B2B product launch is an exciting as well as stressful time. Every B2B organization wants to avoid mistakes and goofs up during the product launch.
You can avoid product launch woes by learning from the mistakes of others.
Let’s get right into some of the biggest mistakes we’ve seen in product launches, and how you can avoid these in your own B2B marketing strategy.
5 B2B Product Launch Mistakes You Need to Avoid
Not doing enough research
Research about your target audience, what affects your industry, what are the problems people face and so on, not doing so (product research) could have an effect on your audience targeting.
Research should be done at the development stage so that it’s easier to make changes and additions to the product or strategy (if required). By talking to your customer you can get all the details about them, their pain points and their expectation.
Here are a few questions to ask your prospect or customers to get to the bottom:
- What problems do you face?
- How long has it been a problem?
- What has this problem cost your company?
- Have others tried to fix this problem? Did it work?
All of this will provide you an insight into whether or not there’s a need for your product, if there’s no interest among your audience, go back and create a product that satisfies your audience need.
Skip Testing
So you’ve done the research and now have a product that you think your audience is going to love. But don’t get ahead of yourself, don’t assume things.
Test your product among a certain number of people or a group before the actual launch of the product to check the effectiveness of the product. Ask them to give an honest opinion, suggestions to improve the product.
Meanwhile, use positive feedback in your launch materials to show third-party approval.
This is also a great opportunity to work with influencers. They will have some spot-on suggestions, but may also give you a valuable endorsement once you’re out of the testing stage.
Not measuring campaign result
To know the real result of your product you must measure/ analyze your campaign performance. From the moment your product launch goes live, start monitoring the metrics.
Pre-defined the metrics that you want to measure like click-through rate, open rate, number of visitors, etc. Determine what metrics are important to you.
You too can use these metrics to adjust your product launch campaign to better attain your preset goals.
Not having enough supporting assets
To make your product launch effective you should involve a number of assets in the launch such as sales material, blog posts, e-book, PDFs, product screenshots, CTA, landing page- and so on.
If these are not ready to assist your product launching then the final product will most likely get affected.
Didn’t work properly on distribution strategy
No matter how hard you worked on your product and how amazing your product is, if it doesn’t get in front of the right eyes, it won’t be of any use.
This is why you need to spend serious time on your distribution strategy. There are lots of distribution channels- social media networks, blogs, online news sites, trade interest, and many more.
But you can’t use every channel nor it would be advisable for your B2B marketing strategy.
Research about your audience, learn what channel they prefer to contact, where they spend the majority of their time?
Once you have collected this information, strategize your distribution plan accordingly, use that distribution channel what most of your audience prefers.
