Supporting product announcements with impactful product-driven thought leadership
By Brett Van Zoelen, Account Executive at The Flywheelers
So, you’ve developed and launched your new product with a few hits off the back of a successful press release, but now what?
Product announcements are a great way to get your new product in front of your customers, but it is important that you continue with the momentum past the initial launch and consider how you can still engage potential customers in three to six months’ time.
This is where thought leadership comes in. The Financial Times defines thought leadership as “original thinking that helps brands to engage top decision-makers and support their broader commercial and marketing goals”. This essentially means offering unique and beneficial insight on a subject matter that fully establishes you as a trusted expert.
Following a successful product announcement thought leadership allows you to capitalise on the publicity you’ve already gained and drive continual attention to your product by shining a light on individual features, practical applications and wider use cases.
Thought leadership can take many forms, and there are a host of opportunities out there to push key messages. Spokespeople interviews, by-lined articles and reactive commentary to pressing news stories are all fantastic ways that organisations can contribute to the discourse and take part in the discussion.
This will not only help support your sales pipeline but also drive further brand awareness of your wider business offering amongst your target demographics.
In this blog, we lay out the crucial steps in making the impact last following a successful product announcement.
Drawing out key messages
When starting a thought leadership programme, it is important you look beyond the core functionality of the product and instead consider the broader pain points it addresses for your customers. This will provide us with the basis to craft a compelling narrative, which is essential to fuel successful earned media.
We start every program by sitting down with senior spokespeople and executives to get the full download on both the product capabilities and the key pain points it solves. This gives us the platform to create a narrative which clearly speaks to the customers day to day experience and allows us to present the product as a solution to the challenges they face.
During this process, we will also start to explore how the messaging can be adapted to speak to different business sectors, as while the product can be used across a range of verticals, the motivation for purchasing is often different.
Securing different kinds of coverage
Once we have a strong base for our content, we can then think about the different types of opportunities we can secure.
Thought leadership bylines are a popular route for delivering this narrative, as they allow us to go into a lot of detail on a specific subject matter, and typically make up the bulk of a programme. However, if the key messages are relevant in an industry with lots in the news, like cybersecurity, we can use reactive commentary as a direct way into publications covering ongoing cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Finally, interviews are another option and a great way to go that little bit more in-depth on a topic or and increase a spokesperson profile by putting a face to a company.
How this looks in real life
For our client GCX, a key benefit of their new product, GNSX (Global Network Secure Experience) was how it addressed issues around the visibility of increasing threats to cloud security, providing end-to-end network management.
As IT and networking professionals were their key audience, we positioned their solution as a fix to security risks that have arisen as a result of hybrid working. Working closely with their in-house experts, we placed byline articles in Network Computing and Networking+ to name a few, on how older solutions like SD-WAN are no longer fit for purpose with hybrid working taking over, and how their solution built on this.
By following this process, we were able to align six months of thought leadership content to their key product announcement
Conclusion
Product announcements are a good way of getting initial coverage, but supporting these announcements with thought leadership that ties vital product messaging to living and breathing industry challenges is what ensures a lasting impact. Using our expertise to understand a product’s value propositions helps us not only make an instant impact in terms of coverage but also make sure our media relations programmes are supporting our client’s priority business goals from sales pipelines to awareness in the best way possible.
