Why is Post Launch Campaign Analysis Important?

Most marketing and leadership teams tend to focus more on stages leading up to the launch while missing out on the opportunity to leverage the post-launch weeks to solidify their launched product in the market. A crucial part of any new product development is assessing its performance to verify its product-market fit for long-term success.

This is because a new product launch is rarely a success on its own – rather, every launch needs incremental and calculated tweaks to be made based on user feedback after the all-important launch date.

Post-launch reviews and analysis offer valuable insights into how the product is perceived compared to the expected performance. Goals established during the pre-launch planning phase are utilized at this point to spot drawbacks and areas of potential improvement.

Evaluate how your product is performing with the help of our post-launch campaign analysis tips and tricks and set up both your customers and product for victory.

What Is Post-Launch Campaign

The post-launch stage is the period following the launch day in your product launch timeline. It usually extends from four to six weeks after the initial launch and involves vigilant observation of how target audiences perceive and receive the product.

This campaign instills accountability for results and fosters hustle for continuous refinement of the product. As Wheelwright and Clark's framework suggests:

The ability to sustain significant improvements in development over long periods rests on the capability to learn from experience.

Basically, post-launch campaigns analyze how well or how badly a recently launched product, service, or feature is doing in the market. This is done by studying the sales figures, early reviews, and impressions, website traffic response, social media engagement, competitor analysis, and other data.

The post-launch phase is also called the response stage and is when analytic and marketing teams need to be on top of their game. Such campaigns require continuous and focused efforts to not let the launch hype tone down after the big event. This is done by publishing relevant content in blog posts, email marketing, ebooks, webinars, videos, and more.

In tandem, the organizations collect customer feedback, review and respond to it, and make amendments to their marketing strategies and products based on the information collected.

Significance of Post-Launch Analysis

Towards the end of your product development cycle comes the post-launch research phase. This research essentially answers one question: Was the launch successful?

The post-launch analysis aims to understand how the users of your product see the product, what shortcomings they find, and whether or not is the product fulfilling the expectations it built before launch.

Feedback from users about the recently launched product or service generates data that organizations use to evaluate how the product is doing. The sales, user experience, bad and the good is then compared to pre-launch metrics and the difference reveals what more needs to be done.

The organization can then work on improvements in the product, tweaks to the advertising and marketing approach, and changes in the customer response strategy, among other things. Timely implementation of these changes helps with a better product-market fit.

Post-product launch reviews allow businesses to articulate the value proposition both internally and externally. While people might learn “from doing”, businesses and organizations need to transfer these learnings into actionable processes. This gives way to cross-functional analysis where team members from engineering, management, design, operations, marketing, etc. add diversity to the cause-and-effect relationships.

Post-launch analysis also helps devise better and more efficient launches in the future. Because you know audience behaviors and triggers and can strategize more effectively to get the desired response.

What Happens in a Post-Launch Analysis

Post-launch evaluation monitors not just the sales of the product just launched, but also checks how it is performing in distribution, retailer’s attitudes to the product, placement, and promotion of it. And of course, the end consumer’s behavior towards the product.

Here are all the details you need to know about conducting a successful post-launch campaign analysis:

Create Dashboards to Track Metrics

Before launching your new product, make sure you set up dashboards of trackable metrics. These metrics include:

• Blog post traffic
• Social media engagement
• Ad CTRs
• Website views
• Number of meetings booked
• Number of evals generated
• Competitive win rate
• Product adaption rate
• Promotional channel metric
• Retention rate
• PR coverage
• Feature use
• Revenue and market share

Decide what CRM tools, analytics, or marketing automation platform has better analytics and tracking mechanisms. Setting up these dashboards is critical in the pre-launch stage so that you have a baseline to compare against after the big launch event.

Checking these dashboards should be a daily ritual during the post-launch analysis phase. Look for trends here, and if you spot one, don’t wait to act on it!

For instance, if a certain ad is doing better than what you expected, notify the design team and update, improve, or refresh the ad for better reach. Or, if you’re getting an impressive number of signups for a webinar, set up a plan to re-engage audiences following this webinar.  Similarly, if a video has more views than your anticipation, create more on related topics to keep the momentum going.

Understand and Respond to Feedback

Everything you see or hear about your product is feedback after a launch. Value all of it, and monitor this response to know more about what functionality is getting users more excited and what doesn’t seem to ignite a spark, or where your launch or product may have missed its mark.

As a result, refine your approach based on this feedback. You can measure launch sentiments and customer reactions with these easy indicators:

• Did the launch allure any unexpected media attention?
• What do you see on the Support channels? What are people saying?
• What kind of comments are the customer-facing teams receiving?
• Is the launch trending on Twitter/HackerNews? If it is, how and why?

Based on these data points, see what needs to be done to satisfy customers. Respond and engage with customers to address their concerns, if any. It’s a great opportunity for an organization to shine because spending time to arm customer-facing teams and hearing frustrated customer voices is rare.

Work on closing the loop. Even though circling back and having to deal with unexpected consequences is tiresome, it’s an amazing chance to improve your future launches and grow.

Conduct a Retro Meeting

A retro or retrospective meeting is a structured session where a team reflects upon a completed project. Teams and individuals get a chance to highlight the successes and failures of a project and contemplate the project as a whole.

Remember, a simple basic retro can go a long way. It could be as straightforward and brief as asking for the stakeholders’ feedback on what they thought worked and what didn’t during the launch.

What these retrospective meetings do is provide a valuable activity log or timeline record of all the events before, during, or after the launch. Few tips for conducting a retro include:

• Prepare for the meeting with the right tools and decide on the right participants – those who can give valuable suggestions and unbiased opinions
• Cover highlights and organize sections for review and discussion
• Look for common themes, patterns, and insights
• Identify blockers
• Document necessary items
• Improve planning and structure for the future and decide on the next steps

Final Word

In the weeks following your big product launch, it’s important to stay alert and ready to optimize, change and renovate. Don’t be afraid to rework some things to amplify the launch and saddle up to double down and iterate on plans and actions that seem to be working for your audiences.

And if you need help at any stage with your post-launch campaign analysis, reach out to experts at prefinery.com for help.

FAQs

What is the goal of conducting a post-launch campaign analysis?

Post-launch analysis collects and understands whether a product’s launch was successful or not. The goal is to comprehend users' experience of the product and devise plans based on what improvements need to be made to enhance the product experience.

The analysis allows you to connect with prospects in a timely and contextual manner which helps in improving the effectiveness of your advertising and lowering customer churn before it is too late.

What are some common post-launch activities?

• User testing to modify product concepts for future
• Collecting feedback
• Reading data and statistics reports of the launch
• Marketing activities
• Social, email, and third-party networking

What is the difference between pre-launch and post-launch campaigns?

Pre-launch campaigns focus on preparing and “warming up” the audiences with solid marketing material and social activities. Whereas post-launch activities include reviewing the results of the launch and making changes and planning for the next launch based on that.