The hardest thing for a business to get from a marketplace is attention.
You can interrupt prospect by advertising to them but often they don’t notice you. What happens in many companies is they look at the other ads run by competitors and assume that they should do the same thing because they must be successful. Why else would they run ads if they don’t work? Show your new shiny product or worse – show everyone who works at the company standing in front of the building. A big new product launch is a different activity that requires a more creative approach.
Remember, attention is something that requires that you nurture curiosity. Slowly, deliberately, reveal a little more information to get prospects interested.
A powerful way to still use traditional advertising as one of several tactics, is to conduct a teaser campaign that attracts attention. It is a hint at what you want to say –not a full story.
VERYX – Teasing The Future
Key Technology is in the food processing equipment business. Founded in 1948, they hadn’t launched any new technology in many years. A new product for sorting was considered revolutionary within the company, and they wanted to make a big splash when they launched the new product to food processing companies.
They hired a B2B focused agency called SteinIAS to help develop a fully integrated launch from product naming to market tease to the introduction. The key to the strategy was the tease to gain attention.
If they just launched the product, it would be difficult to build up any external excitement. So they created a complete approach that begins with a multi-channel campaign that never mentioned the product. The company and agency agreed that they had something that was like going from a flip phone to a smartphone.
The key was attention.
How to stand out in a crowded marketplace? The campaign called “The New Standard of Excellence.” Their print, online and email campaigns drove people to a landing page where a countdown clock appeared. The company knew that the big “reveal” would happen at a large industry trade show called Pack Expo.
At the landing page, all you could do is to sign up and receive information as soon as the product was announced.
The tease drew a huge audience to see the machine at the Expo. But to take you to another level, the agency created a virtual reality experience, so you were inside the sorting machine as it worked. It gave you a front row seat to the experiences. And, the VR experience was also online so that they could extend the ability of an interested customer to learn through an immersive experience.
Lessons in Teasing a Market
- Be mysterious and just hint at what is coming. Don’t tell the whole story. Think of it as a trailer for a movie trying to gain attention.
- Use an omni-channel approach in your messaging. You can’t solely rely on what place to tell a story. Different leads learn in different ways. Have simple and complex explanations so that you can talk to both technical and non-technical audiences. Print, online, rich media – use them all.
- Invest in your Future. Don’t skimp on a campaign that needs to capture the imagination, particularly if it only comes about every few years. Be everywhere – at least for a little while.
- Teasing builds excitement. The goal is to get the eyes and ears and interest of customers. Don’t share too much but get them hungry for more but think through how the arc of the story can grow and gain some interest and momentum.
Sometimes the best way to be heard is to whisper, or surprise or intrigue. Do your new product launches capture the imagination of the marketplace?
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Need a marketing expert to help you think through an approach to a new product launch and to help tease something BIG you want to promote? Connect with Jeff.
Photo courtesy of Veryx – all rights reserved.
