From the countless hours spent creating blueprints, mockups, and implementing design changes, bringing a new product to market is a major investment for any business.
But the hard work doesn’t stop once the product is created.
To ensure a successful product launch, it’s crucial to develop a strategic marketing plan that efficiently gets your product out in front of different audiences.
For many industries – including niche markets and most manufacturers-- integrating a B2B inbound marketing strategy increases product awareness and drives qualified leads.
How to Market a New Product Using An Inbound Marketing Approach
The goal of any marketing plan for a new product should aim to increase relevant traffic to your site while shifting visitors into leads and nurturing them into sales.
However, instead of eating up valuable employee resources by cold calling or emailing every manufacturer, distributor, or OEM in your market, an inbound marketing approach draws customers to find your product organically online.
From the initial launch to the nurturing phase, these five inbound marketing steps will help answer the age-old question of “how to market a new product?:”
1. Conduct Market Research
An effective inbound marketing plan always starts with market research.In order to properly market your product and increase site traffic, it’s important to identify the consumer's pain point(s), any distinguishing product factors, and any alternative solutions on the market.
Start by answering these questions:
- What problem does my product solve?
- What alternatives exist on the market?
- What differentiates my product from others?
2. Define Your Ideal Buyer Persona
After you’ve established the unique selling points for your new product, it's important to define who this product is for.
A buyer persona, or semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, is based on data and research. Creating an effective buyer persona involves answering generalized questions about your ideal customer, including:
- Who is buying your product? -- Who is involved in the purchasing process/journey/decision?
- Why are they interested in our products? What products will best solve the problems they have? Why are they NOT buying?
- When are they buying? Time of day, month, year? When is your product most useful?
- Where do they go to get information about products? What sources do they trust? Events, blogs, forums, etc.
- How are they buying? What decisions do they make throughout the buying process? What affects those decisions?
3. Develop SMART Goals
Your marketing goals will set the tone for marketing messages, strategy, and budget.
The most common method for setting marketing goals is using the SMART system, which means your goals should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
Using the SMART system helps keep your goals realistic, quantifiable, and qualifiable. For example, instead of saying “we want to increase sales,” set a measurable goal like “we want to increase sales by 15% between Q1 and Q2.”
When setting your goals, ensure they have a beginning and an endpoint and are specific enough to measure over time.
4. Produce Content
Content is the bread and butter of inbound marketing. Once you have established your unique selling points and ideal buyer, and developed measurable goals, next comes content.
With an inbound marketing approach, it's important to create different types of content to appeal to your ideal customer at different stages of their buyer journeys, including:
- Spec Sheets & Sell Sheets: After your product is ready for manufacturing, it’s important to create both spec sheets and sell sheets. These documents are crucial if your product is serving OEMs, manufacturers, or end-consumers that need specific dimensions, ratings, and design cues. These will also be an essential part of your trade-show strategy.
- Web Content (Blogs): One of the most important and impactful steps to take when launching a new product is ensuring that you’ve created optimized web content, including:
- Web Pages
- Landing Pages
- Premium Offers
- Blog Content
- White Papers
- Social and Email Resources: Including social posts and email blasts is an effective way to communicate new product launches to the masses and drive traffic to your site.
- Featured Content: Think of featured content as the gasoline that runs your engines. You’ve already identified what type of vehicle you want (creating spec and sell sheets) and made the initial investment by purchasing the car (Developing Web Content) - now you want to fuel your car with premium, high-grade fuel (Featured Content). Featured content can include:
- Case studies: Real-world success stories from customers that are using your product
- Pillar Pages: When launching a new product, you may have a specific topic cluster you're
following, a pillar page is the basis on which that topic cluster is built.
- Premium Offers: Premium offers are any resource that a client may find valuable and be willing to provide their information to get.
5. Nurture Your Leads
The ultimate goal of lead generation is to sell your product. However, to drive sales, leads need nurturing.
According to Woosuites 2022 annual report, lead nurturing helps companies generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower costs.
While lead nurturing tactics may differ based on your industry or market, they should include
- Utilizing targeted content during multiple interactions
- Following up with leads in a timely manner
- Sending personalized emails or videos
- Using lead-scoring tactics
- Ensuring your sales and marketing strategies are aligned
Lead nurturing is a critical part of any inbound marketing strategy that no business can afford to overlook. Among the multiple strategies for lead nurturing, find one that suits your sales team and execute it as smartly as possible.
New Product Launch | Choosing an Effective Marketing Agency
From designing and manufacturing to marketing, launching a new product requires a lot of hard work.
However, your marketing strategy is as effective as the agency behind it. When searching for agencies to partner with, it’s important to consider your current needs and any future needs that may pop up.
Protocol 80 is a full-service B2B inbound marketing and sales agency that offers a wide range of marketing services including:
- Inbound marketing services
- PPC advertising
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Web development
- Trade show marketing
We combine exhaustive data research with a “customer education” mindset to build you a fully customized strategy that grows website traffic, generates qualified leads, and increases sales.
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Want to Boost Your New Products Marketing Strategy?
When launching a new product, partnering with the right agency can make or break your marketing plan.
With proven experience helping with new product launches, the experts at protocol 80 are ready to help you:
- Define your product and buyer persona,
- Create data-driven strategies,
- Produce optimized content,
- And more!
Interested in seeing one of our new product launch marketing plan examples? Give us a call today!
How to Audit your Online Marketing
If you are executing digital marketing, congratulations! You are most likely already one step ahead of your competition, and making strides to meaningfully connect with prospects online. But, how do you know if you’re seeing continual success year over year, and improving your metrics?
Without the tools in place to analyze and benchmark your efforts, it is impossible to scale your online marketing and ensure continuous success.
