Launching a product is one – getting to use it is another thing
Broadcasting the new product
You can launch a new product or service in many ways by a website, press releases, blogs, commenting on blogs, micro blogging, advertising (print or online), advertorials, conferences and trade shows.
Explaining in different ways through different communication channels, addressing the different audiences or the same audiences from different angles of attack, all with the sole purpose and in the hope they will notice.
The website plays an important part in most of these communication types as it is the online presence of the company that is being referenced.
This is like broadcasting over multiple channels in order to reach as much people in your target market.
Comparing to competitors
Those people need to understand quickly what problem it solves and what it does in a short amount of time.
By just telling the basic benefits and functionalities we will only reach a small part of the market as the audience needs to understand the message and needs time or even requires some effort.
However if you could compare your solution with other established offerings on the market, it is likely people will understand it faster and better and retain the differentiator(s) mentioned.
Thus comparing similar well-known solutions with your solution helps to get across faster and more efficiently, as people can “file” your solution amongst the peer group.
The Youtube era
Still even if people understand the problem and see the benefit, they need to know how to use it.
This might be an even bigger problem as you have to learn them something new.
Learning is hard to do (the thing you had to do during school).
Actually only a few people want to learn something new.
Explaining using extensive texts, chances are nobody is going to read it.
Explaining using screenshot or image stories isn’t working neither as this seems to require too much effort and isn’t appealing.
In the era of Youtube, people expect the convenience and easy of learning from a streamed video.
People are so used to see and having explained everything on their TV-sets or on video, they expect the same for your product or solution.
Thus in order to provide what the public wants; you need to have a short introduction video showing and explaining the use of the solution.
The LEADSExplorer case
In our case of the web service LEADSExplorer we launched it using the website, this blog and press releases.
We haven’t compared it publicly yet, but that was taken care by the WebMarketCentral blog on December 8th 2008.
Currently we have a decent amount of traffic on our website (Alexa ranking about 407,000).
In order made this introduction video about discovering the companies visiting your website and saving the interesting ones for further use.
The best was to present a web service is to make a screen cast showing the use of the actual screens of the application.
As the website is provided in 3 languages, having verbal explications the costs and issues would have been significantly increased thus we opted for text balloon. These relatively simple text balloons in 3 languages are probably as effective and have the potential to be even more widely understood as all visitors are not native English speaking.
Features:
- As people do click away when a video is not loading fast, we have made it auto-loading.
- Clearly state the length of the video, in order to let people know how long it will take.
How was your company able to get customers using their solutions?
What are your experiences?
