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What Is Launch Marketing and How Is It Different from Regular Marketing?
If you've ever searched for help marketing a new product and felt like the advice was written for businesses that already exist, you're not wrong. Most marketing content is built for brands with existing customers, established audiences, and months of data to work with. But that's not your situation. You're starting from zero, and the rules are different.
What is launch marketing, exactly?
Launch marketing is a methodology that helps entrepreneurs quickly and affordably prove an idea has the merit and potential to become a profitable business, generate early success, and create a solid foundation for growth, all before traditional marketing strategies would even apply.
It is not simply "marketing, but for a launch." Instead, it is its own category, with its own strategies, its own timeline, and its own definition of success.
Why launch marketing is its own category
Think about how we differentiate between types of marketing: search engine optimization, public relations, email marketing, paid social. Each has distinct goals, tactics, and metrics. Launch marketing belongs on that same list, yet it's the least talked about.
Regular marketing has the privilege of time. Launch marketing does not.
A typical business can test a new campaign over months, make incremental improvements, and gradually optimize toward results. A product launch doesn't have that runway. A launch campaign usually spans four to eight months in total, split into several distinct phases, and revenue is often generated in only the final 30 to 60 days of that window. In fact, a single mistimed piece of content or one unanswered objection from a prospective buyer can unravel months of preparation quickly.
The Risk of Hiding Your Price Until Launch Day
One wrong move we've seen on many occasions: keeping the product's price a secret until launch day. This can be especially damaging if the product is on the expensive side.
Why? Price is likely to be the number one sales objection for most product launches.
With regular marketing campaigns, pricing tests are generally low-risk, presented to just a portion of your prospects, so any pushback can be resolved with little noise.
With launch marketing, if pricing is hidden until launch day, that price point is being tested on everyone at once, at the most critical moment of going to market. If there's strong pushback, your launch day will be unsuccessful and you'll face a wave of complaints. However, if the price has been introduced during pre-launch, you have time to respond to pushback and resolve the objection before launch day, mostly behind the scenes.
Will Russell, Russell MarketingThis is why launch marketing requires a different approach, a different mindset, and a different system.
The three phases every launch goes through
Regardless of the product, the industry, or the budget, every successful launch moves through three phases. At Russell Marketing, this structure forms the backbone of the Five-Step High-Profit Launch System developed by Will Russell and outlined in his book Launch in 5.
Each phase runs specific steps of that system. Validation is Step 1 (Validation, Research, and Strategy). Pre-launch runs Steps 2 and 3 (Audience Acquisition and Audience Engagement). Launch executes Step 4 (Audience Conversion). Finally, the fifth step, Scale and Optimize, begins after this window closes, once the product moves from launch into ongoing growth.
Validation
~1 monthBefore spending significant money on development, manufacturing, or marketing, you need to know whether people will actually buy what you're selling. Validation is the process of proving, or disproving, that your idea has a real market. It involves researching your target audience, testing your pricing and messaging with real potential buyers, and making a data-driven go or no-go decision on whether to proceed. Overall, this phase typically takes about one month and costs far less than most entrepreneurs expect.
Pre-launch
1–2 monthsOnce you've validated your idea, the focus shifts to building a community of potential customers before your product is available to purchase. This is the phase most entrepreneurs skip, and the reason so many launches generate little to no sales on day one. In practice, pre-launch is about finding your first supporters, building excitement, and creating multiple channels of communication with people who are likely to buy. This phase usually runs for one to two months for a typical four-month campaign.
Launch
30–60 day revenue windowThis is when everything comes together. Your pre-launch community converts into customers, and you begin reaching new audiences who weren't part of your early community. This is the most publicly visible part of the process, the part people think of when they hear the word "launch." But its success depends almost entirely on the quality of the work done in the two phases before it.
What makes a launch fail
The most common reason product launches fail isn't a bad product. Instead, it's a misunderstanding of how launch marketing works.
Entrepreneurs who skip validation spend money building something nobody wants. Meanwhile, those who skip pre-launch arrive at launch day with no audience and wonder why nobody is buying. Those who treat launch marketing like regular marketing, running general ads, posting on social media, hoping things pick up, typically see a flat line where they expected a spike.
We've seen this countless times: devastated entrepreneurs reach out to us after launching a product that failed to gain any traction. The reason is almost always the same: they never ran any kind of pre-launch demand analysis or validation testing to confirm the right go-to-market path.
Will Russell, Russell MarketingThe other frequent mistake is treating launch marketing as a one-time event rather than a campaign. A launch is not a single moment. Instead, it's a system with a beginning, a middle, and an end, each requiring specific actions taken in a specific order.
What launch marketing looks like in practice
For most entrepreneurs launching online, launch marketing involves a combination of three things.
Paid advertising
Primarily through Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Paid ads reach target audiences and drive them to a landing page where they can express interest or make a purchase. In short, this is typically what drives the bulk of new traffic during both pre-launch and launch.
Validation phase: small ad test to a simple landing page. Launch phase: full spend across all channels simultaneously.
Email and SMS marketing
Once someone opts in, email and text messaging keep them engaged throughout the weeks leading up to launch: building anticipation, answering questions, sharing updates, and ultimately driving purchase. The tool Russell Marketing uses for this is Klaviyo.
Pre-launch adds email sequences and community building. Launch phase deploys the full conversion sequence.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
CRO is the work of making it as easy as possible for an interested person to actually buy. Specifically, it covers landing page design, answering objections on the page, testing the checkout experience, and adding urgency and social proof. The tool RM uses to build and test landing pages is Unbounce.
The platforms change over time. The underlying system does not.
Launch Marketing Benchmarks to Know
When assessing this kind of marketing funnel, understanding the data, your targets, and the industry benchmarks is critical for profitability.
While these metrics will be unique for each product launch, keep these launch marketing benchmarks in mind. Any sale coming in through paid advertising generally costs a third or less of the revenue that customer delivers (for example, if a customer pays $100 for your product, you should spend less than $30 in paid advertising to acquire them). An email community of prospects will generally convert into customers at 2% to 7%, depending on engagement strategy, product, and price. Similarly, pre-launch landing pages should look to convert traffic into prospects at 15% to 25%, and sales pages should look to convert traffic into customers at 1% to 3%, again depending on product and price.
How Russell Marketing approaches launch
Russell Marketing is a product launch agency based in Austin, Texas. Since founding the agency, Will Russell has applied the Five-Step High-Profit Launch System across dozens of products and industries, from consumer tech to home goods to crowdfunding campaigns.
The system is designed to be replicable, which means it works for a first-time entrepreneur with a $5,000 budget just as it works for an established brand entering a new market. In other words, what changes is the scale, not the structure.
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