How do you design and execute a demand generation plan for a new product launch?

I once conducted a post-launch audit. Asking ten stakeholders "How successful was the launch?" yielded ten wildly different answers. Turns out, their vision of success was a tangled mess, each person clinging to their own unshared metric. They skipped the crucial, often-ignored step: Triple-confirming what "success" looks like before liftoff. Get every stakeholder – marketing, sales, leadership – singing from the same data-driven hymnal. Agree on key metrics and document them like launch commandments. Clarity becomes your rocket fuel, propelling everyone towards the agreed-upon success nebula. Trust me, the only confusion you'll hear then is the celebratory roar of engines hitting escape velocity.

Remember this: Demand generation for a new product needs to begin before the product is launched. Before. Otherwise you're not doing demand gen at all. You're just doing plain old marketing.

Alignment, Clarity and Discipline are two things required to succeed. Before any product launch, alignment on goals, objectives, responsibility, accountability, and pivots is essential. Once these are defined, the product launch should have two clear deliverables: (1) Take to Company Plan and (2)Take to Market Plan.

- Set Clear Goals: Define SMART goals like generating 1,000 leads in 90 days. - Know Your Audience: Conduct market research & create detailed buyer personas. - Craft a Value Proposition: Highlight unique selling points & develop clear messaging. - Content Strategy: Produce diverse, SEO-optimized content (blogs, videos, webinars). - Choose Channels: Use digital (email, social media, SEM); consider influencer partnerships. - Lead Generation: Optimize landing pages, use lead magnets & host webinars. - Engage Leads: Develop email campaigns & retargeting ads. - Align Teams: Ensure sales & marketing collaboration. - Measure and Optimize: Track KPIs, conduct A/B testing & refine based on analytics. - Iterate: Gather feedback & continually improve.

Designing and executing a demand generation plan for a new product launch involves identifying target audiences, crafting compelling messaging, selecting appropriate channels, and leveraging data-driven insights for continuous optimization.

-Behavioral Segmentation: Use advanced analytics to segment your audience based on behavior patterns and predictive analytics. -Niche Targeting: Focus on niche markets with high potential for quick wins, such as industry-specific professionals or enthusiasts. -Segment by Adoption Propensity: Segment users based on their propensity to adopt new technologies, and tailor marketing efforts to their familiarity with and openness to innovation.

It all builds around few main concepts: identifying target addressable market, identifying ICP, understanding the Product-Market fit of your product. To simplify - It all moves around ICP, their Engagement and your Product-Market Fit, this will dictate your Demand Generation strategy: you start with ICP and drive Engagement (ABM), or you catch on High Intent and Optimize towards your ICP (LBM) or maybe you start with your Product first (PLG) and build your demand gen strategy of it

The Take to Market Plan should clearly outline the following: 1. Target market | ICP 2. Deep Understanding Pain | Problems 3. 1 to 2 Use Cases and no more 4. Where to locate your ICP? 5. Market Narrative, Positioning and Messaging 6. Value Proposition 7. Content Strategy Aligned to JTBD and Buying Committee 8. Simple | Clear | Language - No Jargon

Use demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data to segment your audience. Tailor messaging and offers to match the needs and preferences of each segment.

-Story-driven Messaging: Develop a narrative around the product that ties into broader themes or societal shifts, making the product relevant on a larger scale. -Customer Journey Mapping: Tailor value propositions to different stages of the customer journey, ensuring relevance throughout the customer experience. -Persona-based Scenarios: Create scenarios for each buyer persona, illustrating specific problems the product solves in their day-to-day lives.

Remember my robotics tech launch fiasco story? Slick tech, stunning demos, zero net-new leads. We were chasing B2B ghosts! The game changer? We stopped chasing numbers and started chasing stories. We dug into the trenches of customer desires, unearthed their deepest anxieties and whispered hopes. We crafted a narrative that wasn't about features, but about the hero they could become with our product. Boom! Leads flooded, ghosts vanished. A laser-focused value proposition ain't just a fancy phrase. It's a B2B jungle machete, hacking through to the emotional bedrock of your ideal client. Forget generic, dig deep. Find their fears, their desires, build your launch on that. Data guides the channels, but connection fuels the fire.

A key value proposition needs to be right to the point, clear, and complete. 'Complete' means that it should convey what you do, for whom specifically, and how. 'Right to the point' means reducing information to the bare minimum. Where the problems occur is by 'clear'. It is essential to avoid technical and marketing jargon, useless adjectives, common clichés, and buzzwords. A three or four-word tagline should be enough to capture value: -Clean clothes delivered -Automated customer service -Access to relevant market data ....

Your TTM Plan should demonstrate how your GTM team analyzed the three vectors below to build a differentiated market narrative, positioning and messaging. 1. Market 2. Customer 3. Competitors Infuse the differentiated market narrative and messaging into content strategy and all channels.

Develop a compelling value proposition that highlights how the product addresses specific customer pain points and stands out from competitors.

Build a content matrix that aligns with each stage of the funnel. For example, top-of-funnel content like blog posts and explainer videos can create awareness, while mid-funnel assets like case studies and webinars build trust, and bottom-funnel offers like demos or consultations drive conversions. Mapping content to each stage ensures a smooth, logical progression for prospects through your funnel.

Content is vital for the demand generation strategy, showcasing the new product's features and benefits. Addressing the audiences' needs, content positions the product as essential. Engaging blogs, social media updates, case studies, and whitepapers spark customer interest. Special offers and promotions highlighted in the content further entice potential customers to take action.

We entered after a "sub-optimal" launch of an automation product. Slick, shiny, packed with more power than a supercomputer on espresso. The message, sleek as the tech, lacked a crucial element: human warmth. We found Sarah, a harried mom juggling work, kids & a to-do list longer than a CVS receipt. We showed her the tech, sure, but then we did something different. We imagined her life w/ it. No more frantic juggling screen prompts. Instead, Sarah, w/ a smile brighter than LED lights, enjoyed a guilt-free evening w/ her kids, whispering, "Remember when things were this easy?" Sales skyrocketed. Tech is cool, but people crave connection. Don't just tout specs, paint a picture of transformed lives. Data crunches numbers. Emotions fuel fire.

A deep understanding of your ICP | Buying Committee should reveal the type of content, offers and channels required to educate and move through the journey. When you build content, please remember the funnel stages and what behaviour you want to change, how the content connects with the buyers and takes an emphatic approach to the problems, how content describes the use case and solution, and how the content speaks to ROI, how the content speaks to onboarding. Most importantly, how the content showcases a better way for prospects they can resonate with using customer stories in different formats.

Use a mix of paid, owned, and earned media based on where your audience spends their time and the goals of your launch. Continuously evaluate channel performance.

This approach includes strategic mix of paid, owned, and earned media like email, social media, and more, tailored to your specific goals, budget, and the preferences of your target audience.

In defining your target market, audience and ICP, the GTM teams should outline ICP cards for each buying committtee member. The ICP cards should outline what channels they visit to consume information, what content is most interesting, etc. Armed with this information and CAC goals, the GTM can build an engine comprised of tactics to attract and drive conversions.

Final but in my oinion, the most important step is to implement a demand generation plan. It includes tracking progress using chosen metrics, and adjusting strategies based on what's effective to enhance results and ROI.

-Real-time Adjustments: Use tools that allow for real-time tracking and adjustments to campaigns based on immediate performance indicators. -A/B Testing at Scale: Implement extensive A/B testing across different demographics and channels to refine messaging and offerings. -Sentiment Analysis: Employ sentiment analysis tools to gauge audience reaction across social media and adjust strategies accordingly.

Ensure tracking is contextualised to the demand gen you're attempting ie: - Field events - Webinars - Target (ICP 1/2/3) - Channels

Demand gen for your new vegan hamburger isn't about shoving your burger in people's faces. It's about publishing content for a while that says vegan hamburgers look and taste just like regular burgers, and that raising cows for beef is terrible for the earth and cruel to the cows. And then showing them your burger.

Post-launch Support Plans: Develop detailed post-launch support and educational programs to maintain engagement and satisfaction among new users.

Alignment with your sales team is very important. Ensure sales teams are fully briefed on the product and demand generation activities to effectively convert leads.

Launching a new product is a big adventure, and your demand generation plan is the map that'll help you navigate through the high seas to find your treasure.