Months of resources and countless hours have gone into planning, developing, and testing your newest digital product. As you draw closer to the launch date, it is important to understand that once the website, app, or other digital product goes live, it is just the beginning of the process that ensures its success.
Successfully launching a new digital product requires more than partnering with an accomplished agency. It requires internal collaboration to ensure everyone within your company is championing the reveal and its overall marketing efforts.
Is Everyone In Your Company Ready For The New Digital Product Launch?
Launching a new website, app, or digital product with the full support of your staff provides a cohesive approach to successfully marketing its benefits, so the end user — whether it is intra-office, clients, or third-party users — gain the most from its solutions.
When internal teams are not prepared for new digital product launches, it can impact more than the marketing department. The sales team may no longer know where to locate leads from the contact form or provide the informative direction necessary to ensure they are going to the right people for follow-up communication.
Client services may no longer be able to identify or proactively respond to end-user concerns/communications in real time if the protocol changes. And executives may feel as though their feedback was not solicited before launching, which can call a large and lengthy project, and the resources to develop it, into question.
There’s one way to avoid negative impact from rippling through the departments: Tell everyone within the organization what is happening. Why it is happening. And when it is happening.
Depending on the size of your company, notifying the entire staff about an impending digital product launch could require a simple email, a company-wide meeting, or a channeled approach to ensure all department heads have notified their divisions to the digital overhaul and its promotion.
Everyone from the assistants to the sales teams and customer service representatives to executives should be included in the announcement to spark excitement about the new brand strategy — and, more importantly, to ensure everyone knows exactly when the new product is launching and how it affects their role within the organization.
Empower Your Internal Brand Ambassadors With A Digital Product Sneak Peek
An integral part of a cohesive brand strategy is to highlight the main features of the new digital product and allow everyone to ask questions.
This can be accomplished with a pre-launch sneak peek.
Emailing an inter-office temporary link of the new website design, or providing a walk-thru of an app or high-performance system upgrade will provide a preview to your hard work while inducing excitement about what’s to come.
As professionals, we understand that including everyone — especially in a large company — in on a digital services launch will be quite an undertaking. But it is necessary to ensure everyone is aware of the new product’s launch date to promote inclusivity.
Being the last to know — possibly learning after a client or vendor mentions it — is bad for morale. Employees want to feel like they are an important part of any company process, and a new website, app, or digital product is a pertinent marketing point that will require alerting everyone.
Once the pre-launch sneak peek is sent company-wide, prepare yourself for the questions, opinions, and emotions the new product will elicit.
Someone may inquire as to why s/he was not directly involved in its development. Another person may ask if this process has journeyed through the proper approval channels, including who-has-been-involved-in-this-process-style questions.
It is important to field each inquiry with positivity, so your coworkers understand that their voices are heard and that solutions are on the way. The final digital product release may provide those solutions outright, which delivers a boost to its overhaul strategy and your responses.
The more confidence you provide that all touchpoints have been covered and that all decision-makers have had a hand in the final product’s success, the better and easier the responses will be.
Certainty in the launch and its overall solutions will allow the staff to support the new product while educating clients or end users about the major changes and how they benefit everyone involved.
Launch Team Goals: How To Keep The Process On Pace For Final Delivery
You have partnered with the brightest agency, and have had a great experience with your digital product’s creation. This is great news, but it certainly isn’t the end of your hard work — or the product’s delivery. In fact, it is just the beginning.
Several items are going to require your attention before this launch is successfully completed.
If your organization has decided to change the website’s address with the launch — which is rare, but certainly not unheard of — you will need to compile a comprehensive outline of every place your website is currently listed, so you can replace the existing website mention with the new web address on all of your digital and print collateral.
This can include:
- Company stationery and business cards
- Marketing materials, including presentations, white papers, case studies, and templates
- Email IDs associated with the previous website
- Email signatures
- Social media platforms
- Online directories
- Search engine Webmaster tools
- Sitemaps
- External sites with incoming links
- Bookmarks that may exist with employees, clients, vendors, and company partners which will require a replacement link
If you have a newsletter, send it from the original domain to alert users about the overall changes to the site and the domain name
This list will differ for each company, and exhausting each category may require a team to ensure success. Do not be afraid to ask for help.
Amid the chaos of balancing your everyday duties with a website launch and URL change, details can be easily overlooked. You are human, after all. Proactively outlining your current online existence will help your teams sidestep any potential pitfalls before they can occur.
The same applies when internally testing the website’s capabilities.
Enlist a team to help manually test and verify:
- Navigation menus and links work properly
- Content is complete, and that placeholders — whether copy, illustrations, or images — are replaced with permanent features
- Website form submissions are being recorded and emailed to the proper parties
- All live capabilities, including messaging and chatbots, are functioning on the front and back end
Finally, devise and outline solutions for each team who may be impacted once the digital product is released. The time to address any potential issues and each person’s role in making the new digital product a success is before the launch. Not after. The lack of purposefully prepared solutions can induce frustration and even panic. Instead, when solutions are in place, they provide confidence in the new product for both the internal teams and the end-users.
Being proactive is an assured approach to your launch going right. This includes developing a plan for how your digital product will be maintained and updated — whether it is through an agency or an internal team — so there are solutions in place, should anything go wrong.
Do Not Overlook The Importance of Your Post-Launch Strategy
Ensuring your launch is met with excitement requires preparation. Much like a distant social engagement you are hosting, where seemingly everyone is invited, it is best to start planning early to maximize your investment once it is live.
This can be accomplished by sending a well-crafted email to your:
- Past, current, and prospective clients
- End-users, when they differ from direct client contacts
- Vendors and partners
- Freelance and remote teams
Discuss the new features and benefits with a short message that drives traffic to the website, app, or digital product and invites communication from all angles. This may be the exact push your company needed to arouse new business opportunities or to remind clients that they were planning to reach out to you.
Once your core contacts are aware of the launch, make sure the rest of the world knows too.
- Create engaging social media posts that link to the new product
- Design and publish a compelling press release for industry professionals to read and share
Post-launch strategies are far-reaching and allow cross-marketing platforms the opportunity to promote your capabilities through an informative approach, instead of a pushy top-of-mind prompt.
More importantly, you’ve worked hard on this launch! Show it off!
If you have questions about designing a new website, mobile app, or digital product, allow us to walk you through the process, so you are able to plan for all aspects of our discovery, design, development, and analyzation while learning how they combine to create solutions for your organization, and your pre- and post-launch actions.
Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash
