Top 8 Mistakes to Avoid When Launching a New Product Online

According to nielseniq.com, 30,000 products are launched yearly. That’s a lot of items resulting in heavy competition in the market.

When you decide to launch a new product, you require extensive effort and work. Things like development, strategizing, marketing, and more aspects of the launch delivery. These aspects are essential for a successful result, whether for a first-timer or a seasoned business person.

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Some of the questions that come to mind include:

• Will my product succeed in this competitive world?
• How much time will I use for a successful launch?
• What are the requirements for an online launch?

These queries plus more are important to ask yourself before giving your audience your product. Let’s help you explore 8 mistakes when launching a new product online.

1. Ignoring Your Competition

If you have an excellent launch strategy but lack any competitive analysis, you need to reevaluate. Circle back and see which areas to improve when learning about your competition.

It’s always an excellent idea to respond to the happenings of the growing market, especially in online retail businesses. For instance, your competitors focus on similar customers, will give you a higher advantage when planning your product launch.

Also, analyzing the business rival before and during the launch process is essential. If you fail to do so, you just might miss out on vital points that might lead to a successful launch.

You can use tools like RSS feeds, Google alerts, and more to know the activities of a particular competitor. They include things like:

• Posting a blog entry
• Targeting another keyword
• Launching a product

Remember that e-commerce is transparent enough to appeal to customers.

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Setting prices based on a reasonable profit margin and costs can get hard to tap the market. More than that, knowing what your business rival is charging, the giveaways, and deals can give you a relative fair advantage.

2. Allowing competitors to distract you

Still, on your competitors, you should have enough ethics and discipline to ignore their antics. It’s good to know what they are up to but not follow their every move blindly. Never tag along while copying everything your business rival is doing without first doing your proper research.

Note that your competition works hard to hide their plans from their competitors and might offer false information to mislead you. Plus, you don’t know their costs, conversion rates, marketing strategies, and even analytics.

3) Poor planning and process

The other mistake is a poor marketing plan. You need to develop a strategy that will meet your needs as well as the consumers’. Even if it’s in the first stages of implementation, all details are necessary, however minimal they may seem to be.

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A sure way that can help improve the success of your product launch is a robust market framework. It includes a comprehensive launch plan with a straightforward progress overview.

What’s more, a proper marketing plan involves many factors such as SEO optimization, links, social media, feedback, business plan layout, and much more. Let’s dive in and review each aspect individually as follows:

Using unfriendly CRO and SEO Website Content

Most online eCommerce businesses use organic traffic to improve site traffic. Not only will this strategy attract more customers, but it also keeps your website activity active. Making sure the content is of high quality and truthful is a bonus when targeting a specific audience.

When you treat the website’s content as a by-the-way option, some customers will focus on websites with authentic information. This results in missed opportunities either on sales, marketing, or revenue generation on your part.

In addition, your Homepage, flow of information, and product descriptions should offer precise details about the items you want to launch. And a well-optimized page usually ranks well in most common search engines such as Google.

Remember that a CRO and SEO-friendly site uses quality keywords for a specific writing copy and niche.

Relying solely on backlinks

Backlinks are essential, but quality content is more critical. These URLs are part of good Search Engine Optimization but need other elements to make them work. Unfortunately, when planning to launch a product, some businesses mistake using too many backlinks on their site to bring higher traffic.

This is a mistake because an effective SEO contains different components, including:

• Keyword placement
• Linking to authoritative websites
• Social signals
• Onsite optimization like Site’s UI and speed

Not using social media as a marketing tool

Another marketing strategy that most businesses fail to utilize is social media. When planning to bring a product into a competitive market, it’s ideal to test out at least two social media audiences. This includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even YouTube, where most of your following is based.

Moreover, a niche client base can help you create a customized audience platform with a minimal budget. Later after identifying the social media area that suits your business, you can focus your advertising budget there instead of spreading it out to multiple regions.

According to later.com, you can use social media to launch your products effectively.

Dismissing Negative Feedback

The following online launching fail is constantly dismissing negative feedback. We understand it can get tempting to focus more on loyal fans’ positive reviews, but checking out the critical ones is essential. Some of the benefits negative criticisms brings to your business are:

• Understanding your customers better
• You can improve your overall customer service
• It lets you tweak your product

Remember that most customers use online reviews to make a purchase. Entrepreneur.com clearly explains how 90% of clients rely on previous customers’ reviews to buy an item. Simply address the negative feedback diligently if you care about a client’s experience regarding your service.

Bonus Tip: Using avenues that allow customer feedback is essential. You can implement a rating system that includes surveys, reviews, and much more. Some of these tools include HubSpot, Qualaroo, GetFeedback, and others.

Poor Layout

The last point we have when it comes to marketing strategy is a poor layout.

How does your website look when on mobile or desktop?

Do the icons blend well with the overall content and icons?

How does the color scheme affect the overall readability?

The above factors and more affect how a user’s eyes see your entire webpage. For instance, if using an unqualified designer, he/she might do shoddy work by just dumping content and graphics all over. Also, failing to split up materials into subsections, including headings, leaves your site looking like a cluttered mess.

A rule of thumb for a great webpage is an easy-to-follow layout. The text should be readable and friendly to the eyes. What’s more, navigating to different places on the site, whether on mobile or desktop, should be seamless.

4) It Doesn’t solve a problem

Does your new product solve a problem? What value is it adding to your specific audience? There’s no need to launch a service that does not improve a consumer’s value. Not only will it cost you lots of money but also effort and time.

Let’s look at the following scenario.

After releasing the product into the market, you notice no sales, signups, or even purchases. The most common reason for this failure is customers don’t have an interest in the item or service.

To avoid a failed product launch because of poor scope of the market, follow these steps below:

Analyse your market

Research the market and customize the information to a specific audience when planning to launch a product. In today’s world, technology is used in almost every area, especially in an online business. A popular tool that can help you analyze your customer base includes Context Canvas.

Categorize your market

Segment your target market after you gather all the necessary information about your audience. This method will help you reach potential customers more quickly than other traditional ways. What’s more, market segmentation increases clarity on a target audience, improves brand loyalty, develops consumer insights, and even lets you stay focused on main goals.

Create your customer persona

The last step that will help you prevent launching an invalid product is creating a customer persona. This enables you to see who will purchase your service, especially if the target customer is personalized and narrowed.

5. Poor matching to target demographic

Always consider your target audience before launching a product. If your focus is on the older customer base, make sure you use a more straightforward website design. The features typically include larger fonts, straightforward content, and easy to navigate toolbar.

On the other hand, designing a website with friendly mobile support is ideal for a business focusing on a younger customer group. The main reason being the youths use their phones many hours of the day doing research, buying products, and even for work.

6. Announcing too early

There’s excitement and eagerness when launching a new product. You are hyped too much to the extent of announcing your service at the wrong time. You can delay the process of advertising your item to focus on fine-tuning the nitty-gritty details of your launch.

For instance, if you encounter problems during the launching development, you might save yourself some embarrassment. Also, if interested consumers have already prepaid and pre-ordered, it can lead to difficulties along the way.

Always announce your product launch when you have completed all necessary plans and implementations, plus the item is approved.

Pro Tip: Try avoiding launching your item during the holidays to maximize the launch’s impact.

7) Under-delivered after hype

You have been promoting your business for a while now and promising your audience an exciting launch day. When the day finally arrives, you fail to meet your consumers’ expectations, and they start wondering what the hype was all about.

As a rule of advertising, always make sure what you promise, you deliver. If you plan to launch a product in a conference room, park, or even via press media, ensure to live up to the excitement. In the worst-case scenario, an advertising manager might lose their job if the launch fails.

8. Poor structure of launch marketing plan

A detailed launch marketing model can help prevent losses and misused time. When using the popular methodology, Smarts Insights Race, you can cover five areas of digital marketing. This includes:

• Planning
• Reaching
• Interacting
• Converting
• Engaging

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These points can help you reach your audience through various activities such as surveys, participation, and feedback. Also, the framework converts potential consumers into reliable customers. Remember to have a launch checklist to help you reach your goals as it has added advantages as follows:

Benefits of using a product launch checklist

When you have a lot of things to implement in your product launch, you need a checklist. Not only to tick-off what’s been done but also to give you clarity of the project. Apart from helping you to visualize the process and result, a proper launch checklist can:

• Break a complex end goal into workable parts
• Help you see small and big details clearly
• Make your goal available to team members and keep them on track
• Help you better prepare for different situations, even mistakes

Conclusion:

We understand it’s exciting to launch a new product online. You feel all kinds of happiness and eagerness to bring in a new item to the market that adds value to the customers. Not only is the marketing time-consuming but also costly.

When launching a service, some of the failures you can avoid include poor planning, especially during the development stage. You should have all the details such as budget, customized audience, demographic, and a reliable team.

Another setback is hyping up your product and failing to deliver the promise. Your loyal fans get frustrated, especially those who had pre-ordered and prepaid for the service.

Lastly, failing to have a comprehensive marketing model can lead to losses, a reduced customer base, and a waste of resources. Remember to bring in a reliable team to discuss all the details of the launch to increase the event’s success.