Collaborating on Product Launch Marketing Plans

You are ready to launch your product--now what? In this guide we are going to look at all the different methods for product launches and how you can contribute to these as a product manager.

This guide will focus on your contribution to the launch materials needed to bring the product to market successfully. It will highlight the different departments you will work with as you create the assets for each category. The categories include:

• Direct sales

• Trade Shows

• Web and digital marketing

• Press release and blogs

• Media and social media

As a product manager, what do you need to bring to your direct sales team in order to launch a product? It is very important that your team is prepared for a product launch, especially if you have an entire sales force ready to sell your product to your target customers.

One of the best ways to educate the sales force would be to do something that is commonly referred to as a "power hour" where you would do a presentation for the sales team about what the product is, its advantages, and the value proposition for the customer. This is a good way to educate the departments on the product itself.

Then, you need to give the sales team collateral, battle cards, presentations, and key facts and figures they can use when talking to customers about the product itself. You will develop the content for this and then work with marketing and sales enablement in order to make it easy to consume and customer-friendly for your sales force.

Often times, products are launched at trade shows, and it's important that you work closely with product marketing in order to get the messaging just right. When you work on trade shows you will work with product marketing, events planning, and general marketing.

You would work on ensuring that the messaging is loud and clear in the booth, and that even next to hundredss of your competitors that you do something that makes attendees want to stop and talk to you.

You will likely be asked to man the product demo or kiosk as the subject matter expert, so you want to ensure you have a say in what information goes into the deck or demo.

Your job as a product manager is to explain exactly what the product does and ensure the marketing team can tell a good story. Especially in a COVID world, lots of what is done for releases is being done on the web and via digital marketing. It is extremely important that your online story is a good one.

You have to think of yourself as the fact teller. You are the one sharing the facts, but people want to hear more than facts; they want to hear the why and the how. Collaboration with the marketing team is key as you come up with the why and how.

Big announcements are usually made in a blog, and bigger announcements are made with a press release. If there is a public launch that’s not press worthy, a company will do a blog about it. However, if there is a larger public launch then the company will often do a press release. For blogs and press releases you would be working with product marketing, public relations, communications, and analyst relations.

Many times the product managers will be asked to draft the blog and/or press release to ensure the key product advantages are highlighted. These longer and more in-depth pieces of collateral often have many stages of reviews and an executive's name on them to ensure they get the proper attention for a product launch.

Media and social media are more important than ever for product launches. You will find that business-focused social platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter are especially important to gross promote the assets we previously talked about. For media and social media you will work with marketing, social media marketing, and product marketing.

Sometimes, you will create assets specifically formatted for social media but most of the time social media and paid media are great ways to cross promote. That means sizzle reels, presentations, blogs, press releases, etc.

As a product manager, your job is get the product ready for market. You have done your due diligence to ensure maximum success of the product through research, road mapping and product development.

This go-to-market strategy is the final key to the product's success. You want to ensure you are on board with marketing every step of the way so that you hard work shines through on the management and development of the product.