Social Media

7 Social Marketing Tactics To Launch A Product

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New product launches are an art and a science.

Once you’ve created your product, it needs to be sold, and before selling the product, it has to be made visible to your prospective buyer. The challenge, of course, is how to do that.

But these days, with nearly one in four people worldwide using social media, it’s pretty obvious. Social media is likely your best place to start.

Social Network Users

Image Source

Let’s look at seven creative social marketing tactics that you can count on for a successful product launch.

#1 – Create shareable tweets

Make it easy for people to help you in your marketing. Write tweets that are easy to retweet.

First, ensure that your tweet is written in an informal lingo. For instance,

Hey peeps, check out our upcoming ‘the-must-have’ for all young ladies; instead of ‘This is our upcoming product.’

Next, respond to all those who retweet your tweet. A thank-you can get you many customers!

Try to embed trending keywords (only if they are relevant to your tweet though) as it will increase the likelihood of your tweets appearing when trending keywords are typed into the search bar.

Bonus tip: To add tweetable comments to your content, using ClicktoTweet. Here’s an example from a recent Crazy Egg article:

Crazyegg1

#2 – A teaser on Facebook

Create intrigue and curiosity! How? With teasers that don’t reveal what your product is going to be.

For instance, if your product is a clothes line for men, title your teaser as “Project Men.”

Regularly post pictures of men with different body sizes flaunting different fashions on Facebook. This will create inquisitiveness among people and they would want to know more about “Project Men” and what exactly it is about.

Begin your teaser campaign at least 20-30 days before the launch of your product. And be sure to mention your teaser tagline (here, Project Men) in every post to cement the words in your audiences’ memory.

A few teaser ideas are bulleted below:

  • Post code names. For instance, Christopher Nolan films have code names.
  • Post images, relevant to your product, evoking curiosity.
  • One-liners like ‘Look at me! Look at me!’

L.L. Bean sort of does this with their winter line of clothes:

Bean

#3 – Get into the ‘linking’ habit

You might miss some of your target audience if you don’t integrate various platforms.

Let’s say you’re trying to sell an ebook, and you’ve created a video to promote it. Put the video on YouTube. Then embed it, not only on your ebook’s Facebook page, but also on community pages that relate to the genre of the book. Paste the link on Twitter as well, and so on.

By placing your promotion on multiple channels you reach audiences who may only be active on one social media platform.

#4 – Launch a founders list

There will always be people who would like to learn more about your product. Create a way for them to get in touch with you.

This would be your first step towards establishing brand loyalty for your product. As an added benefit, these people can help you with word-of-mouth advertising or crowd-sourced content.

Create a mailing address on which people can contact you and get to know about the inside snippets about your launch. Place this in your page’s ‘about’ section on Facebook.

Then involve these very people in offline events. For example, your brand has an online contest which is followed by an offline event. You can ask the people in your founder’s list to help you with arrangements.

#5 – Get into motion with videos

Videos are often more impactful than text promotions. And yes, it takes more effort to create them, but that usually pays off in dividends. (With Instagram, you are compelled to make videos with shorter duration; some effort saved!)

Let’s say your new product is a graphic novel. You can begin by writing a script about what you would say in the video.

To make it more appealing, you can use different voices (based on the characters in your graphic novel). Music adds emotion, so get an original music score—it will definitely work.

Then think bigger. Web series and extremely short, catchy videos can attract an audience, making it possible for your promotion to go viral.

#6 – Use every platform to the hilt

Every social media networking site has effective features. Try to use these to the fullest.

For example, when on Twitter, use relevant and popular hashtags and mention relevant and popular @’s. When on Facebook, share/like and comment on others’ pages to earn the same for your product’s page.

Endorse others on LinkedIn to get endorsed. A person who has earned several endorsements gains trust. This trust is also transferred to his/her products.

Make sure that your launch is mentioned in several social media channels. Mentioning it in your Facebook cover photo, Twitter bio and in a banner ad that will appear on your blog are good options. Other channels to consider are your Google+ page, podcast and Youtube channel.

And remember, you can generally get a great response if you just ask for it. Take this post from our Facebook page, for example:

App

#7 – Contests

Generally, you want to create buzz before your product launch. Contests are a good way to do this.

Audiences find contests appealing and fun—and it’s one of the best ways to help people remember your brand.

Publicize a contest relevant to the theme/ideology of your product and publicize it on Facebook, Twitter and other social networking platform.

For instance, a brand promoting health and fitness can come out with a “how much weight can you lose?” contest. This contest would have a specific time frame, and you would see contestants becoming highly involved with the brand during that time frame.

This involvement within a particular time period helps reinforce the brand in your audiences’ memory.

The bottom line

Just one tweet or a lone landing page isn’t going to get the word out about your new product. Unless you leverage social media as part of your campaign, you won’t see the traffic or sales you need.

That said, social media should never be an after-thought. Make it part of your total campaign, and you’ll see the difference in your profits.

Want to share this post on Pinterest? Use this image.

7 social marketing tactics to launch a product

Reference links:

http://mashable.com/2011/01/26/product-launch-web-strategies/

https://community.jivesoftware.com/community/jivetalks/blog/2013/04/24/moving-from-social-media-to-a-social-business

http://socialmediatoday.com/george-guildford/268906/four-ways-brands-can-utilise-social-media-maximise-launch-new-products

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-product-launch/


Vishal is the CEO & Founder of Appsquare—an app development company based in Sydney that creates innovative apps, provides part funding for selected app ideas and also helps app developers get funding through its network of Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors.

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