There are three critical issues brands should focus on with a product launch: how to reach consumers; how to get them to share the brand’s message; and finally, how to get them to the store to buy their product. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. About 30,000 new products launch every year and every year, 80-95% of those new products fail to gain a following. The CPG sector is a particularly challenging space to launch a new product, but with a robust digital presence, success is more likely.

It’s not enough that consumers know about a product. They must also have a favorable impression of the brand and know where to find that product in the shopping aisle. By learning from consumer behavior, building awareness on multiple platforms, and creating campaigns that resonate, brands can grow enough of a following to help establish new products. It’s also possible to boost sales in the shopping aisle by making marketing efforts mobile. By reaching out to consumers through mobile apps, brands can target moving consumers and improve product launch results.

A brand shouldn’t have to create multiple campaigns for each of these platforms. Instead, the goal should be to create a consistent, compelling conversation that translates across multiple platforms. It’s a matter of recognizing that many social media sites overlap, so a campaign should be able to do the same.

To understand this, you can look at the evolution of the hashtag. Initially, the hashtag trend started with Twitter. In 2007, the social media platform rolled out an option to categorize conversations by tagging it with “#.” While this was a very simplistic way to organize content databases, it was by no means in mainstream use. Today, we can see the hashtag on virtually all social media channels. Social media marketing mimics the evolution of the hashtag. Users discover a brand in one place but begin to follow it on other platforms if they become invested enough. This multi-media approach allows a brand to leverage that traffic to build buzz during a new product launch.

Tidy Cats, a Nestlé Purina Petcare brand, showed an excellent example of one of these multi-platform campaigns with its Kitten Week promotion. Tidy Cats is known for its parody content and decided to go with a fun parody on The Discovery Channel’s Shark Week. The award-winning campaign began on Twitter, where the brand shared kitten memes, gifs, images, and videos and encouraged viewers to share their own kitten content. That Twitter campaign also drove engagement on the brand’s YouTube and Facebook channels by tying in hashtags and user-generated content. Altogether, total views across social media channels reached 1.5 million in just a week and a half.

As evidenced through the Tidy Cats campaign, launching a campaign across multiple platforms can lead to increased engagement. Through a multi-platform campaign, a brand can significantly boost its following across channels and ensure they have the audience needed to spread awareness for a new product.

What that means for you is that a small, vocal following will be responsible for sharing content about your brand. This is where influencers come in. While you may have heard the word “influencer” more than once, it’s important to note that there’s more than one type of influencer.

These types of influencers will help spread the message about your brand and drive others to try your products. Target these individuals with messages that feel personalized, or that uniquely connect to them. Pringles doubled down on this CPG marketing strategy and created an Internet phenomenon with #NobodyAskedYouKevin.

In 2017, Pringles noticed a trend when reviewing available data regarding their product online. They noted that consumers were posting “food hacks” that combined Pringles flavors to create new flavors. The brand decided to create the Stackable campaign around that, kicking it off with their Super Bowl commercial. They centered an advertisement around “flavor stacking,” using Saturday Night Live personality Bill Hader as a spokesperson. At the end of the commercial, Hader screams the line “Nobody asked you, Kevin!” That line created a spin-off with #NobodyAskedYouKevin trending on Twitter. Pringles, in turn, used the hashtag as their banner.

This strategy humanized the brand and let others know they were in on the joke. That made those consumers more willing to share the message and expand the brand’s reach for its campaign. While this wasn’t a new product rollout, it was an opportunity to view the product in a new way. Pringles capitalized on this and was able to turn that interest into brand awareness and sales through the use of mega-, macro-, and micro-influencers.

Any mobile campaign can be targeted to reach consumers at the right time. While a social media campaign can improve brand awareness and brand affinity, mobile makes that even more impactful. For example, if a consumer is checking their Facebook while at a store to purchase kitty litter, they may have noticed the Tidy Cats campaign. As that message reaches them just as they’re about to buy a product in that category, it’s very likely they’ll be the brand to gain the sale.

It’s possible to improve on this even more through the use of shopping apps. Apps that reward consumers for interacting with products, like Shopkick, can incentivize engagement and get consumers to seek out a product in the store. Essentially, they can move a consumer from awareness to purchase in one shopping trip.

Incorporating mobile into a new product launch campaign can significantly improve sales. Any brand that wishes to increase their market share through a digital campaign should find a way to engage with consumers in the store. Shopping apps like Shopkick create that connection, allowing your brand to travel the entire path to purchase with the consumer.

Using a shopping app to engage influencers while they’re in the shopping aisle can be part of your brand’s product launch how-to checklist. These influencers don’t have to have massive followings, as even micro-influences can help to create a stronger impact on your sales.

To be successful in today’s highly competitive CPG industry, brands should develop new product marketing strategies that work in an ever-changing environment. By using agile innovation strategies, many challenger brands can compete with massive CPG conglomerates. Agile innovation is a strategy born in IT, but it is applicable in digital marketing—especially in the way it can be used to introduce a new product to a crowded market. By breaking down larger campaigns into smaller components, brands can create a strategy that’s flexible enough to adapt to changing consumer demand.

There is no one single new product launch plan that can be said to work for all brands, but of the plans that succeed, we can see common themes. A successful launch depends on timing, how the target audience is reached, and, above all, partnerships with the right platforms to drive product awareness. Through these strategies, brands can bring a product to market in a way that makes an impact.

The benefit of breaking these tasks into components is that it allows rapid pivoting for a brand, which is what agile marketing is all about. As the digital space continues to change rapidly, with new products and campaigns appearing almost constantly, it’s essential to create a campaign that can easily be adjusted based on audience, platform, and timing.

Releasing a product at the wrong time makes it harder to gain attention. However, proper timing can be difficult to pinpoint as the causes aren’t apparent. Brands need to be able to understand why consumers choose to buy when they do. Mobile apps and the data they collect through user behaviors can offer an opportunity to CPG brands that want to calibrate their campaigns more effectively.

The brand can then use the data from those signals of purchase intent to determine the best audience for that specific product. For example, if they notice that most of their engagement is coming from women in their thirties with children, they can aim their marketing efforts to reach that specific group of consumers.

The benefit of doing this via a shopping app is it allows brands access to consumers who make purchase decisions for their household. As shopping apps are typically used while in-store and those who download and actively use them tend to be regular shoppers, the shopping app can essentially become a diverse focus group for brands to test the reception of each product. By identifying these consumers, brands are better able to connect with them on the digital platforms they use.

All these platforms offer the opportunity for brands to connect with the correct audience to gain sales for new products. A few can even be a means of acquiring data ahead of a hard launch. In either case, a brand can go into the new product marketing campaign with more insight, increasing the likelihood of success.

Tying New Product Marketing Strategies Together

Breaking your marketing strategy into components makes it a much more flexible plan. In the digital age, a brand’s success with a new product will be determined based on its ability to pivot. Applying the standards of agile innovation to your marketing plan can help you gain that flexibility.

Testing marketing strategies through shopping apps can support all of this as it gives you insight into who is buying your product and why. The knowledge gained through this can help with the timing of your product launch as well as where to reach out to your target audience. Shopping apps can help improve your marketing strategies by giving you a better understanding of your consumers, which you can be ultimately used to improve sales.