How to create a marketing plan to launch a new service

Want to know how to create a marketing plan to launch a new service? Whether you are launching the very first service your business will offer, or your thousandth, you need to a marketing plan to ensure that people hear about your new service and, ultimately, buy your new service. Keep on reading to find out how to create a marketing plan to launch a new service.

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HOW TO CREATE A MARKETING PLAN TO LAUNCH A NEW SERVICE

Step 1: Set Your Objectives

No matter what type of marketing plan you create you first need to be clear on the objectives. Essentially you want to write down what the purpose of running the marketing campaign is and what you hope to achieve. Since you are launching a new service your objectives are likely to be around awareness, driving traffic to a sales page, getting enquiries and/or generating a certain number of sales. Quantifying what you hope to achieve is essential. Marketing is a numbers game and once you’ve identified how many people you want to reach in a campaign or how many purchases you want then you can work backwards and establish how big the launch campaign needs to be.

Step 2: Identify The Ideal Client

Next, you’ll need to super clear on who is the ideal client for this new service. Hopefully, you’ve already done some ideal client for your business. However, even if you have identified the ideal client for your overall business it may be that your ideal client for this service is slightly different or maybe even more specific. For example, I work with solo and small service-based business owners. However, my Pricing Power Hour is designed specifically to help service-based business owners who are struggling with setting or revising their pricing.

The more specific you can get about the ideal client the better. This will help you to work out the right marketing channels and also help establish whether you already have enough of the ideal client in your current audience or whether you need to focus on getting in front of new people.

Step 3: Decide On Your Timings

You can’t make a marketing plan to launch a new service without timings. When will your new service be available? Once you’ve made it available will it be available indefinitely or will it only be available to buy for a certain period of time? Knowing how long a service will be available to buy has a dramatic impact on the marketing plan you create. If a service is only going to be available to buy for a small period of time, then you need to make a big impact in a short space of time and that will have an impact on what marketing channels to use and the frequency of marketing activity (email, social media posts etcs).

WANT TO WORK WITH A MARKETING PROFESSIONAL TO CREATE A BESPOKE MARKETING PLAN FOR YOUR NEW SERVICE?

I believe that every business is unique and as a result, I work with 1-to-1 with solo and small service-based business owners to create personalised marketing plans to launch their services (no cookie-cutter templates here).

In just one day I’ll go through everything you need to consider for your launch and then ensure by the end of the day you leave with a marketing plan that is ready to follow step-by-step.

To find out more, or book, a Strategy Day to create your very own marketing plan click here.

Step 4: Clarify Your Key Messages

Next, you’ll need to decide what the key messages for the marketing campaign are. What do you want to ensure people learn through your marketing? Key messages for launching a new service usually revolve around:

what the new service is
who the new service is for
how the new service will solve a problem
how to purchase the new service
when they need to purchase the new service (if available for a limited period)

Step 5: Choose Your Marketing Channels

By this point, you know what you want to achieve, who the ideal client for the service is, when the new service will be launched and what you want to communicate through the marketing campaign. This means you can now choose your marketing channels from a really informed place. A marketing channel is simply a tool or platform use to share your marketing messages. Some examples of marketing channels are:

email marketing
content marketing (podcast, YouTube, blog)
social media marketing
digital advertising (social media, pay-per click or programmatic)
print advertising

There are lots of options when it comes to marketing channels and to choose the best marketing channels to launch a new service you’ll need to consider what marketing channels are best to communicate with your ideal client, what marketing channels are best to share your key messages and what resources you have (financial, creative and timewise).

You can find out more about choosing the right marketing channels here.

Once you’ve decided what marketing channels are right for this launch you are ready for the final step.

Step 6: Create Your Launch Plan

At this point, you’ve made all of the decisions and it is time to bring everything together and create a launch plan for your service. The key part of making a successful marketing plan to launch a new service is having an integrated marketing plan. You need to make sure that everything is working together and the easiest way to do that is to have a timeline with everything on it so you can easily see how everything is fitting together.

The first part of the timeline you’ll need to create is for the launch. Go back to the timings you wrote down earlier. If you decided to have a short window for sales then you should have a plan that identifies what is happening on a day by day basis for the entirety of the launch window. If you are launching a service indefinitely then you might want to only have a timeline for the first fortnight to a month.

On the timeline, you should be able to see every single marketing channel and what will be happening on that channel. For example, if you are using email marketing as a channel it should be obvious when an email is being sent out and what the key message in that email will be. In contrast, some marketing channels, like Facebook Ads, may run continuously with the same creative and messaging.

In relation to actually create the plan, it is up-to-you how you make it. I’m a lover of a Gantt chart and so will create a plan in a spreadsheet, but you can also do this in a project management software like Asana or Trello.

There you have it! You now know how to create a marketing plan to launch a new service.

As you can tell there are a lot of choices you need to make before you get to putting the marketing plan together, which is you need to start thinking about your launch sooner rather than later. A well-thought-out plan will increase the chances of your launch succeeding and if it does succeed you have a blueprint to use again if you decide to launch that service again.

If you have any other questions about creating a marketing plan to launch a new service please comment below.

WANT HELP CREATING A LAUNCH FOR YOUR NEW SERVICE?

Creating integrated marketing campaigns is one of my favourite things to do and I’ve been doing it for over a decade. So, if the thought of making a plan by yourself is too much I’m here to help.

Book a Strategy Day and you’ll get a whole day with me to make your entire launch plan. You’ll leave confident that you’ve done everything necessary to maximise the impact of your launch and have a plan that you can easily follow.

Sound good? You can find out more and book a Strategy Day by clicking here.