A seamlessly executed brand launch is one of the most critical elements of a successful business. Learn the secrets to a successful brand launch here. In this article we discuss 5 Secrets to a Successful Brand Launch
On your marks, get set, go!
You’re getting ready for a brand launch and it’s exciting! It’s a race against the other brands in the market. You have an opportunity to nail this and create something powerful and new.
The benefits of getting this right can’t be understated. This is not something that you do by crawling under the radar. You can make it great, but you can also waste a lot of time and money if it’s not.
So, here are 5 secrets to a successful brand launch to help your brand make a grand and memorable entrance into the world.
Table of Contents
First Up: What is a Brand Launch?
To the untrained eye, a brand is a business logo, right?
Wrong.
A brand is the living, breathing personality of your business. Yes, part of it is your company logo, but that’s how that logo represents your business as a whole.
Your brand is the way your online presence meshes with your shopfront. It’s the way your blog posts sound like they were written by the girl that served you in-store today. It’s the way your customers can glance at your website and get the vibe of what your business is about.
When you launch a brand you are not just opening up for business. You are introducing all of these brand design elements of your business into the world as a seamless experience to foster a relationship with your audience that makes sense to them.
1. Bring Yourself Back to Basics
What is your service or product, who is the audience and what resonates with them? How can you address the gap in the market and how will you communicate this to your customers?
Everything about your brand should stem from this, yes, even your name. Your customers are likely not going to dig deep into your business to find something compelling about it.
Remember, this is the same audience that is exposed to an average of 5000 marketing messages a day. A vacuum cleaner repair service will be just that unless you add some sparkling personality to it.
You need to draw them in, at the very least your messaging needs to be consistent across all of your platforms.
2. Create a Style Guide
This is important so that all the visual elements of your brand are cohesive. A style guide can also extend to the tone of voice and vibe of content as well; for example corporate, cheeky, or empathetic.
Remember that your business is going to spend a lot of time creating its initial content and getting its platforms ready to go, but it doesn’t end there.
A style guide keeps everybody on the same track, including you. If you’re hiring a writer, designer or social media manager, you want them to create content that matches all of the initial work you put into your branding.
3. Promote Yourself in the Right Place in the Right Way
This goes for before and after your launch. That’s right, you should start creating some groundswell about your new business before you launch.
Knowing your audience means knowing the best way to reach them. It might not be in your interest to target every social media platform available, but there will likely be two or three that attract the customers you want to target.
Basically, speak the same language as your audience. Make content that is relatable and piques their curiosity.
Once you know where to find your audience and how to relate to them, start leaving messages there for a month before you launch.
Another great way to promote your launch is via influencer marketing. See if you can start a relationship with a key influencer in your field and do a guest post on their site.
Alternatively, you can set yourself up as an influencer by creating authoritative content like a podcast. Learning how to record on mac with some basic equipment and podcasting could be an effective way to reach your audience.
4. Don’t Rush
The issue with trying to rush a brand launch is that you only get one of them.
Can you imagine going to a theatre production where after 20 minutes the director announced that they weren’t quite happy with the performance and would like to start again?
Don’t do that.
You get one chance to make an entrance, so give it the time it needs.
Another way to think about a new brand launch is to emphasize the word launch. When you launch a rocket it blasts off into space with a bang and a big fuss. You are propelling your business into the world, not rushing to the starting line stressed and half ready.
This brings us to an interesting crossroads of re-branding. Take a look at some of the financial figures involved in branding and you can see that the extra time spent getting it right the first time pays off.
Also, starting again will take longer than 20 minutes of theatre production, it could take months or even years.
5. Huff and Puff and Blow the House Down
The huff and puff is your launch, blowing the house down happens twelve months later.
In other words, your efforts need to be sustainable to maintain the trust of your audience. If your brand takes off and the demand for your products is high, managing this can be a challenge at first.
Think about your launch, but also think about where you will be in a year and how your resources are going to meet the demand.
6. To Infinity and Beyond!
A successful brand launch is challenging and worthy of celebration.
Over time you will have to consider how changes to your branding will affect your company’s customers and stakeholders. Your launch is your chance to set the stage the way you want it to be.
Being slightly over-prepared is always better than patching up holes you hadn’t really thought much about. We hope you have learned something from the 5 Secrets to a Successful Brand Launch. For more information on how we can help your brand succeed, browse our site and get in touch!
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