On today's episode, Jon LaClare, your host and CEO of Harvest Growth, reveals Harvest Growth’s “secret sauce” for launching products. Our 3-step launch process works for any market and has brought billions in revenue for small and large brands we have helped. To get actionable tips and support on how to start using this process, join us on the podcast now.
In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:
A step-by-step process of how you can successfully launch any product in 2023.
Why the consumer must come first in any marketing campaign.
Avoiding the mistake that most businesses make when their marketing campaign starts bringing in results.
And so much more!
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Or, click to watch the full video interview here!
Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands that now total over $2 billion in revenues? Set up a free consultation with us today!
Prefer reading instead of listening? Read the full transcript here!
Jon LaClare: After launching hundreds of products successfully, we often get asked, what is Harvest Growth's secret sauce? In today's episode, I share the behind the scenes process that we use for every marketing campaign launch.
Advertisement: Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow, you've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know. Harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Here's the host of the Harvest Growth Podcast, Jon LaClare.
Jon: Every product or service launch that we execute remains basically the same in terms of the overall process. Even though the products or services may be different, the messaging may look different, but really, again, that process stays very similar and that's what I'm going to walk through today.
This is the same process over the years that we've used to develop and launch new products and services for OxiClean, many years ago, for Nabisco 100 calorie packs that have been so successful now for 15, almost 20 years, SonicScrubber, which went on to sell over 10 million units, Bona hardwood floor mop, GUND teddy bears, that business was sold for over $70 million. Pony up Daddy was a saddle that dads wear, their kids ride 'em around. If you've got young toddlers in the house, it's just a funny, almost gag gift. We achieved a 17 times ROI on that business by following these processes I'm about to share with you.
Boogie Board, the electronic tablet you've probably seen, we've done several product launches for them, generating millions of dollars in sales and also Enduro Power batteries. This is only a few years old and they've achieved a million dollars in sales in their very first year in business, doubled it their second year and have significantly grown since then. Again, all of these businesses, big and small, have followed the same process that I'm about to share with you in this podcast.
Okay, the first step is really you want to optimize the audience offer and messaging behind your campaign. With that, you can make almost any product or service successful. Let me walk you through the process of how to learn or really optimize your audience, your offer, and your messaging and I'll get to those in more detail in a second. We really follow a process that we start with testing first, then moving into optimization or optimizing, and then scaling up your business.
In essence, testing it means market research or there's many ways to do that, and I'll walk through those. Optimizing you'll do through a small controlled launch, then once you achieve the results that you need or you want for your business, now it's about, "Okay, how do we scale this up? We've got a successful a $100,000 business, how do we take it to a million? We've got a million-dollar business. How do we take it to 10 or a 100 million dollars?"
That's the scaling approach that I'll walk through as well. First thing we do is testing. Again, this is essentially a market research. The very first thing we're going to do in a campaign could be a brand new product or service or could be a new campaign for an existing business we're trying to reinvigorate or really grow. A few different ways to do that. One is online survey.
I'm going to walk through that in great detail in a second. Another way is a focus group. This is a great way to get qualitative responses. If you got questions on your creative or product changes to make, bring in a group of people that you don't know, talk about that your product, your service for typically half an hour to an hour asking a battery of questions. What do they like? What they don't like? What questions do they have?
It's a great way to get creative responses or answers about your creative in your campaign before you launch, before you spend money behind it. Another great way is going to trade shows or consumer shows. You can think home and garden shows or an industry show. This is the chance now to talk live, face-to-face with potential customers, selling your product or service and you'll find out very quickly in the first couple of hours in a brand new show, you'll get almost all the answers that you need in order to make your campaign, your business more successful.
Getting in front of consumers in a live environment face-to-face like that, again, whether it's business to business or business to consumer, product or service, getting in front of people to sell to them directly is extremely valuable. Another great tool we've used over the years is what we call competitive review. There's a few different tools we use, but the ultimate goal is, "Hey, let's see what your competitors are doing and what's working?" For example, if you have a product-based business, if you have competitors that are selling on Amazon, check out a software called Jungle Scout.
If you don't know that already, it's a way to see the behind the scenes, estimated sales for your competitors. You can find out what were their monthly unit sales and dollar sales over the last month for your competitors by product, by category and you can see a lot of products at the same time. It's really an easy tool to use, to start to see what's working and what's not for your competitors.
You can also, there's cool tools like MerchantWords and others where you can see what key words they're using on Amazon to drive their sales. If you see a really successful campaign or product, find out what keyword words they're using and that can be used whether you're selling on Amazon or take those learnings onto your website, onto a Facebook ad, into a TV spot, whatever avenue you might be pursuing.
Another great tool is Facebook Ad Transparency. If you look on a Facebook page for a business and look up ad transparency, you'll be able to see if they're currently running any paid Facebook ads. Click on that button right below that where it says, see ads, and now you can see the actual ads, all of them that are running both the videos and images as well as any ad copy that they're going to. You can't see results necessarily, but you can see creatives that are running.
If it's an ad campaign, you can see the time that it started. If it's been running for months, most likely that's a campaign that's working really well for them. Start to look at creative just to generate some thoughts or ideas of what might be possible for your business or your category. A similar tool, but for Google Ads is called Semrush, so search engine marketing. Semrush, it's a paid tool.
Facebook ad Transparency is totally free. Jungle Scout is a paid tool as well as is MerchantWords, but through Semrush or similar tools, now you can see on Google what your competitors are using in terms of keyword words and what's successful for them. There's a great detail of data that goes into that Semrush and other tools as well, and it's arguably not very expensive. It can be under a $100 a month to do a membership with that.
Finally, another free tool is simply Googling. Google your category, Google your competition. You'll start to see what content is out there, how they're talking about their business, how maybe other websites or other businesses are selling them, and start to see again, what messaging is working, potentially what audiences they're targeting, but spend some time simply Googling, totally free except for the time that it takes to go in there.
Similar to that is looking up social media posts on their Facebook, their Instagram, their TikTok pages as well as social media paid ads I talked about through their transparency. All right, let me get back to the survey. This is a piece that we use that has provided great value to us at Harvest Growth and our clients over the last, now 16 years we've been in business. We've done over a 1,000 of these types of surveys to test products and services before we go to launch.
When we have a client that approaches us and they have a $5,000 budget or a $500,000 budget either way, we always start with this market research as the first step. It can be pretty simple. We oftentimes will start off with an audience of a 100 to 200 people. You just want to make sure that it's a general audience representative of your audience. If it's a general product that works for men and women of all different ages, then a 100 to 200 people can give you a good sample size representation of that audience.
The more people you survey, the more accurate results get only to a certain point, after you test to a few 100 different people. There are, the cost really isn't necessary. Start with 100 to 200, if you're going to split your data into a bunch of different buckets of ages, genders, et cetera, maybe take it to a few 100 but beyond that is really not necessary.
In that survey, really what you want to do is test a concept of your product or service, describe it, show images, and then ask a battery of questions. I'm going to talk about at the end of this, if you ever want to reach out to ask any questions on exactly how we do this approach, we're happy to jump on the phone with you. If you go to harvestgrowth.com, you can click to set up a free consultation with one of our product launch experts, and they'll walk you through all of this.
We can send you examples, et cetera but in that survey, so we're going to share the concept, show images, copy, key messaging, et cetera. Then we ask, "Okay, what do you like, what do you not like about, what questions do you have about this?" We'll scale their answers and try to find out their purchase intent, their uniqueness, credibility, their believability, if the product works or not, how much they like it. We also ask, "Is this product solving a problem for you or service?"
If the way we've described it is not solving a burning issue or problem you have in your life, it's harder to sell. It's harder to market, so we want to tweak the messaging until we get that solves a problem score or percentage of people that either agree or strongly agree that it solves a problem. We want that score to be pretty high. The ultimate goal is we want to get that messaging to the point where the purchase intent, so the intent of your consumer audience or business audience to shell out money to buy from you is high.
We like to see the percentage of the audience that at least agrees or strongly agrees that they're interested in purchasing your product to be 40% or higher. If you've got that in a general audience, you're in great shape. You've got a campaign or a product or service that you can get that up and launched and ready-to-go in that working order.
We want to dive into more details. We also want to look at messaging, so we want to look at features and benefits. We typically list out between 10 and 20 different features and benefits for a given product or service, and we have them rank order, pick their top three, and then we're looking for the ones that really rise to the top. In any marketing campaign, there's so much you can say about your product or service, but there's only so much time or space you have to say it.
You could make an hour-long video and talk about everything, but no one's going to listen to that, right? We want to get to the messaging fast. If it's digital in 15 seconds. If it's TV, a minute to two minutes, so somewhere in that ballpark. What are those core features and benefits that are really going to drive interest for your product, so you rank ordering their features and benefits is one way to get there very effectively. We also ask about concern, so what concerns.
We'll give them a list of possible concerns. It could be pricing, it could be that they want to hear about it from others, they need credibility. A list of other concerns to try to find out, "Are there messaging needs that we need to talk about in order to answer questions that our audience may have?" Again, to boost up that purchase intent. Pricing as well. We're always going to ask, "Okay, let's ask purchase intent before they know the price of the product or service." Go back and ask that same question once we reveal the price. Does it go up? Does it go down? How much?
Typically speaking, once you introduce a price, your purchase intent almost always decreases because now you have to pay something. Whatever that is. If it goes down 20%, 25% from the unpriced purchase intent, not a problem. Every now and then, it actually goes up. Meaning that people expect to pay more than you're charging. What that means is often times, now we could raise our prices, raise our margins, increase our margins on this product, which is fantastic.
This approach also gives us an answer to audience, so who we target. The way we do this is we look at our demographic, so age, gender, and income primarily, and then we look at the data for, of the people that are-- We call it Top 2 Box, so those that either agree or strongly agree that they're interested in purchasing your product, is that group more likely to be male or female? What age group are they mostly like to be in?
Same thing with income. What incomes, we call index, highly or achieve higher than average purchase intent scores, or are more interested in purchasing than the average. That helps us figure out, "Okay, is this a male or female target market?" It may sell the both and you may have an audience that really does well with both, but what we're trying to find out is the target audience or target market. Meaning, what's the easiest audience to approach.
The ones that are most interested in your product or service, because that would be the least expensive audience to market to. Get that early fast profitability, and then you'll get the umbrella approach growing beyond that too. Hit the other gender, other income sets, other ages, et cetera. Find that sweet spot, that target audience that is hyperfocused on purchasing your product or service. Again, the survey, really that focus is going to be on getting your audience, your offer, and your messaging figured out.
Audiences, who do we target once we go to Facebook, and Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. Who is that target market TV? Whatever it might be, age, gender, income, et cetera. The offer, so how do we price our product or service? If there's not a lot of value viewed in market research that it may just mean that A, we need to either offer promo codes, discounts, decrease our price, or we need to build up the value.
We need to talk about benefits that are more important to our customers or consumers, and build up that value for our offer. It's really not necessarily about changing your price, but how we make that price, or that value, that offer appear to be more valuable to our customers or consumers.
Last piece again is messaging. Get audience offer, and then how do we talk about it means our messaging. This is what's going to drive our scripting of any videos that we're going to do, or a copy that goes in ad copy, or on to images, in our Facebook campaigns, in our TikTok campaigns, in our Instagram campaigns, in our TV campaigns, et cetera. That's the testing phase. Market research is that first step in the process to a successful product, or service, or campaign launch.
Next is optimize. After we test, we get all this figured out. Now we launch and we optimize. First thing is we're going to learn what works. We're going to test. Let's take Facebook, for example. We're going to run 5 to 10 different versions of video and/or still images in the creative. We don't want to just test one image, one ad, one audience and say, "Either it worked or it didn't." Let's get as much data as we can upfront. We can't over inundate.
If we have too much, it becomes too hard to keep track off, but 5 to 10 versions of our creative. Again, video, images, et cetera. Another 5 to 15 versions of our ad copy, so written ad copy could be a couple of sentences, a paragraph, et cetera. The ad copy that connects with the images, and Facebook, and Instagram for example. Launch that campaign and then now see what ads are working well. Which ones are driving the highest click-through rate, highest number of people to your website, and then which were driving the highest conversion rates, et cetera, and we're going to optimize.
Meaning, we're going to take out, trim the facts. Take out the ones that aren't working and replace with new creative or copy that is similar to those that are working. Same thing goes with audiences. Test a bunch of different audiences. Not just by age, but also by interest. There's ways to actually target Facebook groups for example. Find out groups that are working through a separate software that we use. Not directly to Facebook, but find out audience. The creative or messaging networking, as well as offers.
Let's stick some offers in there for promo codes, discounts, et cetera, and see what drives interest drives purchase, et cetera. The key there is to act on your results. So many times we give this advice, and somebody runs a campaign. They have a bunch of different ads sits in there, and they just pick the first best message, the best ad copy, the best creative, the best audience, and just run with it, turn it on autopilot and forget about it.
Really in reality, you got to act on, this isn't just one answer. It's such a complex game to figure out which AdSense are working, which campaigns are working, et cetera. Driven by copy, audience, creative, et cetera. Act on the results. Basically, what I mean is, let's fine tune, pick and create creative that is similar to what's working. Let's get ad copy for the top five that's working, trim everything else out, and find the similars, and continue to test. Whatever work best your first week or first month is only going to get better as we continue this process of optimization really forever.
Even as we talk about a second, scaling up your business, even in that phase, you're constantly testing, tweaking, optimizing. Again, your creative, your ad copy, your messaging, your offer, the audience you're talking to. Constantly test the next thing. Don't ever give up and sit back and say, "Oh, it's working now." What's going to happen is Facebook, for example, may change their algorithms, may change what's working, or your audience may get saturated with your current messaging. Always be testing, always be optimizing with the goal of creating purchase intent.
All of this behind, it's great to get click-throughs, it's great to get traffic to your website. What really is driving ultimately conversions. A bunch of metrics get us there, but the ultimate goal is a return on ad spend, or ROI, ROAS it's called in Facebook, a return on ad spend. For every dollar you spend, how many dollars are you generating in revenue? Getting that profitability is essentially metric.
Once you get that optimized or maximized, now you can really start to scale up the business. You have found a responsive group of people, you've messaged in a compelling way, you found pricing that works for them, and you retargeted to people that show some interest, getting back to the site, all this is optimizing fine tuning. When you get your goal ROAS, your goal profitability, it really is just about, "Okay, let's scale it up."
I do want to emphasize. This is a part where a lot of businesses start to falter. They go through this entire optimization process and they get to-- Let's say their goal is a 4.0 ROAS. Meaning for every dollar they spend, they get $4 back in revenue. Your goal is maybe higher or lower than that. If you are achieving that goal, you may think, "Awesome. I'm spending $100 a day or a $1,000 a day. Let me just double that. Let me take it up by 10x."
There is a process in Facebook when we scale, we want to do it in a controlled fashion. You typically don't want to do anything more than between 50% to 100% growth from week over week. For example, if you're at $100 a day in media one week, it's working really well, you're hitting ROAS goals. Your next week, you wouldn't want to go anymore than $150 to $200. Once you hit $200, you want to take it between $300 and $400.
Scale it up carefully and do it on a week-by-week basis. Let it settle in for at least a week. Once your results starts to stabilize, get back to that 4.0 ROAS. If that's your target, for example. Accelerate it. Part of the ways to do this is we need to generate or find new audiences, or we get increased frequency with our existing audience, or we continually optimize, so the success is seen from that same number of people, but they're responding at a higher rate.
They're clicking through at a higher rate, they're converting at a higher rate, they're looking at the website. Once they get there, how do we get the conversion rate much higher? Again, new audiences, increased frequency, continued optimization both on our site and in our campaign. That's the process to really scale it up in a controlled fashion. The amazing thing is, if you think about doubling from week over week, that $100 a day can quickly turn into $10,000, $100,000 a day for maximum campaigns with really big audiences. That's where we scale up where we start to see this profitability really drive in to the business.
Thanks for listening to this podcast. I hope it was helpful, but if this is all at a high level, really a generalization for things that work for almost every business, but you've got a specific business. If you want to talk to us directly and get some advice on how you can implement this process that's been so successful for us and hundreds of our clients over the last many years, please visit harvestgrowth.com and schedule a free consultation with one of our product launch specialists.
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