How to build a launch plan for your product or service. Presented as a guest lecturer in Rashmi Menon's Stanford Continuing Education Course: BUS 110: How to Start Your Business: From Idea to Business Plan

1. Business
110
How
to
Build
Launch
Plan

2. Starting Place
• Great product launches start with 3 raw
ingredients
1. Initial Product Marketing
Funnel
2. Target Customer
3. Personas

3. Initial Product
Not the ultimate product or the
best product
Def.
The minimal product needed to
get a specific target audience to
buy and like the product
“enough” to recommend it to
others

4. For Launch Purposes
• Product needs to be defined against
multiple dimensions – 4Ps
– Product
– Price
– Positioning / Promotion
– Place (distribution strategy)

5. Pricing
• Example – Mama Cass – Food truck – 2
sliders for $8.00, 3 sliders for $12.00

6. Positioning / Promotion
• “In a city glutted with food trucks it can be
hard to carve out a niche” – NYTimes
– Gourmet Vietnamese
– Initial promotion focused on food critics who
covered street food scene + traditional
restaurant critics

7. Place
• Food truck w/ set travel schedule as
detailed on website

8. Target Customer
• Who you expect to buy your product first and why
Convenience
Young
Foodies
Soccer
Moms
• Age 25-54 • Age 20-40
• Age 18 -25 • Primarily Female
• Primarily Male
• Mixed Gender
• Higher Salaries • Secondary Ed
• Budget
• Multi-taskers • Hold Family Dear
• Trendsetters
• On the go • Tech Savvy
• Educated
• Goal Oriented • First to go home

9. Personas
• Description that makes the target customer
“come alive” – for you to stay focused on while
developing your marketing plan
– Ideally based on market research – i.e. talking
to potential customers

10. Personas

11. Take all this raw input
Marketing
• Market Planning Funnel
– Initial Product
– Target Customer
– Personas

12. Marketing Funnel

13. Launch Planning
• What levers do we have to get people into
the top of the funnel
– Touchpoints, Influencers
• What are some of the barriers we expect to
encounter and how can we overcome them
– Inertia, Near Substitutes, Direct Competition

14. Launch Plan
– Venue
– Press/Influencer strategy
– Beta & Seeding strategy
– Content Marketing strategy

15. Venue
• Where/When You Launch
– If you are launching into an existing market,
often it is best to launch at someone else’s
event

16. Press/Influencer Strategy
• 4 main categories of press/influencers
– Press, Bloggers, Analysts, Mavens
• Your launch plan needs to…
– Identifying who these people are /how best to reach
them
– Target dates as to when you will brief them
– Think through the tools each group will need so they
can market you

17. Beta Plan & Seeding Strategy
• Beta Plan
– Identify when you will beta
– Whether an invite will be needed
– Who will get invites to distribute
• Seeding Strategy
– Identify who you will seed and why
– How many seed units you will need
– Consider ethical norms with press vs. channel

18. Content Marketing Strategy
• Identify the content you will create
– Website, Facebook page, YouTube channel, Twitter page,
LinkedIn page – these are basics and are expected
• Beyond the basics – what content do you need to create that will
serve as a magnet for potential customers?
– Distribution plan for the content
– How you will make that content findable
– How you plan to reuse / leverage that content in multiple ways
– Call to action – what you want people to do after they get your
content

19. Par>ng
Words
• About OpenMarketing
– Marketing-driven Business Strategy
– Content Marketing + Inbound Marketing