The following audio is from a blog post and video in our Marketing-to-Go series. Marketing to Go: How Should You Promote Your New Product?

Here’s something I hear all the time: My new product is great. If only people knew about it, they would buy it.

That’s often true.

What else is often true is that many marketers are promoting their new products all wrong.

They act as if they’re marketing an established product and not an up-and-coming one. They use the same tactics as those iconic brands, such as Coca-Cola or McDonalds, but then they come up short.

What do I tell them? You have to consider the product’s lifecycle stage when you create your promotions.

The Product Lifecycle is the period of time a product exists in the marketplace, from its introduction to its discontinuation. It consists of four stages:

Not all products go through each stage. Some decline soon after introduction. Some remain in the maturity phase for long periods. The period of time in each phase can vary greatly.

But what doesn’t vary is HOW you should promote a product when it’s in those early stages. The first two stages need heavy promotion. You must use Reach and Teach marketing. Use Reach and Remind in the latter phases, but today, we’re focusing on NEW products.

Your focus should be on educating consumers about the product:

The key is to obtain enough exposure to adequately explain the product and to share your message in a format that consumers will actually listen to and trust. This will create the desire to buy!

So how do you do that?

You need articles in magazines and newspapers, interviews on television and radio as well as plenty of content online. This publicity can provide enough bandwidth for an adequate explanation about your product. Best of all, today’s consumers are very receptive to hearing your messaging delivered through these channels. In fact, they’re craving it.

What shouldn’t you do?

You can’t depend on traditional advertising to sell your product. First of all, buying enough ads to explain all but the most basic product will probably bust your budget. And second, today’s consumers tend to be “ad-blind”. We all simply dismiss ads without reading them. We just don’t trust them. But read about a new product in the newspaper ... See it on the morning news ... Hear an expert discuss its benefits on the radio … then see it mentioned in an online article. Now you peaked the consumer’s interest … and opened their wallet.

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