One of the most important tasks a marketer can undertake is writing a solid marketing plan for a new product or service launch. But how exactly does one go about doing that?
Inspired by World Product Day on the 19th July, here I share how to create a product launch plan from scratch.
But first, there’s one important distinction to make…
What is the difference between a marketing strategy and plan?
In simple terms, a marketing strategy is a high-level concept of what your product or service is about, its place in the market, and, broadly speaking, how you aim to go about bringing it to market. Your marketing plan on the other hands sits inside your marketing strategy and details the actions you will take to execute the launch and ongoing marketing of that item or offering. The plan incorporates what you will do, where, how it’ll be implemented, and how you plan to measure its success.
Because this post will focus on how to write a marketing plan, I’m going to assume here that you already have your strategy covered.
What is included in a marketing plan?
The key components of a marketing plan are:
- Business/product/service overview
- Customer profiles
- Competitor research
- Target setting
- Budgeting
- Marketing approach
- Results tracking
In the rest of this guide to writing a marketing plan, I’ll explain what each of these components means and why they’re important.
1. Business/product/service overview
The first important component of your marketing plan should be an overview of your offering’s strengths and weaknesses, along with the opportunities before you and the threats to success. Together this is called a SWOT analysis, something I’ve previously explained in my recent post on implementing strategy and business development plans. Here it really helps to know your USP and take an honest look at what customers may perceive as flaws in your offering in order to change those or at least market in a way that de-emphasises them. Opportunities usually revolve around finding a unique position in the market and getting the product before as many eyes as possible in innovative ways. Threats meanwhile can refer to competition or market factors which should help you form a worse-case scenario. Good extensive and factual customer research is required to ensure that you have the USP’s correct.
2. Customer profiles
It often surprises me the amount of times I ask a company who their product or service is aimed at and they don’t have a clear idea. In fact, it’s so important, I certainly couldn’t pen this guide to writing a marketing plan without including it!
This is where profiling customers – known as creating customer personas – is crucial. The more specific you can be on the ideal audience (or audiences) for your product or service, the more you can tailor your marketing approach to them.
For instance, to give a common consumer example, you might think that almost everyone would find an Apple Watch appealing. But the product’s high price point and multimedia capabilities mean Apple have targeted tech-savvy, health-conscious twenty and thirtysomethings with high disposable income more than anyone else.
To use a B2B example, if you have a cutting-edge piece of aviation equipment, you might think it would be targeted at aviation buyers. However, taking time to understand your customers will tell you that buyers tend to operate on price; it is in fact the engineers and R&D people who might fully understand your product’s market-leading qualities and push for their business to buy it.
3. Competitor research
The number three consideration in this guide to writing a marketing plan is to look at what similar products and services in your field are offering. What are their USPs? How are they regarded in the market? And how does that stack up with your own offering and approach?
Possibly the most effective way to do this is to do the same as you did for your own business at step one: do a SWOT analysis. This will give you an idea how you compare to your competition and give you an edge in terms of how you present your idea to the world.
4. Target setting
This component of your marketing plan is essential to your success because it helps you define what success actually looks like.
For a new product launch, this could be as simple as selling a certain amount of the product at a specific margin. However, you may also want to consider the cultural impact of the item and how it fits into your company’s wider goals. Do you want this to be the start of a large and varied product range? If so, setting targets for positive customer service interactions, high review scores, and extensive media coverage, could all be things you want to factor into your goals. Likewise, if you’re launching a service, do you want to generate more website visits or maybe app downloads? Prompt more conversations? Build a community?
Whatever your goals here, make them specific and realistic. This will help you with the next part of writing a marketing plan…
5. Budgeting
Defining your marketing budget is often not as straightforward as it sounds – although modern digital marketing tools have made it somewhat easier. For instance, if your goal is to generate more traffic and convert a certain percentage of those into sales, you can work out how much it might cost to convert one customer based on the average of visits per sale. From that, you can work out the investment you need in order to hit your sales targets and grow your business.
On the other hand, physical interactions like footfall can be harder to judge, and therefore more difficult to budget for. Getting this balance right can be tricky – which is why getting help from an experienced marketer can be crucial when weighing up how to write a marketing plan.
6. Marketing approach
Once you have at least some idea of a sensible budget, you can then move on to the penultimate component of your marketing plan: choosing the channels you’ll use to market your product or service.
An everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach here might sound like it covers every base, but that can be counterintuitive. Instead, refer back to your customer personas and take stock of the channels those people are most likely to use. Is it social media? Might Google Ads be the best fit? What about physical point of sale material, TV or radio time, or taking out paid advertorial print space in a local paper? Of course, your budget will also help drive these choices, so the interplay between where your customers ‘live’ in a marketing sense, and how much you have budgeted to reach them there, is something you’ll want to pay heavy consideration to.
7. Results tracking
The last part of my guide on how to make a product marketing plan covers how you intend to measure your marketing success. Which key performance indicators (KPIs) will be important to you? What tools will you use to track your returns on investment (ROI)? Additionally, who in your team will be responsible for keeping track? Who will they need to report the results to? And what mechanisms might you put in place should your short-term results show you need to adapt your approach? It is surprising how many people forget to track their performance against original budgets and measure whether the launch is truly successful or not.
From tracking technologies and analytics to studying your sales data and measuring your marketing’s effectiveness, your marketing team will need to have the right tools and approach to make the most of your new product or service launch. And even if they do, having the experience and know-how to adapt when things don’t go according to plan can make all the difference.
Are you planning a product or service launch?
With several decades as a senior marketer behind me, I have a long track record of making the difference in product and service launches.
To learn more, take a look at my experience across a variety of sectors and get in touch to see how my skill set can work for you.
Further Reading
