New product launches are always exciting—but no matter how great the product is and how certain you are that customers will love it, you need to have the right digital marketing plan in place to make sure people can find it.
Successfully executing a new product through search engine marketing will rely on your knowledge of your competitive landscape, your preparedness for the launch, and your willingness to adapt and improve your strategies over time. Read on for ADM’s guidance on this nuanced but important digital marketing challenge.
The Main Challenges of Marketing New Product Launches
The biggest challenge with a new product launch is being sure that all of your bases are covered. New product launches should not be a minimum viable product. The least-successful product launches occur when advertisers haven’t invested the time into optimizing the materials around the product, including
- Landing pages
- Product imagery or descriptions
- Early awareness campaigns prior to release
The item may be great, but if you haven’t laid the right groundwork, your digital strategy won’t succeed.
Another primary challenge is determining adequate budget for launch campaigns, particularly if a company needs an early return on investment to justify spending more money creating and marketing the item. When launching into a saturated or competitive market, advertisers will need to quickly determine what will be enough budget to push past competition.
In turn, competitors may respond by increasing bids to block a new product. The best ways to avoid a bidding war are:
- Work with your advertising agency ahead of time to develop a clear understanding of your business plan and the growth goals for the new product.
- Launching a product that is clearly superior to the competition
A precise understanding of performance goals will help you SEM team adapt to changes in competition and adjust bidding and keyword targeting as the marketplace adjusts to your new product. Having a clearly superior product is, of course, going to be helpful—but that’s a matter of positioning your unique selling points so the SEM team is empowered to showcase why users should purchase your product instead of the competition.
Why Paid Search Campaigns Are Key For Product Launches
Google Ads has been an expansive advertising platform for some time now—it offers far more than just search-based campaigns: YouTube, display campaigns, Demand Gen, and other tactics all have their place. But for new product launches, paid search campaigns are one of the foundations for success.
Standard search ads give advertisers more space to convince a user to try the new product by showcasing unique selling points than Shopping Ads: You get a few lines of ad copy and a number of ad extension options to allow for further detail. Search campaigns also offer more control over the targeting and the bidding than most other campaign types, which is crucial as you work to get the product off the ground and quickly optimize for better performance.
As a baseline, you’ll obviously want to cover the core keywords relevant to your item. When building paid search campaigns for new products, however, there are a few keyword considerations:
- If launching with a limited initial budget, focus on high-intent keywords and motivated audiences so you can achieve an affordable CPA before expanding.
- If the search landscape is too competitive to start, find longer-tail queries that fewer brands bid on from competitors to gain footing.
Determining your bid strategy will be dependent on the nature of your launch. If it’s a singular product, it’s wise to establish an ideal cost per acquisition goal that will keep the item profitable—so you’d want to use a Target CPA strategy. If you’re launching several new products within a single campaign (for instance, a new line of t-shirts rather than a single design) then a Target Return on Ad Spend bid strategy will be your best play.
Other Google Ads Campaigns to Use For New Product Launches
In some product categories, advertisers are limited in their ability to launch paid search campaigns simply due to competition. There may be as few as 2 to 4 openings for paid search ads at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) for ads to display. If multiple companies are trying to place similar products in those slots, this can lead to rapidly-rising CPCs and poor performance.
Google’s AI-powered Performance Max campaigns are a great counter to this problem. These campaigns can manifest ads in multiple formats, but the most important to focus on for new product launches is Shopping Ads. To set these campaigns up for success, here are the most important points to note:
- A strong product image is crucial to your success, as it’s the primary tool you will have on the SERP to capture users’ attention
- Optimized shopping titles and competitive pricing are vital to generating strong click-through rates when going head-to-head against similar product ads
- As the product begins to generate ratings, incorporating them into the Shopping Ad will help boost customer confidence
- If needed, promotions are a terrific way to make your new product stand out
Oftentimes, product launches can be difficult to scale due to a lack of consumer awareness. If budget is available, using Demand Gen and YouTube awareness campaigns can help augment your paid search campaigns and help advertisers break a new product into the market.
Launching New Products With Confidence
Marketing the launch of a new product can be stressful, and there’s no magic paid search formula for success. The most important thing you can do (other than ensuring the product itself is worthwhile) is be both prepared and adaptive. Once you’re sure that your keywords and campaigns are set up for success, the focus will shift from launch to testing and iteration, so you can determine what landing pages, imagery, copy, and extensions will deliver the best results.
If you’re looking for a paid search agency partner with extensive experience in successful new product launches, look no further than the contact form at the bottom of this page. The ADM team is dedicated to constant improvement and scalability, we’d be more than happy to hear from you about the challenges and goals your brand is facing with its new product rollouts.
