New Product Launch Marketing Guide Part 7 – Refine, Revise, and Retarget

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 last article in our series, and its’ focused on refining and revising work that’s already been done to maximize performance.

New Product Launch Step by Step

This is the final 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
6. Awareness Advertising
7. Refine, Revise, and Retarget (this article)

Marketing Is Never Really Done – Keep An Eye on Competitors

Nothing in marketing is ever finished. When you launch a new automotive product, for example, your competitors may react by changing the price of competing products. Price changes don’t necessarily have an effect, but if competitors decide to reinvest in marketing an established product, it can have a negative effect on your launch.

In order to stay ahead of the competition, it’s important to monitor what competitors are doing:

• Use a change detection tool like Distill.io or VisualPing.io to track updates to competitor’s product and sales pages
• Monitor the ads competitors are running using Facebooks’ Ad Library
• Subscribe to competitor newsletters and follow competitors on social media

What you’re watching for is changes to either collateral or messaging, as both signify a substantial effort to “fix” a product that’s not selling as expected. Price changes can be important, but those are so easy they don’t necessarily mean anything. New product imagery, videos, and copy? Your competition is up to something.

Review What’s Working

Whatever your competitors do (or don’t do), there’s a lot of value in reviewing the performance of your efforts. However, don’t just look at sales or revenue:

Talk to customer service. What questions are consumers asking about the new product? What issues are causing returns? Is there an opportunity to reduce confusion with a clarification or new photo? Is there some content you can add somewhere, or maybe some content you can cut down to boost engagement?

Look at what’s selling in terms of fitment and add-ons. We often find that new products sell for unexpected fitments. Everyone expects a product to be popular with Jeep owners, for example, but it ends up being really popular with Nissan owners instead. Likewise, the add-on or upgrade that everyone thought would be popular isn’t, and there are some questions about why. Reviewing the sales data can help identify problems or new opportunities.

Analytics can be helpful too. GA4 makes it easy to see the number of item views, carts, and purchases for products by title, SKU, category, etc. by traffic type. If Google search traffic is performing relatively poorly for your new product, for example, there’s either an issue with your product page(s) or Google is ranking your products for the wrong term(s). If the add to cart rate is higher than average from Facebook ads, for example, there’s something good going on with that campaign.

Make Small Refinements and Iterate

If a product launch goes well, the tendency in most organizations is to move on to other tasks. However, taking a few days to really button things up before moving on is always a good idea. It’s much easier to refine things when they’re still fresh in your mind than it is to come back in six months or a year. And if a product launch does not go well, the tendency in most organizations is to redo everything.

Either way, take the time to do some follow-up work:

• Influencer and end user reviews are a great place to look for problems. Influencers will often avoid being super critical in videos, but will tell you exactly what they think via phone or email so try to talk to them. Consumers will be more direct, so be sure to read early product reviews.
• Were any steps skipped? If messaging didn’t get tested or video didn’t get created because of time or financial constraints, now is the time to go back and ask for budget or more time.
• Who can you interview? Try and talk to customers who have bought the product, customers who have returned the product, and any neutral outsiders you can and ask for feedback.

And while there’s always something that can be improved or clarified, avoid making too many changes too fast (unless you find something that’s obviously wrong). Each change should be tested for a couple of weeks at least, if for no other reason than to make sure the change doesn’t cause problems. The last thing you want to do is hurt a successful launch, or make an unsuccessful launch worse.

Making small steady changes over the course of a few weeks is a good way to improve things without breaking something.

Be More Aggressive With Retargeting Too

Retargeting ads are obviously a good idea, so the note here is to be more aggressive than normal. New products often take months to find a foothold. Part of the reason is that consumers who are potentially interested in your new product aren’t necessarily in the market at launch. However, if you can stay in front of these customers for a few months, you can bring them around.

So, as part of any new product launch, it’s a good idea to be extra aggressive with retargeting ads.

• Retargeting audiences in ad platforms tend to atrophy pretty quickly (sometimes in as little as 24 hours), so try to capture email addresses from potential customers that you can use for a trickle campaign as well as for retargeting.
• When running retargeting ads for new products, it’s OK to increase the frequency. For optimal performance, we generally shoot for a frequency cap of 4-6 impressions per week. But for a new product, we might double that cap.
• Put extra resources into retargeting ad creative. Very often retargeting ads are transactional, eg “Most orders ship same day” or “Best price guaranteed”, but for a new product your retargeting ads can be more like awareness ads in that they reiterate USPs as well as transactional aspects.
• Cast as wide of a net as you can. For performance, we typically focus our retargeting budget on Facebook/Instagram and Google. But for maximum awareness, it makes sense to look at 2nd tier ad platforms like X.com and Reddit. And native advertising can be worth a try too, assuming you have experience.

The End

Congratulations – you’ve made it to the end!

We created this guide as a resource for our customers and our staff, but decided to publish it because why not? If you’ve found it helpful, please share it on social media or drop a review for Spork Marketing on Google. And if you decide you want some expert help with your company’s next product launch, please contact us.

Thank you!