Public Relations

You get only one chance to make a first impression. That’s why, despite the popularity of “stealth” and “soft” launch approaches, you owe it to yourself to take a long, hard look at your situation and your prospective customers. Dribbling out your news and content in tiny, incremental steps over time might preserve cash or save staff time, but often you’re taking a chance. You might unintentionally forfeit your ability to make a bigger splash later. And you risk not getting noticed at all.

If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over? (This argument goes for cost as well.) Once you become known in your prospect’s mind as one thing, you cannot cheaply and easily “flip a switch” and become something else. It’s foolish to think you can pivot your product or service without any negative impact on your brand, reputation and customer trust. From a marketing standpoint, pivot often means a radical move that requires the market to suddenly change what it believes about you. This goes to what you do, what your value is to them and why they should care about you at all. It’s a function of human memory and opinion formation habits which are seldom altered by marketing tactics (not even with a cool name like pivot).

So is there a basic recipe for a successful launch? We think so. Here are the 10 fundamental launch steps to get you started, developed from our experience in leading the launches of literally hundreds of products, services and companies:

The Countdown to Launch …

10: Market Research
Do your homework. That includes competitive analysis, market analysis, SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), problem and niche definition and above all, listening to potential buyers and trying to learn about and categorize them.

9: Strategic Positioning & Messaging
Build on your research results. Boil down the essence of your differentiation. Research and refine your positioning and key messages. Document them in a detailed brief that guides all marketing. Tune them for what you know your buyer personas. Whenever possible, test them.

8: Brand Development
Extend the positioning by communicating your value proposition and uniqueness externally. Differentiate. The narrower the brand, the stronger it is. Well developed brands help us remember companies and why we care about them. This is not so much about “brand statements” gathering dust but about actual implementation, such as logo treatments, visual identity, taglines, voice, tone, personality, creative concepts and naming schemes.

7: High Quality, Original Content Creation (a.k.a Intellectual Capital)
Based on the positioning/messaging, go the extra mile to create high quality original content aimed specifically at your target buyers and their buying stages. Give every piece of content you create a set of goals, a job to do, a target audience segment and a set of metrics.

6: Testimonial/Third Party Validation
“Borrow” credibility from influential sources, including customers, prospects, analysts, consultants and partners. Aggressively solicit 3rd-party references and testimonials. Make it easy to say yes by suggesting multiple choices and levels of support. Align with longer term and sector-wide trends. Present references in context.

5: Content Strategy
What kind of story must you tell? What is the context? How does it relate to your prospects and their preferences? What do you know about their problems and views? How can you use that knowledge to tell your story in context to them? What media channels do you need? What is the right process for drawing back the curtains to reveal your story?

4: Mainstream/Trade Media Outreach
Define your pitch to the mainstream news media. How do you make your story newsworthy? What is the “tension” or conflict in the story? What background do they need to “get it”? What approach and tactics will help you cultivate key long-term press relationships?

3: Social Media Outreach
Where do you need to be active on the social web to reach your prospects and their influences directly? What networks, what communities, what groups, what chats, what channels? Identify your sweet spots. How can you encourage people to share your content and story? Start small and focused and grow out from there. Leverage content and connections across multiple channels. Don’t forget other influencers as well, including industry analysts, standards groups, online communities and consultants.

2: Launch Vehicle
Formalize your move into market with event of some kind — even if virtual. Focus the story to build momentum. Create a sense of “urgency” and timeliness for people to pay attention at a point in time to promote sharing. Whatever channels and media formats you choose, back them up with lots of rich content and several points from which to access your story.

1: Follow Up
Launch is only the beginning. “Launch Marketing” is a state of mind. Today, you can never really leave “Launch mode” or rest on your laurels. You may view it as a campaign–as long as you recognize it should never “end.” Be opportunistic, persistent and consistent!

Do you know what Buzz is? Do you know how it works? Everyone thinks they do, but mostly they’re wrong. There’s the mythical Buzz and the real Buzz. And wouldn’t you know, the mythical Buzz gets all the great PR–or ahh, “buzz.”

The Buzz that most people mean is the mythical one. Even though it does not exist, that doesn’t stop thousands of people from claiming they’ve mastered, perfected, deployed, executed, managed, roped, tied, branded, harnessed and tamed it. I have a cousin who owns an equestrian shop. She assures me that in her vast inventory there’s no gear for “harnessing” buzz—even though there are lots of harnesses. Most people think of buzz as a kind of fairy dust or secret sauce, which, if spread correctly over something by that magic someone who knows how, suddenly transforms the mundane into remarkable, irresistible awesomeness that everyone feels compelled to spread by word of mouth.

The truth is, there’s no such thing as that kind of Buzz … the kind most people believe in. None. Zero. Zilch.

Here’s where it starts to go off the rails. The first mistake is viewing buzz as a commodity. Like it’s “stuff” you can acquire, store, spread around, save, spend, or hoard like a sack of flour. It’s not. You can’t peddle it, shift it from one topic to another, or one client to another or one industry to another. It’s not pork bellies. Buzz has none of those characteristics. If you think buzz is a commodity that can be reduced to single, simple formula, you fundamentally do not understand what it is or likely, how influence works.

The second mistake is more serious. Most people view buzz as having the power to make people suddenly become interested in something that they otherwise would find boring. But it can’t and it doesn’t, for the most part. Instead, what the real buzz does is activate in people who are already interested in a subject the willingness and urge to share it (or more often, some new aspect of it) with others. That seemingly tiny difference — activating a latent or dormant interest in something vs. creating an interest where there was none – is a huge, wide gulf. In that gulf reside the answers we seek about how it works. In this age of Content Marketing, we’re hearing more and more about activation. And well we should, since it represents the inflection point at which someone decides to consume some content. A good read on this can be found in Joseph Jaffe’s Flip the Funnel.)

If you want to try to generate some Buzz, and you already know what the subject will be, then ask yourself questions like these:
• What new and interesting, fresh insight have you brought to the table?
• What have you communicated, offered, or done that no one else has?
• How do you show you have any credibility on this subject?
• Have you taught us something even while entertaining us?
• What possible reason have you given us to want to continue to consume your content vs. dispose of it in 1-2 days in favor of the next mildly amusing shiny bauble?

Like sex in high school, Buzz is inversely proportional. The people who talk about it the most are the ones who know and practice it the least. I don’t pretend to know all the answers about what makes Buzz successful. But I believe it’s possible to get closer to the meaningful ones by asking the right questions.

[Based on a post that originally appeared in Steve Parker's Marketing Dissector blog.]