Anaita Sakar is the CEO and cofounder of Hero Packaging and the author of How to Sell Anything Online.
You might think of a brand launch as the one big “ta-da” moment that you bring your brand to market, but a brand launch is not a one-time thing. Doing new brand launches every so often can keep things super interesting for your audience.
With Hero Packaging, every product launch is like launching a new brand. During a launch, marketing goes all in with creative assets, creating an opportunity for the whole team to get on board with content creation. Here’s how you can do the same.
What is a brand launch?
A brand launch is the process of bringing a new business or new brand identity to market. Often businesses end up going through multiple “brand launches,” whether they’re introducing a new product, partnership, or brand identity.
So while a brand launch technically involves starting a new brand, a marketing-savvy business might have multiple launches a year. The only difference is that an established brand launches products to an existing community, and a new brand launches to an audience for the first time. But the launch strategies remain the same.
How to successfully launch your ecommerce brand
- Gauge demand
- Create relatable content
- Start teasing your brand
- Open preorders
- Target VIPs
- Officially launch your brand
- Focus on customer experience
Here’s a tried-and-true strategy for brand launches—whether they’re for an entirely new ecommerce brand or simply a new product:
1. Gauge demand
Before launching a campaign for a new product, it's crucial to confirm market demand. There are various methods to gauge market demand, ranging from informal discussions with friends and family to engaging potential customers in online communities, such as Facebook groups. Hero Packaging employed search engine marketing (SEM) tactics to test the viability of its inaugural product, a compostable mailer.
Hero Packaging purchased Google Ads for keywords related to compostable packaging, ensuring anyone searching for sustainable packaging would see an ad. The ad directed the targeted audience to a landing page where they could sign up for a free sample of a compostable mailer. The ads ran for over a week and generated significant interest, confirming demand for the product idea. While samples were readily available due to prior packaging testing for a previous business, a landing page without a physical prototype could offer a waitlist or suggestion form.
If you already have a sizable social media following—maybe you’re a content creator launching a new brand or you have an audience from your existing business and you want to branch out with a new offering—you can gauge demand by sharing a link to a form where your followers can express interest.
2. Create relatable content
Once you’ve assessed demand, you can start building hype. The best way to do this is to start sharing content about the problem you aim to solve with your brand—and along with that, your product(s) or service(s). At this stage, don’t mention the solution.
For example, this video of plastic-wrapped pallets calls attention to a problem in the packaging industry, that of sustainable packaging:
It’s not promotional, it simply focuses on a real problem business owners can relate to, which is why it’s called relatable content. You can see in the comments for this post that other people have the same frustration.
3. Start teasing your brand
After a few weeks of sharing problem-focused content, you can shift to sharing solution-focused content. Let your social media followers and newsletter subscribers know you’re working on a solution to your shared problem.
Take your audience behind the scenes of your development process. If you have a prototype, ask for feedback. This video introduces Hero Packaging’s new custom labels and takes followers along the product development journey by asking them what shapes they would like to see:
Once you have the product in hand, you can show that you’ve tested it on people and they love it, like Dieux Skin Cofounder Charlotte Palermino does in this video:
During a brand launch, you want to push out as much content as possible, because people often need to see your brand many times before they buy. If there’s a time to be everywhere all at once, it’s during a launch. You should also take it as an opportunity to get your brand out there in the cheapest way possible.
The goal is to create a seamless flow from problem to solution over the course of about 100 pieces of content across social media, email, paid advertising, and SMS. That may seem like a lot, but the right cadence during a launch is to post to social media at least once a day and send emails and texts once a week.
4. Open preorders
Now that you’ve built up hype, you can move into the preorder phase. Make about half of your initial inventory available for preorder. This goes for your brand’s first product and your 100th product. If the preorder sells out, it’s an indication there’s significant demand for your product.
It also creates that FOMO (fear of missing out) feeling that really makes people buy when the product goes live for the mass market. When preorders sell out, you can use a stock alert app to automatically notify customers as soon as orders open up again.
Run digital ads during the preorder phase to get your product in front of new audiences. When you do that, make sure your ads and product page very clearly spell out what the product is, what it does, and what problem it solves.
With preorders, people don’t know if they can trust the product because no one’s used it yet. To give someone the confidence they need to make a preorder, you want to share product photos and videos, maybe before-and-afters or product comparisons, user-generated content (UGC), or early reviews from friends, family, or influencers.
Here’s an example from Fenty Beauty of how you can use UGC before a product becomes available by sharing comments requesting something that doesn’t exist yet:
5. Target VIPs
Twenty-four hours before your official launch, target your VIPs. These are the people who really wanted your offering but missed out during the preorder phase. By giving them VIP early access, you fulfill the promise made when they gave you their email addresses.
These customers are already excited about your product, so give them extras like free gifts, free priority shipping, and a personalized email from the founder.
6. Officially launch your brand
The actual launch day is often the easiest part of a brand launch because you’ve already done all the hard work of creating content, building your email list, and selling preorders. Announce the official launch to your entire audience on all of your marketing channels—and, if you can, tap into other people’s audiences, too.
For example, you might send your product to influencers and ask them to post about it at the same time on the same day. Or, if you’re launching a collab, coordinate with your collaborator to leverage both of your audiences.
Here’s how Fly by Jing and Fishwife jointly announced their Smoked Salmon with Sweet & Spicy Zhong:
7. Focus on customer experience
After a successful launch, your job is to make sure the customer experience exceeds expectations, whether that means surprise and delight, great customer service, or a generous product warranty. Even a little handwritten note in the package will help customers remember the experience.
You also want to collect as much customer feedback and as many reviews as possible. The best way to do this is through personalized outreach. If you send a generic email, you might get a 5% response rate. But if you send a personalized email from the founder, you’re much more likely to get a response—and create a lasting connection. Even though there’s a customer service team at Hero Packaging, emails still come in from early customers saying, “Please tell Anaita about XYZ.”
3 tips for launching an ecommerce brand
Here’s what small business owners should know about launching a brand:
Prioritize engagement
When you’re starting a small business, it’s easy to get hung up on your brand strategy. You might spend a ton of time worrying about little things, like the size of your logo on an ad, because you want everything to be perfect. But all of those things can be pushed to the sidelines when you’re creating content for a brand launch.
What you should really focus on during a brand launch is grabbing your audience’s attention and being very clear about what it is you’re actually selling. Founders can get in the weeds with their product and branding, assuming everyone understands the ins-and-outs of the product just like they do—but, of course, they don’t.
Plan ahead
You should always be one step ahead with your content strategy. So during the prelaunch, you’re creating content for the launch; during the launch, you’re working on post-launch; post-launch, you’re getting ready for the next brand or product.
This makes posting every day a lot more manageable, since you have this bank of content to pull from. Consider starting your brand launch with 100 pieces of content ready to go.
Focus on longevity
A successful brand launch isn’t just about hitting a certain sales goal. It’s about: Are people interested in what you’re selling? You’re basically testing demand for your product.
If the launch goes well, great. The next thing to figure out is: Can you get consistent sales? Too many brands focus on the launch and the pre-launch, and then they go quiet. But to achieve consistent sales, you need to go through that brand launch process over and over again.
If you didn’t make as many sales as you wanted, that’s OK, too. It doesn’t mean your launch failed—customers may just need to see your product over and over again before they’re ready to buy.
Brand launch FAQ
How can I launch my own brand?
A successful brand launch strategy requires you to do the following:
1. Gauge demand.
2. Create relatable content.
3. Start teasing your brand.
4. Open preorders.
5. Target VIPs.
6. Officially launch your brand.
7. Focus on customer experience.
How do you announce a new brand?
To announce a new brand, start by sharing organic content focused on the problem your product or service solves, before seamlessly transitioning into more solution-focused content. Before your official launch, generate hype with limited preorders.
How much does it cost to launch a brand?
You can launch an ecommerce brand for free, or very cheaply, by doing your own social media, email marketing, and search engine optimization. The biggest cost of launching an ecommerce brand is often paid ads, but you can get started with just $5 to $10 a day.
