The Essential Pre-Launch Marketing Checklist
About to launch a product or service? You’ll need a launch plan! Here’s your essential pre-launch marketing checklist.
Posted 2 years ago
Written by
Mackenzie TaylorPosted 2 years ago
Calling all social media managers: Do you know all the steps you need to take when it comes to launching a product or service for yourself or a client? It’s time to get well-acquainted because knowing all of the items you need to cross off your to-do list can take your launch to the next level. Which is what you want! Ready to get started? Here is your ultimate pre-launch marketing checklist for launching your next product.
Brand style guide
When you first launch anything, you want to make sure you’ve got your brand voice and overall aesthetic completely nailed down. If your content isn’t on-brand and consistent, then your launch probably isn’t going to go as well as you think it will.
People follow you for a reason, so don’t change the game on them at the last moment! Keep your brand voice consistent across the board and make sure the rest of your team understands what the voice is as well. ![frank body brand voice]()
Research competitors
Look at your competitors. What are they doing well? What are they doing wrong? Is there anything that you can take from their content and strategy that could work well on your own?
Put together a list of your main competitors and check each of their social media channels. What kind of content are they posting? What are they ranking for? Are they doing paid social media ads?
With all of this in mind, start thinking of which things you like from your competitors that you can make your own.
Define your audience
Think back: Have you ever been targeted by an ad that you were SO uninterested in? Yeah, it happens to a lot of us and if you’re not sure of who your audience is before you launch your product, you need to define it. Now.
One of the best ways to figure out who your exact audience is? By social listening. You can learn all about social listening here, but to give you a quick rundown:
Social listening is when you use social media to find conversations people are having about your business, product, industry, and competition.
Social listening helps you figure out what your audience wants from you and helps you narrow down WHO your exact audience is.
- What’s their age?
- What do they not like about your industry?
- What do they love about your industry?
- What are they saying about you?
- What are they saying about your competition?
Once you have your audience defined and have researched your competitors, it’s time to set your launch goals.
Set your launch goals
You can’t launch a product without any goals in mind. That’s a bit silly now, isn’t it?
Set goals and decide which metrics you want to track whether or not your goals have been met. Not sure what kind of goals to track? We’ve got you! Click here to figure out which social media KPIs to keep track of, like:
- Impressions
- Followers
- Engagement
Outlining your goals in advance will help you tweak any of your posts during the launch to make sure you’re getting the numbers you’re wanting to hit your ultimate goal.
Build a waitlist
Something you can do before your launch even begins is build a waitlist! If you have access to your followers’ emails, craft up an enticing email and ask them to join the waitlist for your product!
This can help you plan out the rest of your social media launch as it can give you a better idea of what your customer wants, which messaging works for them, and more details about the kind of person that wants your items!
Create and schedule your content
Now that you have an even better idea of what you need to do before launch, it’s time to start really digging into the content you need to plan.
Think of the product or service you’re launching and how you best can present it. Is it through a Reel? A photo? Is it using content creators to help you build out the campaign with their own user-generated content (UGC)?
Once you’ve gotten an idea of your content and created it, it’s time to schedule.
Scheduling your content is SO important when it comes to a launch. It’ll save you so much time and energy (and tears!). We recommend getting set up with an Instagram scheduler (kinda something like Flick’s scheduler) to schedule out all of your content before launch day.
Start your free 7-day trial with Flick today by clicking the banner below:
With scheduling, you can take a peek at your analytics and know the best times to post so you can get the highest engagement possible for your content.
After the content goes live and the likes start rolling in, it’s time to start analyzing your results to see what’s worked and what needs some improvement.
Analyze your results
Our absolute favorite part: analyzing!
You’ve made it through your product launch—yay! But now what? Well, it’s time to take a look back at the goals that you created and look through the metrics to see if you’ve hit your goals or not.
There’s a variety of ways to look at your metrics, you can do it through Instagram’s own app, or you can get incredibly detailed analytics through Flick.
Take a peek at all the analytics for your account with your free 7-day trial with Flick.
Did you hit your goals or did you fall short? Write down your successes and figure out a plan for your next launch on ways you could have done it better.
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