How to Use Visuals for a Successful Product Launch

Launching a product is a challenging moment since it requires a lot of research, data, planning and diverse teams working together. With so many things going on, companies need to plan everything in advance.

Keeping resources, milestones and roles organized is challenging, but visuals can be great tools for team communication. Visuals such as product roadmaps and Gantt charts help teams work together and keep everyone on the same page.

Read on to find out how to use visuals to improve team communication, collect feedback from users, promote your new product and more.

Visuals to plan a product launch

Setting goals and milestones is a critical part of a product launch. The easiest way to define and communicate your plan is by creating timelines to visually present schedules and highlight critical points.

Check the timeline below to see how it works:

Similar to timelines, roadmaps are great for keeping track of all activities required for a successful product launch.

In short, roadmaps are excellent for

• Setting high-level goals
• Tracking progress
• Coordinate activities that require multiple across teams
• Improving communication
• Aligning departments

To be effective and support your project plan, roadmaps must be customizable to keep up with the progress of processes. Consider using templates like the one below so teams can edit the product launch roadmap to improve team communication.

Consider using roadmaps and timelines alongside project management tools, Also, your roadmap should have a specific audience and timeframe that it will represent. For example, a roadmap for stakeholders can present a simple overview, while team leaders might need more details, schedules and milestones.

Create product roadmaps to:

• Define and present tasks
• Track progress
• Align departments
• Present deadlines and goals

You can also rely on schedule templates to ensure you have the resources to achieve your goals and easily manage tasks

Use mind maps to organize your product launch

Mind maps are excellent for creating strategies, organizing ideas and connecting concepts to present and develop a plan. This mind map, for example, presents objectives, metrics and channels for a product launch.

To quickly develop a communication strategy for your product, you can create a mind map starting from the main goal at the center of the map and then branch out ideas and bullet points. Use your mind maps to define channels, tools and teams involved, like in this marketing strategy mind map:

Visuals to boost promotion

Before launching and promoting your new product, it’s critical to have a plan that covers each customer journey stage. Having a journey map will help you to share the right content with your audience in each sale funnel stage and leverage the benefits of social media.

See this customer journey map as an example:

A customer journey map helps marketing teams to organize strategies, create a content brief, and set objectives, metrics and actions for each stage of funnel sales. Also, your plan should include what kind of content you will create for each channel.

Visuals to boost social media engagement

To stand out on social media you need impactful and original visual content. From statistics to product comparison, an infographic is an engaging and shareable type of content, because it communicates and presents valuable information in a memorable, visually appealing way.

This kind of Carousel, for example, conveys critical points from a blog post in an eye-catching, fun way and can help to increase your Instagram engagement rate:

Here’s another example of a simple yet engaging, memorable social media infographic:

Show your product value with comparison infographics

Comparison infographics are often used to help customers make their minds up quickly and with confidence when a company offers many slightly different products or services.

By presenting features side by side, a product comparison template helps people to decide, which may reduce cart abandonment.

In this comparison infographic, two smartphones are faced side by side to highlight their features and differences:

Another way of using comparison infographics when is to use them to find out which features should be highlighted to make it stand out from the competition.

If you were launching the Samsung Galaxy S10 above, what would be the best features to highlight?

Even if you expected to present the largest storage or the lightest phone, when comparing your product to others side by side, maybe you find out that highlighting the wider screen and highest resolution will make your product more attractive and unique.