New Product Launch Marketing Guide Part 5 – Getting Reviews

We’ve learned a lot about launching new parts and accessories over the 17 or so years we’ve been in business, so we’ve put together a multi-part guide as a reference. This is the fifth article in our series, and its’ focused on getting reviews and testimonials for a new product.

New Product Launch Step by Step

This is the fifth article in a series that address the seven key steps in the product launch process:

1. Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking
2. Developing and Testing Messaging
3. Pulling Together Essential Content
4. Web Content and Content Strategy
5. Generating Reviews and Testimonials (this article)
6. Awareness Advertising
7. Refine, Revise, and Retarget

New Products Need Reviews To Succeed

Selling new products without reviews is difficult (at best). Many people choose between products by comparing the number of reviews and the average review rating. And many automotive buyers won’t even consider a product if it doesn’t have some sort of third party validation or endorsement.

Suffice to say, new products can’t thrive until they receive reviews. Fortunately, there are are a few ways to get new product reviews:

1. Influencer marketing
2. Pay-for-review programs like Amazon Vine or Field Agent
3. Aggressive pricing or incentives to attract “early adopters”

We’ll talk about each below.

Influencers Aren’t Just For Awareness

Oftentimes, influencer marketing discussions are centered on awareness:

“Such-and-such operates a YouTube channel with 1 million subscribers. If they talk about our product, that’s going to be huge!“

While it’s true big influencers can drive sales, they rarely share that influence for free. Many top tier automotive influencers ask for a five figure sponsorship fee just to mention a product, let alone showcase it in a review video.

However, there’s more to influencers than awareness:

• Any influencer, even influencers with a tiny audience, can create great video
• Smaller influencers who lack subscribers often have great authenticity

If a smaller influencer creates a great video review of your product – and also says some nice things in the video you can publish on your site or use in your marketing – that’s good! And if these smaller influencers will work for free or discounted product? Even better.

Paying for Reviews

Officially, there are only a handful of companies that are authorized to incentivize consumers to review products. Amazon has their Vine program – which is highly recommended if your company is going to sell on Amazon – and Walmart has a partnership with Field Agent.

However, there are lots of ways to pay people to review products that aren’t officially endorsed. There are lots of fly-by-night companies that sell Amazon reviews, for example, and there are more traditional methods:

• Offer people who buy your product a gift or incentive if they leave a review somewhere
• Offer people an incentive to upload a video or photo of your product in your review platform, so they’re being paid to create a video or photo rather than to write a review
• Offer people the opportunity to “test” a product with a reimbursement for people who “share their experience” in the form of a product review

We would discourage any company from paying for or incentivizing reviews. These methods are illegal, and we are aware of several instances where paid reviews were removed or “flagged” by Amazon and Google and effectively became worthless as a result.

Getting Reviews With Aggressive Pricing

With aggressive pricing and the right approach, you can generate reviews pretty reliably. The process:

1. Publish the product on your website, but don’t offer it for sale. Instead, invite people to submit their email address to find out when the product will be available. Then, focus on building your list.
2. Once your email list hits a certain subscriber number (20, 50, 100), offer everyone on the list a big discount (like 50% off). The offer should be for a limited time.

While a 50% discount on 20, 50, or 100 orders might seem expensive:

• Most of the people on the list won’t take advantage, especially if you limit it to 24 hours (you can always extend it if you don’t get enough takers)
• Participating in Amazon Vine or similar usually requires giving away the product for free anyways
• People who get big discounts tend to be pretty happy and likely to leave a great review

Next Steps

It’s difficult to sell products without reviews or testimonials. To give your product the best possible launch, it’s a good idea to focus on getting reviews from consumers and influencers as early as possible:

• Influencers – even small influencers – are a good source of videos and reviews
• When a product first launches, reviews are always hard to come by – investing can speed the process

While we do not recommend paying for reviews outside of an officially endorsed program like Amazon Vine, investing in reviews is always a good idea. Once a product gets 10+ reviews, sales tend to accelerate. The sooner your products hits that 10 review threshold (either on your site or on a site like Amazon), the sooner sales start to grow.

In our next product launch guide article, we’ll discuss awareness advertising for new products.