New products take up a lot of your time and energy to create. Therefore, you want them to hit the ground running. You want to see massive initial sales that go a long way to regaining the money spent creating this new product. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case.
When a product doesn’t start off selling very well, it rarely flips things around. You might find some instances where a product bombed initially, and then came back to see awesome sales a year or so later. However, the opposite is usually true; products that don’t have a great launch will continue to see poor sales performances.
The key to success is ensuring that there’s enough hype surrounding your products when you release them. But, how do you do this? It’s a lot easier than people think – you just have to follow these simple steps:
Step 1: Drop hints
The first step in the hype-creating process is to drop hints that a new product is on its way. Post to your socials put a banner on your website – do things that attract attention, but give very little away. The point is to notify customers and consumers that something new is coming. Instantly, they’re intrigued. What is it? When is it coming out? They want to learn more, which is why it’s super important to direct people to your social channels, getting them to follow for more updates.
Step 2: Release more information
Next, you start releasing more and more information about the new product. Again, your socials are key to getting as much hype as possible. After the initial posts hinting at something new, start giving people more information that gets them more excited and intrigued.
At this point, you don’t want to give everything away instantly. Start by revealing when the new product is coming, maybe post an image of the outline of your product, and then gradually add more information as the days and weeks go by. The trick is learning how to drag this step out without dragging it out for too long.
You see, giving everything away will mean people could lose interest before your product comes out. But, giving hardly any info until a day before your product releases will mean there’s not enough to get people excited about. Use your socials to slowly reveal more and more about your product – possibly even do a countdown of sorts. Give people something new every day or every week until the release. It keeps them hooked and they’re longing to know more. A few weeks before the release, you can reveal the product in its full form and show all the different features and specs, etc.
Step 3: Use influencer marketing
Hype is easy to generate when you get others to do it for you. Influencer marketing allows you to tap into popular social media users and their big followings. Contact influencers that align with your brand and would be a good fit for your product. As a very basic example, if you’re releasing a tech product, find users who post about technology.
Here, you are going to send your products out to these influencers, giving them a chance to test and review them. Because your product is obviously amazing, they’re going to give you good reviews and get the word out there about it.
Alternatively, you could just pay people to advertise your product. It works the same, only it tends to be more expensive because you have to pay them. But, you get the advantage of an influencer promoting the new product to thousands of followers, all of which are within your target market.
Step 4: Run an event
The final step should take place when your product is about to launch. Here, you need to work with a corporate events agency to set up an event. The aim is to create an event that showcases your product to lots of different people. You can invite journalists, influencers, and many other people that can talk about the event and create more hype around it.
Now, this event has a couple of key benefits. Initially, it serves as a way to give people chances to see your products, test them, and learn more about them. Already, this could help you generate some customers amongst the people at the event. Secondly, because you’re inviting journalists and influencers, they will post about the event, create news stories, and so on. In turn, you get thrust into the spotlight, alerting the rest of the world about your new product.
After all of this, enough hype should be generated that you can launch your product and receive many orders right away!