How to Promote a New Product without being ‘selly’

The issue is that once we launch a product, we often forget to promote it, or we forget about it and expect it to tick over and just sell. But the reality is that not how you sell things!

There's 3 steps to promoting a product:

1. Planning

2. Building excitement for the product

3. Repetition

Step 1: Planning

So there's a few things you're going to need - A calendar and a notepad - or if you're like me you can use our 2020 marketing content calendar spreadsheet and Asana which is what we use for task management.

We need a calendar to mark out our launches. So what we do for this is we start by opening a new project in Asana and creating a timeline starting at when you know you'll have the final product in your hands and ready to sell and ship to your customers.

From here you're going to want to create all tasks that you need to do to promote a product. For example you might have Pinterest, IGTV, Instagram feed, stories as separate sections in your project.

Now is the time to decide how you're going to cover all bases for your launch across all different channels. Usually you would launch with an overview of your product so that customers can get a feel for what it is.

Once you've done this - grab your calendar and add the tasks from your project management into the calendar. Ask yourself is each task a weekly or monthly task? How many times does it need to be done e.g. How many Instagram posts per week (keeping in mind the 80/20 rule of 80% serving your audience with value-added content and 20% selling.)

You can use an actual calendar or paper diary but we like to use a spreadsheet - you can find our actual spreadsheet here on our website - it's a 12 month 2020 content planner with weekly and monthly goals to help you continue your promotions.

Step 2: How to build trust and excitement

If you're a new business you're going to want to start a few months in advance building up a community on your chosen social media channels. Bring your audience along for the ride by showing them your design or manufacturing process, get them involved with helping you to choose colours, or shaping the content within an ebook if your product is not physical. Educate them about your story, where your products are made, the team behind the business and anything that you think people could potentially find relatable and a reason to follow your brand.

If you're a services based business we would start by seeding in content for a few months prior to your launch e.g. we launched a Pinterest ebook and if you look through our Sassy Digital Instagram content you'll find we did loads of Pinterest tips prior to the launch to build up interest, convince people that Pinterest is a legitimate business tool and build that trust that we know what we're talking about when it comes to marketing. Following this, we gave sneak peeks 2 weeks in advance of the launch. Then a few days beforehand we announced what the product would be.

If you're an e-commerce business then It's not always easy to do this depending on what your product is - If you have physical products then I'd suggest posting images of the final product up to 2 weeks in advance to drum up interest within your community. If you're a beauty brand for example, you could start doing this weeks in advance by keeping people guessing what product is coming next by seeding in short videos on your stories, asking people what they think is coming and using polls to shape which of your products you're going to launch first (if you have more than one product to launch)

If you can drum up the right excitement before a launch, come the day when you announce, you should have plenty of customers lined up and ready to buy. However, it doesn't mean they'll all run to checkout as soon as you announce. This is why the next step is so essential...

Step 3: Repetition without repeating yourself

One of the most forgotten about steps is post launch i.e. anytime after you announce the launch of a new product. Once you've announced, you're going to want to keep a slow and steady momentum to help keep promotion of the product up so that people don't forget about it. That said you don't want to keep shoving the same information down people's throats - so let's refer back to our calendars for a moment.

The first step is to write down some different angles that you could promote. For example, our Pinterest ebook contains two separate parts to it. It's a 33 page ebook full of information, and a separate 14 day plan to help you put everything into practice. So we already have two angles here - but breaking these down even further our 14 day plan is great for those who need extra guidance, it helps those who are time poor, it gives people a structure to follow, and it helps you stay on track and accountable. All of these are additional promotional points - they are pain points for people which will help us sell more!

Further to this, you can show off your product in different ways. For example, we might show people one of the tasks we are doing from our 14 day plan to help people see what might be in store for them.

If you've got a physical product - for example a clothing brand, you might want to show off a new product. There's so many ways you can do this including how to style it differently, showing different influencers or models wearing your clothes so that people can get a feel of what it looks like, where were your clothes made? What's the story there, what kind of activities can people do in your clothes? give people a sneak peek into how they will look or feel in that particular piece of clothing. It's the same with any product - essentially you want to make your customers feel something and show them how their life will be enriched if they buy from you.

Once you have a list of these selling angles, make sure you add them into your calendar and set reminders for yourself for when to post. This means you can have a think and plan your content in advance to make sure you have a good mix of selling and non selling information going out on your marketing channels.

All of the points I've just mentioned will help you to sell without being too selly...for example when brands just show the product and the price - people don't relate to this!

Once you've covered all possible angles, you can begin either thinking of new angles, or repeating similar messaging. Hopefully you'll have some customer photos or testimonials to post by this point, but if you notice on IG stories particularly, plenty of brands over time repeat the same information on products in an ever so slightly different way! If you look at some of your favourite brands they'll be doing exactly this if you look close enough!

So that's how to promote a new product without being too selly!

My last suggestion is to make yourself weekly goals on how much you want to sell so that you can keep on top of promoting. It's not just new products that we make goals for, we make goals for older products too - but that may only be possible if you have a small inventory of products.

How do you keep on top of promoting your products? I'd love to know - comment below or DM me with any specific questions!