While launching a new product, many miss out on pre-launch buzz, that is creating buzz about the product and making people interested in it even before the product is launched. The concept of pre-launch buzz is not new. Film industry has been using it for many years. The purpose of pre-launch buzz is to create desire, need and excitement for the product in the market. With this, when the product becomes available, it starts selling like hot cake.
The best way to use the pre-launch phase is to warm up the market, your prospects, your customers. Use this time to engage with the market, look for feedback, ask questions, address objections, conduct surveys and answer questions.
I believe that for the pre-launch buzz to be successful, it needs to have a right mix of creativity, diligence and focus.
Creativity: Pre-launch buzz creation definitely requires a lot of creativity. Rather than going by the regularly mentioned things like putting up a teaser, offering a whitepaper etc, you need to identify what will appeal to your audience, what will excite them and what will make them talking about your product/ service? Of course, this requires a thorough understanding of your market, research of your target group, your competition (if any), detailed understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and so on.
Focus: What do you want to achieve from your pre-launch buzz creation campaign? What exactly do you mean by creating buzz? Yes, the end result is to get more customers or users for your product, but that need not be the sole objective of your campaign. You need to widen the scope and achieve more than that. As mentioned above, some of it could be getting some insights through surveys, handling objections, establishing your thought leadership in the market and so on.
Diligence: The reason I have included this factor here is because the pre-launch is a delicate and sensitive phase in your product lifecycle. It could make or break the product. The right kind of buzz can make the product very successful while a poorly executed pre-launch campaign can make the product introduced with a negative impression. So spend some good, quality time in planning and executing your pre-launch buzz campaign. Spend dedicated time in managing the campaigns and monitor the responses carefully.
I recently came across an interesting pre-launch buzz campaign. This company, IDYeah Labs, has not yet revealed what it is planning to launch but has just introduced a contest asking its Facebook fans to guess what it is up to? Certainly an interesting and welcome effort of using social media (only) for creating the buzz. Let us wait and watch how it works out for the company.
Have you come across any pre-launch buzz campaign which really appealed to you?
