Crossing the Bridge Between Knowing How Important Your Launch Is and How to Allocate Marketing Resources to that Launch

I’ve talked a bit about the importance of the Product Life Cycle (PLC) to Product Marketers and larger organizations overall. I’ve also talked about the importance of using a methodical and documented approach to determine how critical your upcoming launch is to the business. See my step-by-step how-to post, “Launch Tiers and How to Use the Launch Tier Form.”

Determining the Launch Tier precedes the Launch Plan Template as the template is designed to allow you to allocate Marketing resources based on the Launch Tier. I’ve constructed both the Launch Tier Form and the Launch Plan Template on three tiers. However, you may find that a fourth tier is necessary. If so, both are easy to accommodate. In the past, I used a fourth launch tier as a pure content update for a given existing offering.

The idea here is to use this as a high-level capture of all of the activities that each Marketing function will perform in support of a given launch whether that be an entirely new offering or an enhancement of an existing offering.

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Use of this form would likely take place in the Planning stage of the PLC but it’s possible that it could be done in the Design phase as well if all else looks good. However, it’s important not to jump the gun and invest too much Marketing time in formulating a plan if the project is not really ready for that. As I mentioned above the form also requires the Launch Tier Form be completed as well as a determination on the Demand Type which is a SiriusDecisions approach to understanding some of the nature of what’s being launched.

Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to leverage the Launch Plan Template. The idea is for each function to input how they are going to support the launch. Of course, this information could be leveraged into some type of Marketing project management tool (ex. Asana, Robohead, etc.) and/or incorporated into a broader overall PLC tool (ex. if Jira has been designed to act as a PLC management tool for the entire organization). I certainly recommend integrating into one of those tools.

However, for organizations that may lack that maturity or size, the form can be used to capture the overall plan for a launch.

Why Is Having a Launch Plan Template Tied to a Launch Tier So Important?

The fact is that this process acts as a mechanism to ensure that Marketing allocates the right level of effort in line with the importance or priority of the launch. As you will see in the template, the template captures all of the various functions across Marketing and the possible tactics each may employ in support of the launch.

I’ve broken out the activities in terms of “Applicable,” “Optional” and “Not Applicable” as a guideline. You may want to modify how I’ve done it based on the needs and preferences for your organization. They are there to give a sense of what you should consider, may want to consider and shouldn’t consider based on the launch tier. The end result is that whatever your launch tier, the launch plan/activities should look in line with that when done. This is critical because Marketing resources are finite and you should never be doing Tier 1-level effort for a Tier 2 or Tier 3 launch.

That’s it. The Launch Plan Template should be pretty straightforward for you to use. Again, though, I recommend checking out my other post so as to put the Launch Tier Form in front of this.