Planning a new product launch on social media can feel daunting, but it’s also a huge opportunity to attract new followers, make sales, and convert your existing audience into customers!
Ready to plan your new product launch on social media? Grab a comfy seat, and let’s go!
1. Define Your Goal
When it comes to planning a social media campaign, it’s important to start with the end in mind: your goals and KPIs!
If you want your new product launch to be a success on social media, it’s important that you define what success is.
Once you have a clearly defined goal for your social media campaign, you’ll be able to come up with strategies to achieve your goal.
But just because you’re launching a new product, your goal doesn’t have to be ‘sales’.
Your goal could be building brand awareness, building engagement in your community, growing your email list, or having more people walk through your physical store.
Since we’re a B2B company, we have a longer customer journey than a B2C business brand, so we have different goals for our new product launches on social media.
Our social media campaign goal is to increase awareness about our new products, which means that we focus more on driving impressions, traffic, and engagement through social media.
If you haven’t already, it’s time to get clear on what action you want to inspire with your campaign. Once you have that goal set for your campaign, make sure you keep that ambition front and center of your mind as you start working on the next steps to building your social media campaign.
2. Nail Down Your Timeline
Timing is everything when it comes to launching a new product on social media, and you’ll want to set your timeline well in advance of your launch date.
The big deadline you should be thinking about is the new product launch date – let that act as your starting point and then build your timeline backwards from there.
This will give you a clear idea of how much lead time you’re working with and the potential scope of the project. If you’re running to a tight deadline, you may have to scale back on some of your more ambitious ideas for your campaign.
But if you have plenty of time to play with (you super-organized marketer you!), you can really level-up your campaign to help you meet your goals.
When planning a new product launch on social media, it’s important to factor in how long your campaign will run. Remember to keep it snappy, creative and engaging!
You may want to think about a launch timeline that runs something along the lines of:
- Day 0-7: Pre-launch hype
- Day 8: Launch day
- Day 9-13: Post-launch follow-up
- Day 14-30: Integrating your new product into your regular content schedule, or planning additional activations to keep up the momentum
By breaking it down per day, or pre- and post-launch, you’ll be able to start thinking of creative ways to incorporate your new product into the campaign, without having dull, repetitive content.
Once you’ve set your timeframe, it becomes easier to plan out your content knowing how feasible it will be to deliver it on time. Plus you’ll be able to take an objective, bird’s-eye view on how long it will run and how your audience will respond to it.
3. Choose Your Social Media Channels
Now that you have a goal and a timeline, you’re ready to start choosing what social media channels you’re going to light up when you launch your social media campaign.
Hint: You’re probably going to be active on most of your social channels to maximize on impact!
But each channel you choose – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube and more! – should all have a slightly different strategy and approach, because of how your audience responds, and how the platform functions is different on each.
For example, what you create for your Instagram Stories will be hugely different to what you create for your Instagram grid, so they deserve different strategies!
Don’t be afraid to let your creative juices flow at this stage – get every idea down on paper and assign it to a suitable social channel. But, do keep in mind your timeline and just how feasible it is to create each idea — it’s always better to have less, but truly strong and engaging content, than more, poorly-executed content.
4. Decide on Your Creative Direction
Now that you have all the (kind of boring) details like goals, timeline, and channels locked down, it’s time for the fun part: what will your campaign look like?
It may sound like a fancy marketing term, but having an overarching creative direction is what separates your product launch campaign from your other day-to-day social posts.
The creative direction of your product launch is what’s going to make your campaign stand out and be seen on your social platforms, and it’s so important to get it right! Especially on Instagram, since it is such a visual platform.
Not sure where to start? There are two elements to your creative direction you need to think about.
Firstly, the overall visual style of your campaign needs to be defined in your creative concept. This should include a color palette, some inspirational imagery, a design style guide, or design templates that will work across your social channels.
If you need some inspiration or help to create a color palette for your product, you can use Adobe Color! You can choose the “color harmony” you want – whether you are looking for different shades, complementary colors, or a monochromatic look. Your color palette can also come from your product or packaging itself.
Secondly, your creative direction should outline your campaign message and editorial style.
This will help you fine-tune your content and make sure how your introducing, explaining or selling your product throughout the campaign remains consistent. It’s a good idea to nail down a couple of terms or core messages you want to weave through each of your campaign assets.
If you’re running your own business, this might mean that you are coming up with the creative direction, managing the photo shoot, editing the content, and posting everything yourself – which is a lot of work!
But as long as you can stick to your timeline, and you’ve got a clear creative direction you’ll 100% be able to achieve a successful product launch campaign!
5. Create Your Campaign Assets
Once you have the overall strategy nailed down for each channel, you now get to create the actual assets for your new product launch on social media!
Your campaign assets would be things like photos, videos, graphics, GIFs, or anything else you’re planning for your social media campaign.
For a physical product, you will obviously be creating photos and videos with the actual product. You’ll want to have a mix of both product photos and lifestyle photos, and your creative shoot could range from a small photo session with your iPhone to professional photos supplied by the manufacturer or distributor.
5. Prep Your Social Media Content Calendar
Once you have all your content and assets, it’s time to put everything together and plan out your social media content calendar!
Now’s the time to plan when each piece of the puzzle goes live across your social channels for maximum impact for your campaign. This often takes up more time than you think, so make sure to factor that into your timeline and schedule!
While you may have an official “launch” day for when your new product is available and on sale, you might want to have a different timeline for social media or different launch “phases.”
When you’re planning your social media calendar, it’s also worth thinking about the lifespan of each piece of content. For example, a blog post may only appear in a newsletter once, but it could be shared multiple times across your social media platforms over the course of a week or month.
What’s important here is how you can keep the campaign concept fresh throughout the timeline — recycling content just won’t cut it these days, so brainstorm ways you can prolong the concept, keep the campaign fresh and ensure you’re always bringing new life to the launch!
This will help you reach out to your audiences that are positioned at different places in your marketing funnel, as well as figuring out how to reach multiple time zones and across multiple social channels.
With your scheduled content ready to go, all you have to do is set your alarm and get ready to monitor the excitement, answer questions, and engage with your community.
6. Track and Measure Your Social Media Success
Remember all the way back in step #1 when you created your campaign goals and KPIs?
Now’s the time to check in on those goals and measure them!
Success looks different to every brand and business, but you should spend time reviewing how successful your campaign was and how it tallied up against your goals.
Beyond tracking leads, signups, or purchases, you’ll also want to take a holistic look at how your campaign performed and where you could improve for next time.
For example, you can glean insights about your followers’ preferences and what content resonated best with them, what medium they liked most, and what channel performed best.
All of this knowledge can then be put into your next product launch campaign!
Article Source: Later