How To Successfully Launch
Thinking about starting your sustainable fashion brand but unsure how launching works? We know that it can be confusing and overwhelming so we condensed the launch marketing module from our Launch Your Brand Program (LYB) to give you a high-level overview of the steps you should take.
1. Set Up Your Launch Goals
Creating your launch goal doesn’t mean saying “I want to sell out” or “I want to make $20k in sales”. You need to have a goal in mind that you’re able to break down and then figure out how you’re going to get there. For example, if you want to sell out, how many sales will that roughly equate to? And based on that, how many website visitors do you need? What does your conversion rate need to be? How many launch events do you need to host?
Compile a list of questions and tasks that you need to work out in order to reach the big goal. We do have a spreadsheet that we provide our LYB clients with that helps sort out a lot of these things.
2. Launch Marketing Strategy
Draft up your marketing strategy to launch. Do you have your main positioning, key message and theme ready? Is it solid enough that your ideal customer would resonate with it? Make sure that you’re highlighting the problem(s) of your customers and solving it with your product.
3. Launch Marketing Timeline
In order to set your launch up for success, you need to have a clear timeline set up to grow your community before you go ahead and launch any products. You don’t want to launch and there be crickets, so start building your community as soon as possible. We recommend at least three months of brand and community building before you launch.
Here, we outline four different phases/stages and timelines that you can follow:
Grow Community Phase — Start building your brand and community of ideal customers at least three months prior to launch.
Pre-Launch Phase — Warm up your audience and get them excited to see your product about one month before the launch phase.
Launch Phase — Research shows that people need to see an advertisement on average seven times before they buy, and do fourteen days of dedicated promotions on your brand.
Post-Launch Phase — after you’ve launched, take the time to regroup and reflect on wins and areas of improvement that you saw during this current launch. To ensure that your launches get better and better, you need to take the time to analyze and strategize.
Grow Community Phase — after all of this, you still want to continue building and nurturing your community for the next launch. You don’t want to run out of people to sell to, so you need to continuously be building your audience for future launches.
4. Launch Brief
To make these steps easier for you, put together a document to keep you organized. This will come in handy in future launches too. You can cross-reference and check what you did before— what worked and what didn’t? Write down things such as launch goals, key dates, an overview of the problem and solution, your ideal customer’s persona, an overview of the product(s), marketing campaign, sales campaign, etc. The list can go on and you should be customizing it how you see most fit for you and your work needs.
5. Launch Schedule And Execution
Lastly, advanced planning is key in order to not get overwhelmed. Start chipping away at creating graphics, captions, organizing launch events, influencer campaigns, ads, etc. Make the time to plan it out and gradually check things off your to-do list in advance so that you’re not leaving it all to the last minute and getting stressed and burnt out.
