A new product launch ties together everything you know about inbound marketing
You must bring together everything in your inbound marketing tool kit to make it a success: 
- Creating new website pages to showcase the product's features & benefits
- Creating new blog post(s) optimized for target keywords around the product
- Creating lead-gen offers to entice site visitors to engage with you and learn more about use-cases for the new product and the solutions it provides
- Creating landing pages to showcase these offers along with conversion forms so you can capture the contact information of those who want to access your premium content
- Creating calls-to-action buttons to advertize these content offers on your website pages
- Creating email marketing campaigns to promote all the assets above to your email list of current customers and/or subscribers.
- Using social media to spread the word beyond your contact list
- And most likely much, much, more.
In short, it will put all your inbound marketing know-how to the test.
To begin, I suggest an overview - Inbound Marketing 101: How to promote your content. Also, I highly recommend the book Launch by Michael Stelzner, founder of the top internet marketing website, socialmediaexaminer.com. This is the ultimate playbook to content marketing in my opinion and also has a great seciton at the end focusing on how to use inbound marketing tactics for building momentum around a new product launch! You can download the first chapter for free along with watching a 5 minute summary by the author himself here: http://socialmediaexaminer.com/launch/
There are 3 target audiences (or persona's) to focus on for any given product launch:
1.) Your current customers
2.) Your current leads
3.) Your future prospects
Don't have persona's propperly defined yet? Start reading up on them via some of the top posts from the Hubspot Blog:
-
3 Steps to Creating Effective Buyer Personas [Marketing Cast]
-
How to Easily Create Remarkable Content With Marketing Personas
Your message to each should be distinct and willl take some planning to make sure each audience is addressed. To get started planning out what you will offer to each audience, download the Planning Your Offers Guide for free.
You'll need to brainstorm Marketing Offer Ideas for the product launch:
A downloadble how-to guide, a webinar going through use-cases for the new product, recorded screencasts walking through the new product's functionality - anything that helps build the bridge between people's current usage/understanding of your old product and actually executing with your new product (you could reuse/reposition some of your current offers & older content like your webinars to do this).
For example, if your company offered software for creating website pages online, and now are offering the ability to create website pages that are optimized for mobile phones, you would want to create content along the topic of "Taking your website pages mobile" or "Mobile website pages, the next step in your internet marketing efforts" ect.
Need Help Coming Up with Ideas? Go Here: Inbound Marketing 101 - How to Create Offers Your Prospects Want
Additional resources to assist with your launch efforts:
- Get a complete walk-through of hosting a webinar on help.hubspot.com: http://help.hubspot.com/articles/Best_Practice/How-to-host-a-free-webinar
- For attracting new prospects and introducing them to your new technology, consider building a free online tool similar to our new marketing grader, except more simplified to focus on a specific area that your product aims to solve (it's not cheap, but it's worth it, Hubspot's "graders" generate hundreds of thousands of leads over time and really put us on the map!)
- For your current customers, consider writing a blog post similar to the ones we publish on the Hubspot Customer Blog. NOTE - Don't forget to subscribe!! http://customers.hubspot.com/
- For your product/service page, consider these resources from Content Camp's "Transform your Website" webinar series to ensure your new product's website page is properly optimized for the most impact on your visitors:
Content promotion tips to spread the word about your new product's launch online:
- Make sure that you've done everything necessary to drive traffic to the landing pages for offers you've created around the new product. Download the helpful guide from Content Camp: 10 Ways to Drive Traffic to your Landing Pages
- Make sure you're promoting any blog posts you've written about the new product using all the tools at your disposal: Content Camp Post: 7 Steps to take to promote your new blog
- 12 Things to Do After you Publish a Blog Article From the Content Marketing Institute [NOTE: Hubspot users will be most interested in #5-#12 as the first few listed we already have taken care of in the software]
- Consider writing a Guest Blog Post about your new product on a popular blog on your industry so you can be featured as an expert source on the new product as well as gaining a valuable inbound link back to your product page. Learn how here: How to grow inbound links with guest blogging (by David Wells)
- Use Social Media to get the buzz going (and maybe even get some early feedback on your product's reception by the market so far):
-
Interested in being able to easily make links that can send Tweets about your new product?
-
Use Hubspot's Social Media Tool to engage in conversation topics related to challenges/opportunities related to your new product. Use the step-by-step tutorial here: How to engage is social media conversations using Hubspot
-
Finally, there's the freshly minted webinars & resources that just got published on Content Camp: How to Create Your Social Media Strategy
Measuring the impact and returns on marketing your product launch:
A critical piece to implementing a successful product launch using inbound marketing is instituting the Monthly Marketing Report so you can measure and improve on your ROI month-to-month. See the complete guide to do this here: 10 Steps to Creating a Monthly Marketing Report.
This will ensure that you're tying all of your promotional efforts around the launch back to ROI. If you have key metrics your staff wants to track beyond what is covered in the Monthly Marketing Report guide above, check out: Analyze Your Marketing Data Content Camp 2011.
Your Turn to Comment: Has your company recently completed marketing for a product launch? What experience can you share? What tools worked? What didn't? Are there other resources available from Hubspot (and beyond) you would recommend including in this toolkit? Please share below.