product exist? What drives your company to get up each day and do what you do?

Here’s an example of what successful product positioning looks like from email app Superhuman’s homepage:

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To find their product positioning, they asked their customer base the main benefit they’re getting out of their email platform. The most common benefit that users have to say about Superhuman was its speed and how it helped them send more emails in less time. As a result, speed is something they highlight in their positioning.

4. Set Product Launch Goals

Every successful product launch plan consists of defining clear goals to target. Otherwise, with no clear direction to follow, your team is going to feel lost and not know what next steps to take. Examples of potential product launch goals can include:

• Driving more conversions and sign-ups;
• Building more awareness for your SaaS company;
• Improving the user experience and boosting customer satisfaction; or
• Reducing your churn rate.

5. Calculate Your Budget and Resources

Before your product launch, you need to assess whether your company has the necessary resources for the upcoming event. If you’re working on a new product but realize halfway through you don’t have the budget, your launch plan will fall to pieces.

Make sure to set meetings with different team departments and discuss what current resources your brand has. Are there enough people on your team to build the new product? Is your budget big enough to cover marketing costs?

Second Phase: Creating Your Product Launch Plan

After covering the prerequisites of your product launch, it’s time to get to action. Here’s what you need to do to bring your new launch strategy to light:

6. Run Beta Tests for Your Target Audience

A great tactic to determine if your upcoming product can win big is to run beta tests. Here’s how you can run a successful beta test for your target users:

1. Segment Users Based on Your Customer Persona: Make sure the right audience is going through your beta test. They need to align with your customer personas, such as demographics, challenges, and goals.
2. Identify Which Data You Want to Track: Think about how you’ll measure the responses of beta testers to your product. This could be through the use of Net Promoter Scores (NPS), for example.
3. Be Responsive to Users: It’s essential to always be there for your user’s needs. Always listen to beta-test users and answer any questions they may have about your product.
4. Ask Users to Fill Out a Survey On Their Experience: Once users finish with the beta test, it will be time to collect their feedback. You can do this by running a survey where they answer questions on their experience.
5. Share the Results With Your Team: Share the user results and feedback with your entire team. You can then discuss the next steps and whether it’s worth proceeding with the product launch.

8. Identify Success Metrics

It’s essential to identify which metrics you’ll need to use to measure your product launch’s success. Here are examples of metrics to look out for:

• Sign-up Trials: How many people do you predict will sign up for your new platform thanks to the product launch?
• User Retention: How will the launch boost your user retention and customer lifetime value?
• Churn Rate: Will your product launch reduce the number of people who leave your platform?

9. Include Milestones

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You must include milestones within your product launch and establish deadlines for tasks your team needs to complete. Without any clear deadlines, your product will take ages to build, and you won’t be able to launch it in time. Here are examples of what a milestone can be:

• Getting your product’s security up-to-date;
• Important industry events; or
• Feature launch.

10. Work With Marketing to Create the Content You Need For the Launch

As you’re preparing your product launch, make sure to create all the promotional content you will need for the event with your marketing team.

Content marketing is going to help drive traffic and boost awareness around your product launch. The content you’ll need for your upcoming product launch includes:

• Blog posts
• Landing pages
• Product tutorials
• Emails
• Social media posts

Third Phase: Collaborating with Your Team During the Product Launch

Collaborating with your team and executives will play a vital role in creating a successful product launch plan. Here’s how you can join forces with others as you create your strategy:

11. Create an Engaging Pitch Deck

To onboard stakeholders and executives, you’ll need to create a pitch deck covering everything the launch will consist of. The deck will help better explain your vision and strategy behind your product launch plan so you can collect buy-in. Here are some tips for creating an engaging pitch deck that will persuade stakeholders:

• Leverage Tools Such as Canva: You don’t need advanced design skills to create an engaging pitch deck. Instead, you can make your life easier with tools such as Canva, which already comes with prebuilt pitch deck templates.
• Address the Special Challenges the Product Launch Will Solve: Outline your company’s challenges and how your product launch will help solve them.
• Include Forecasted Revenue and Results: Numbers are music to executives’ ears. Your pitch deck must highlight the type of impact on revenue and company growth the launch will produce.
• Make It No More Than 5–7 Slides: Your pitch deck needs to be straightforward and short. Never make it more than 5–7 slides.

Here’s a great example of an engaging pitch deck from Buffer, which helped the company raise $500,000 for its startup:

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12. Share Documentation With Different Departments

Make sure to provide your different teams (sales, marketing, customer support, etc.) with product launch documentation to ensure that everyone is aligned. The product launch documentation needs to include:

• Timelines and deadlines;
• Brand positioning and vision;
• Expected tasks for each department; and
• Success metrics.

13. Communicate With Your Team Throughout the Launch

Always keep constant communication with your team throughout the process since the strategy behind your product launch can always change. Here’s what you can do to invite other departments to weigh in on the launch:

• Set Up Regular Check-Ins: Set aside time each week to discuss your progress with your team members. Let them express any issues they’re experiencing and help them find solutions to overcome bottlenecks.
• Make Room for Feedback: Keep in mind that you never have all the answers. Always be open to feedback from team members on how you can improve the product launch plan.
• Constantly Review the Product Launch With Your Team: Your product plan will likely evolve over time. Make sure to continually tweak your product launch, so it’s the most relevant to your target audience and market.

Fourth Phase: Promoting Your Product Launch

You must find ways to promote your product launch and boost your reach as much as possible. That way, your launch drives the most awareness and won’t be ignored.

14. Identify Platforms Where You’ll be Announcing the Product Launch

Identify which platform your target audience often uses and find ways to promote your product launch on them. It’s going to help ensure that you’re showcasing your launch in the eyes of the right people.

For example, there are many press release platforms such as Newswire, Presswire, and PRWeb, where you can spread the word about your release and draw the attention of potential users:

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15. Use an Omnichannel Marketing Strategy

To maximize the reach of your product launch, you’ll have to market the new release across different channels. Customers use various mediums to learn more about products, so an omnichannel strategy maximizes opportunities for reaching new users. Here are the critical channels you should be using:

• Your company blog;
• Email marketing campaigns; and
• Targeted social media ads.

Fifth Phase: Launching the Product

So, the big day is finally here, and you’re ready to officially launch your product. Here’s what you can do to engage your users:

16. Offer a Free Trial of Your Product

During the product launch, make sure that users get access to a free trial of your product before they can purchase it. A free trial is a great way to encourage customers to sign up and get a feel for your new product, so they eventually become paying users.

17. Prepare Your Sales Team for Any User Questions

You must prepare your sales team by providing them with answers and roadmaps they can follow to answer your customer’s questions on your product. It will save time for your sales team and help them meet the user’s needs effectively.

To find out what these answers are, go back to your research and data from the beta tests you ran earlier. What questions from beta users frequently came up, and how can you guide sales to solve them?

18. Encourage Customers to Share Your New Product

Find ways to make users spread the news about your new product release through word of mouth. Customers naturally trust their friends’ opinions, so it’s an excellent way to drive more users through referrals. For example, you could offer users a discount on their membership if they share the news with their friends.

Sixth Phase: Analyzing the Post-Launch Results

Even when the product launch is over, there’s still work you’ll need to do. Some of the things you can do to continue growing include:

19. Take a Look at Your Data

Once the launch is over, dive deep into your data and measure the results. As you research your product launch’s performance, ask yourself these questions:

• How did your social media following grow following the product launch?
• Did you drive more users to your SaaS platform?
• What is your overall feedback from customers?
• Were you able to boost customer lifetime value?

20. Showcase Customer Success

If some of your users experience benefits from your product launch, don’t be afraid to follow up with them and ask if you can showcase their success on your website. It will prove to other potential customers the value of your product and boost your authority for launches to come.

21. Collect Lessons From Your Product Launch

Sit down with each department and discuss the lessons learned from your product launch. Even if it didn’t go the way you expected, there are still insights you can get to improve your future product launches.

Get the Most Out of Each Release With a Product Launch Plan

The product launch plan is just as important as creating a high-value product, since it’s what boosts your reach and builds the first relationship with the customer. From there, you can continue to nurture that user relationship with new releases to meet their changing needs and improve your product over time, so they become lifelong fans.