How To: Announce a New Product
Photo Courtesy of Lucy Dana
Lucy Dana does a deep dive into the various avenues you must travel if you want to do a really thorough job of launching a new product. Her highly detailed breakdown explains how to approach each different sector of advertising and how to make the most of it all.
Understand the avenues you can use: To get the word out about a new product, the three channels would be your owned channels, that's your own social media and email marketing. The second one would be other people's channels, whether influencers or newsletters or websites. And then the third [one] would be in-person channels.
Grow your own channel ahead of time: On the first front, your biggest goal before you launch a product should be growing your own channels as much as you can. You don't want to have a cold start when you go to launch this product. So, as much as you can, create content that's educational or funny or just a reason that people want to subscribe to your email list or follow you on Instagram or TikTok or whatever it is so that when you do launch, you have people listening when you blast it out.
Extend the launch as much as you can: When you actually launch your new product, think about how you can, quote unquote, drag it out for as long as possible. I used to think “If you're launching something new, you just put up one video and that's it. Everyone will see it.” But that's so not the case. Probably a 10th of your followers see each video you put up. So, you may think it's overkill that you talk about the same thing in every single video, but it's actually not because your followers probably only see one of those videos.
Same story, new content: Some good advice I got early on was, “How can you tell the same story over and over again?” Because then people actually start to absorb it. Try to do a few teaser videos. Like, “Something is coming. Can you guess what it is?” Get people very interested so that they know something is coming. Then I would do a week's worth of videos and photos of different stuff about the actual product. And then for weeks after, I would keep circling back. Do a taste test or “Here's what other people had to say about it.” Make it a full campaign so it's not just a one-off post. Same thing with your email marketing. I don't think people want an email from you every single day for three weeks. But how can you make that same arc of, “Something's coming!” “It's here!” “Here's a recap of it!”
Understand the reach of your posts: Here's where experimentation helps. Instagram pushes you to do a lot of videos. I find they send it to people who aren't your followers. But when you post photos, it actually reaches more of your followers. We often will do a video for a launch and then follow it up the next day with a photo. When we launch cookies, a random person on the Internet probably isn't gonna buy [them]. But someone who's already had our peanut butter probably will. You almost want it to go internally to your followers, not externally to new people.
Let people into the story: People love to see the-behind-the-scenes of building a business. Even, “Here's a new flavor.” Not just saying, “Here's the flavor,” but “Here’s how we got to that flavor. We tried all these different ones. This one was gross. This one was great…” Really focusing on the storytelling behind the product.
Know the numbers:The second bucket, which is other people's channels, includes influencer seeding. This is a lot of DMing influencers and saying “Hey, I love your content. Would you be open to receiving our product?” There's a huge funnel. If you DM 100 influencers, maybe 50 of them will respond. You get the product to them and then maybe only like 25 actually post about it since you're not actually paying them. If you have a great product people will probably want to post about it more, but there's no guarantee here. So, if you have the budget, reach out to as many people as humanly possible. What's funny is, DMing people you get the biggest response. When we first did it, I was trying to email people. I was not getting that many responses.
Don’t hold back: I say, splash it as much as you can. If you think about products that you've seen online, you see [it] once, maybe in an ad. And then you see someone else is using it. By the fifth time you're like, “Oh my gosh, is this everywhere?” You want to create that allure that everyone is using this product.
Reach out strategically: In that same vein of other people's channels, what are websites and newsletters that you can try to get in? I don't think you need to hire real PR, but how can you be clever about getting your product into these newsletters or websites? Oftentimes, if you can find out who the editor of a newsletter is or someone behind the scenes who may not be the star of the newsletter but has a lot of input into the newsletter, it's easier to get through. We got in [a] big newsletter because I [wrote] to the editor.
In-person connections: And then the last [channel]. How can you meet people where they are? If it's a food product, can you go to a grocery store and do demos? Can you go to farmers markets and do demos? Can you collab with another like-minded business? For example, could we do a pop up with a jelly company and, if we have a new peanut butter, let people try the peanut butter and jelly flavor or whatever it is? So, trying to get beyond the computer and the phone because it's hard to get people's attention online versus in person. It's much easier. I think the in-person stuff is really worth it.