Product launches offer manufacturers a perfect way to generate buzz among their customers and prospective accounts. Creative marketing campaigns, sales blitzes, promotional offers, and other tactics are all part of the recipe for drumming up interest.
But, how can you demonstrably tell if all that hype actually moved the needle with the right buyers — and positively impacted the bottom line?
Measuring Post-Launch is Too Late
If you wait to measure the success of a product launch after you get orders, you’ll miss out on important information that can help you improve future launches.
Approaching a product launch with a holistic view — from ideation to implementation — will help answer questions like:
- Did we target the right accounts with our launch activities?
- Which campaigns were most effective, and what about them drew interest?
- Were there enough touchpoints to effectively drive buyers through their purchasing journey?
- Was the sales department delivered enough information throughout the launch to accurately determine which accounts they should prioritize with outreach?
To unlock the answers to these questions, you’ll need to leverage technology that tracks activity across your key accounts and reveals influence throughout your product launch process.
Pre-Launch: What Accounts are You Targeting with Your Product Launch?
When launching a new product, it is important to measure the performance of your top accounts. There are a few factors to consider when choosing which accounts to focus on:
- Potential for revenue generation
- Strategic importance
- Likelihood of conversion
- Market fit for new products
- Level of competition for the account
- Previous engagements / existing contracts
Most likely, these accounts will match with your target-account list (TAL).
6sense can help you uncover even more target accounts for your product launch by identifying companies that are already in-market for your new product type. (You can read more about how 6sense delivers buyers that are most likely to purchase from you.)
During the Launch: Real-time Data on the Effectiveness of Your Product Launch
Looking at generic data points like pageviews, email opens, or ad views won’t reveal if the right buyers are engaging with your new product.
An Account-Based Marketing (ABM) platform can give your teams greater insights into:
- Accounts researching topics related to your products and services (including your new products)
- When accounts and buyers see and engage with your product launch campaigns
- What aspects of your campaigns they’re engaged with (web pages, advertisements, etc.)
- Where an account is in their buying journey
6sense helps your teams associate traditionally anonymous activities to the accounts where they’re happening. This all happens in real-time during your product launch.
With 6sense, your marketing team can start creating reports that track the level of engagement they see on your new product pages, the performance of topics related to the new product on search engines, and the engagement your advertising campaigns see from your top accounts.
The insights your teams uncover about their product launches makes it easier for sellers to know where they should prioritize their efforts. If one account is showing a ton of activity on your new product pages, for example, you know it’s time to start engaging them.
After the Launch: Encores
In the immediate aftermath of your product launch, you’ll likely land a few immediate deals. But with the insights we’ve discussed above, you can uncover a lot more accounts showing interest, but that haven’t necessarily raised their hand yet.
As you discover more accounts that are showing interest in your new product or service, you can:
- Launch direct email campaigns, personalized to individual accounts highlighting new product/service features
- Target advertising campaigns to those specific accounts — controlling your costs and increasing the effectiveness of your ads
- Enable sales to prioritize the accounts they know are showing interest
- Configure your product pages to align with the messaging you know is resonating most with your audience
By leveraging technology that uncovers all of the activity happening around your product launch, you can increase the impact of your promotional campaigns and build on your buzz.
Conclusion
By executing a product launch strategy that takes a holistic view of the entire process — and using an ABM platform to uncover hidden account activity — you can learn more details about the successes to incorporate into future launch plans.
For instance, if you find that your target accounts typically prefer reading informative whitepapers about a product instead of watching videos, you can focus your efforts there in the future.
Launching a new product is a big deal for manufacturers that takes a lot of time and money. 6sense helps manufacturers understand the effectiveness of the campaigns supporting your product launches by delivering deeper insights into engagement by key accounts.
