Growth Strategies – Upcoming Product Launch

You’ve been slaving away for months — researching, developing, testing, tweaking — and now it’s finally time for the moment of truth: product launch. No matter how awesome you think your product is, though, there’s no escaping your nerves. What if no one acknowledges your launch day? What if there are no sales, no downloads, and no discussions about your product? What if all of your hard work was for naught?

If any of these fears sound familiar, you’re in the right place. While there’s never any guarantee about what launch day will look like, we’ve learned some pretty cool tricks for increasing the likelihood of success. By implementing the following three simple growth hacking techniques, you can rest comfortably in the knowledge that you’ve done everything possible to ensure a kickass product launch.

By now, most business have embraced the more popular social networking sites. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest are the most obvious picks. But what about the more obscure — yet equally important — sites?

We’d like to specifically address StumbleUpon and Reddit. These sites, while not the best options for a steady marketing campaign, have proven themselves time and again to be invaluable during product launch campaigns.

When done correctly, a single, high quality StumbleUpon post can actually yield thousands — even tens of thousands — of unique visitors to your product launch website in only a day. This results in boosted search engine rankings and steadier web traffic over a longer period of time, spreading the success of your product launch out for quite awhile. This, of course, requires you to bring excellence to the title, format, and subject matter of your content. Remember that you only have an average of five seconds before a user “stumbles” away from your content, so brainstorm catchy titles. Use headings, sub-headings, lists, and images to break up content and make it more scannable. Finally, make sure that your content is unique, relatable, and relevant.

Like Stumbleupon, Reddit has the potential to rake in tens of thousands of unique visitors to product launch sites and to make sure that your brand name is spread far and wide. Navigating Reddit can be a bit tricky, though; users are able to quickly pick out those who are using the site purely for marketing purposes, and they are ruthless about it. Instead of forcing information or promotions down your readers’ throats, use Reddit to spark intelligent discussions that are relevant to the related Reddit community. Slipping your product name casually between the lines will get you a lot more positive attention than overt advertising.

Strong partnerships that allow for cross-promotion can significantly boost your growth rates and the overall success of your product launch. Look for businesses that you can buddy up with for:

Product Integration — Integrating your product with others on the market will allow you to bring added value to other brands while piggybacking on their existing success.

Syndication — Syndication partners work to compliment one another through the cross-promotion of their products to a combined audience.

Email remains one of the most effective and affordable methods for attracting and retaining customers on an ongoing basis, so coming up with new ways to build up your list is super important. Offer customers access to limited content and special offers in exchange for their email addresses, invite users to subscribe to your blog via email, use cheap Facebook ads to attract new users to your email offers, or set up contests that require an email entry.