Launching With Social: A Study of What Works and What Does Not

Are you planning to launch a new blog, product or service?

Do you want to know how to organize and execute a successful launch with social media?

To share ways you can use social media to launch or celebrate anything, this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast gives techniques and insights learned from the launch of My Kids' Adventures' Parenting Adventures podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, you'll learn how to plan your launch and what assets to include. You'll also find out what worked for us and what didn't.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Launching With Social
Start the launch process

The first thing I did was to prepare a PowerPoint presentation for people on the internal team. If you're a one person show, you can prepare the same ideas and present them to a friend or even to yourself. What's important is to go through the process below.

First you need to identify the audience you want to target. As part of the annual survey for Social Media Examiner and My Kids' Adventures, we asked two questions.: "Do you listen to podcasts?" and "Are you a mom or a dad?". Based on the responses we were able to determine that dads listen to podcasts more than moms which helped us to resize our expectations.

You then need to identify your biggest asset. Whenever you launch anything, you should use what I call tag-along marketing. You've built an audience somewhere - with a blog, a newsletter, an existing podcast. This asset you own is there for you to use. Piggyback some of the marketing efforts for your new venture on it. My biggest asset was the Social Media Marketing podcast.

Next take a look at who you're up against. I looked at the Kids & Family category and identified Sesame Street, Adventures in Odyssey and other podcasts from established brands that have been around forever as competitors.

You need to establish what your product is all about. To wrap everyone's heads around Parenting Adventures, I simply shared that it's a 30 minute interview show followed by a fun activity.

Then choose your launch date. The Parenting Adventures podcast launched on Friday, June 13, 2014.

Listen to the show to hear why this date was chosen to launch the Parenting Adventures podcast.

Find the best way to launch

One of my strongest assets are the relationships we've built. From these relationships, I was able to identify different "camps" of people we could reach out to for their support.

One of the obvious camps was staff and contractors who work for our company. For the second camp, we identified allies from the bloggers and podcasters the My Kids' Adventures marketing team has been building relationships with for a year. Another camp included people who write for My Kids' Adventures and the last camp was made up of my personal friends.

Listen to the show to find out other things we had in the launch pipeline.

Leverage your website traffic

When people come to your website to read an article, they might discover you have something more to offer.

We added the Parenting Adventures podcast to the website navigation bar at the top of the page, to the sidebar and the About Us page.

I also put together a 'help us spread the word' page to give people everything they need to promote the show for us. On that page I included a video to thank people for their participation.

Listen to the show to discover how we are using this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast to promote Parenting Adventures.

Make it frictionless