By Ajala Samuel Akindele
Given, your core aim at the blueprint stage of launching any business should be creating a strong brand identity that allows your potential customers to recognize and experience your business. But how do you achieve this? Buckle up, our team at Black Ink Media have several steps we believe that you want to consider taking before you make the big move of launching your business.
Identify your goals for the business
Before you set out to launch your brand you must identify the goals of the business you are starting up. You should have already had financial goals in mind before launching. Another thing you need to ask yourself is whether you have a plan outlined for reaching them? You need to critically look at your marketing strategy so you can identify and set goals to reach along the way.
Any business brand without a clear and definite goal accompany with a market strategy might eventually collapse later on. Ensure before you launch your business, you should already have SMART goals in place. According to Founders Guide, SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. It will help direct your path as you move forward. Goals give you a destination to keep you moving forward and help you create an action plan to drive your business. If you don’t have goals in place and in your mind, pause and take time to write them down. Think about where you want to be in one to five years from now, then break it down into monthly goals. From there, break it down further into weekly steps you can take to hit your monthly targets. Defined goals and strong time management is the key to a successful startup.
You need a product launch plan
After you have clearly stated the goals of your brand, you need to look into your launch plan. The launch plan is meant to define how you will achieve your go-to-market strategy in future. It should detail the activities that need to happen to achieve this, ensuring that your launch reaches the right audience.
You need to understand that having a successful product launch can create significant benefits for your company. Aside from generating revenue, a launch can build anticipation and market awareness for the product. It will also help to provide feedback from early users, which the product team can use to improve the product. That is the more reason you need a product launch plan roadmap.
Creating a successful launch plan requires planning and coordination across many departments throughout the company. Because it’s such a complex and strategic undertaking, you will want to develop your product launch plan using a strategic roadmap.
To create a product launch plan you need to reacquaint your team with your user and buyer personas, remind yourselves about the “why” behind your product, make sure you have the right tool to build your roadmap, keep your roadmap’s contents brief, high-level, and jargon-free, create a timeline for your product launch plan, use roadmap swimlanes to divide responsibilities and build in a review process and timeframe for each initiative. Once you are done with this you are ready to launch.
Build your brand positioning platform
Once you are done with your product launch plan then you need to start looking into your brand positioning. Brand positioning is defined as the conceptual place you want to own in the target consumer’s mind. It also entails the benefits you want them to think of when they think of your brand. You must also understand that an effective brand positioning strategy will maximize customer relevancy and competitive distinctiveness, in maximizing brand value.
Forbes says brand positioning is the strategy for finding your presence in the industry. Meaning it’s about where you’ll stand among the competition and with your customers. The goal for this is to create a unique and identifiable image that your target market associates with something that is desirable and of value. Many new businesses make the mistake of not learning enough about their competitors, and they end up paying for it later on. As you build your brand position you need to ensure you know your competitors, knowing this will position your brand in the market.
Your brand positioning should include quality positioning, value or price positioning, benefit positioning, problem and solution positioning, competitor-based positioning and celebrity-driven positioning
Create relationships and network
By building your positioning platform you already know who your competitors are and what to do to secure your place in the market. Another important thing you need to look into is creating a relationship and network with people and firms that will help you to accelerate and promote your business goals. When considering this, you must ensure your network with people of like mind, people who can easily help to promote your brand.
Before launching you need to look at developing relationships with media professionals and local or industry firms. Identify the people or contact with whom it would be beneficial to connect, and have a strategy for informing them about your new brand. It means having a concrete brand message and vision and knowing how to effectively communicate it. If you have the budget to employ a PR professional, please go ahead. If you don’t, invest some time into learning the basics of PR and communication to promote your brand.
Insure your brand
Insuring your business or brand has several advantages. Insuring your business before launching provides bodily injury coverage, property damage coverage, covers for advertising liability, helps minimize the financial losses, overage for lawsuits and settlements, helps to promote business continuity, aids in risk-sharing and protects the business image.
Once you have completed the steps above, it’s time to officially launch your brand. With the thought and planning, you’ve put into it, you’ve high chances for success.
Do you have any questions about these steps highlighted above? Send us an e-mail at info@blackinkm.com or DM us via any of our social media platforms highlighted below.
