If you’re in the process of scaling or evolving your business, a comprehensive brand launch strategy can maximize your success. Whether you’re repositioning your corporate narrative or relaunching a branch of your business that isn’t living up to its full potential, this is your chance to make your brand part of the conversation and build some positive momentum.
You already know that an effective launch plan requires more than just a press release and a social media blast. You’ll need to research complex market conditions, craft optimized messaging for a variety of channels, and find the right tools to measure your most important metrics. Still, the more work you put in now, the smoother your launch will be once it gets underway. To learn how to refine your brand launch strategy, and how a strategic marketing communications agency can help, use the five steps in our guide as a starting point.
As you consider your brand launch strategy, it helps to view your brand as a holistic entity. In addition to obvious markers, such as a logo or a slogan, your brand also includes your:
To build a brand differentiation strategy that highlights all of these brand pillars, you’ll need to know your audience, pinpoint your competition and, above all else, tell a good story.
Research of market conditions is often an early indicator on the readiness and timing of a brand launch. This is even more important if you’re relaunching a legacy brand. The data intelligence and market insights you made about launching a brand months (or years) ago might not still be relevant today.
To start, answer these questions:
By analyzing current trends, you can also find out the potential market size and saturation, as well as how pricing has fluctuated over the past few months or years.
Regardless of what your brand offers, you’ll be up against other companies that offer something similar. Before you research your competitors, though, you should take some time to define exactly who those competitors are. You don’t want broad knowledge about every other company in your field; you want deep information about the companies that share your target audience. To start, focus on competitors that have similar:
Once you’ve narrowed down your list of competitors, gather online reviews, social media, their websites, and word of mouth. Perform sentiment analysis to gain a better understanding of your ICP’s preferences. A detailed tool like the Highwire AI Index can let you know not just where you sit today in relation to your competitors, but how your position changes over time as you adjust your comms and marketing strategies.
Consumer attention is currently at a premium. To be part of the conversation, content strategies that earn media coverage should be a key part of your launch plan. That means developing a comms and earned media strategy.
Historically, comms plans focused on traditional media: newspapers, magazines, and their online counterparts. While those publications are still part of the equation, today’s media landscape is much bigger and more diverse:
The exact elements of brand storytelling you should use depend on your size and strategy, but you’ll probably want a mix of social media, traditional publications, and podcasts or video content. If you don’t have the resources to do brand storytelling and narrative in-house, consider hiring a consultant or outside firm.
An integrated branded campaign strategy requires multiple marketing channels, and those channels should share the same aesthetics and tone. A consistent approach to multichannel brand marketing will help your audience build an association with your business, but it will also help AI recognize your brand. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and similar tools thrive on pattern recognition. The more they associate your brand with recurring images, phrases, and people, the easier it will be for AI-powered search to recognize those signals. Over time, that will help you build a content strategy that converts readers through answer engine optimization (AEO), and generative engine optimization (GEO).
Having a fully functional website is basic brand launch strategy advice, but you would be amazed how many businesses overlook this step. Your website is your most prominent public face, and prospective customers will judge your business based on how well they can interact with it. Audit your website for:
AEO and AI-driven search visibility on your site is especially important if you’re doing a relaunch and have years’ worth of old content to sort through. Now is a good time to practice some search engine optimization (SEO) by refreshing popular content and removing pages about topics that are no longer relevant. SEO and AI search optimization will help your target audience find your business as they search for general solutions online.
Once your brand launch strategy is underway, you should be measuring marketing and communications performance. Depending on your exact strategy, you may want to focus on attracting visitors to your website, creating conversations on social media, or generating leads through targeted communications. Whatever your priorities are, you should track them and be ready to adjust your strategy accordingly.
As your brand launch gets underway, you’ll be able to track a variety of metrics, from revenue to share of voice. However, not every metric is automatically a key performance indicator (KPI). Your KPIs for launch probably won’t be the same as your KPIs overall. Consider tracking brand launch-specific KPIs, including:
Your KPIs should track how well your brand connects with your target audience, and whether that audience is interested in your services. More granular metrics, such as share of voice and customer satisfaction ratings, can wait until later. Even revenue might not necessarily be a KPI right now, as your brand may need to establish itself before your cashflow grows.
Once you’ve decided which KPIs matter most to you, you’ll need some software to track them. There are dozens of potential metrics and tools, though, so this is one area where you’ll have to do some research on your own. For a few quick examples, you could use:
Research different pieces of software and set up demos for anything that sounds promising. If not, this is another area where a strategic communications firm can help. Reputable agencies have worked with dozens of KPI-tracking tools and should be able to pinpoint the best fits for your business.
If you’re planning your brand launch strategy (or your brand relaunch strategy), Highwire has the resources you need. Our expert staff can help you with research, storytelling, technical troubleshooting, and everything else you need to start your brand off on the right foot. See how we’ve launched brands before, and learn what a full-service marketing and communications partner can do for your business.