A 90-day go-to-market plan for a new product or location

Launches slip when these are still open in week four.

1. Who it is for, specifically. Not "homeowners" but "homeowners in three named zip codes with houses built before 1990." Not "SMBs" but "independent dental practices with two to five chairs." Specificity drives every creative and channel choice downstream.
2. Why they should switch. Write a single sentence: for [audience], [product] is the [category] that [key difference], unlike [current alternative]. If you cannot fill in the "unlike" part, you do not have positioning yet. This is the work of brand strategy, and it is cheaper to do in week zero than to discover in week eight that nobody can explain why you exist.
3. The one number that defines success at day 90. Units sold, bookings, qualified leads, foot traffic. One number, with a target. Everything else is diagnostic.

Week 1: positioning, offer and pricing. Finalize the positioning statement and the launch offer. Launch offers work best when they are time-bound and specific (founding-member pricing through a date, a bundle only available at opening) rather than a generic percentage off. Confirm pricing against two or three named competitors. Decide the sales motion: self-serve checkout, booked consultation, walk-in or a sales call, and who handles each.

Week 2: proof and assets. A launch with no proof is just an announcement. Secure early proof now: a pilot group, pre-orders, a handful of testimonials from beta customers or, for a location, reviews from a soft opening. Brief the creative: a core message, three supporting messages, and a visual system that works across a landing page, paid social, email, print and the physical space if there is one. Video is now the default format for US paid social; plan for at least a 15-second and a 30-second cut plus still variants.

Week 3: the landing experience and the funnel. Build one dedicated landing page or microsite for the launch, not a buried subpage. It needs the positioning sentence above the fold, the offer, proof, a single primary call to action and a form or checkout that works on a phone in under a minute. Connect the form to your CRM and set up conversion tracking before any traffic arrives. For a location, make sure the Google Business Profile is claimed, categorized correctly and has photos, hours and the launch offer loaded. See landing experiences.

Week 4: operations and the warm-audience list. Confirm inventory, staffing, fulfillment or booking capacity for two times your target demand. A launch that sells out in day three and leaves two weeks of disappointed customers damages reviews more than a slow start. Build the warm list: existing customers, email subscribers, social followers, local partners and press. Write the email and SMS sequence for the soft launch. For SMS, confirm express written consent is captured and documented under TCPA rules and that messages go out within permitted hours. For email, every send must meet CAN-SPAM requirements for identification and unsubscribe.

Day 30 go or no-go checklist:

• Positioning statement agreed and used in every asset
• Landing page live, tested on mobile, tracking verified end to end
• Offer, pricing and terms finalized and approved
• Creative for paid, email and organic produced and approved
• Operations confirmed for 2x target demand
• Warm list segmented and sequence loaded
• Staff or sales team briefed with a one-page script and FAQ

If two or more boxes are unchecked, move the launch date. A one-week delay costs far less than a weak launch.

Week 5: soft launch to the warm list. Open to existing customers and subscribers first, with the launch offer and a direct ask for feedback and reviews. Watch for friction: abandoned checkouts, form errors, booking conflicts, questions the FAQ did not answer. Fix daily. Collect the first 10 to 20 reviews or testimonials. This week usually surfaces a pricing objection or a confusing step that would have cost real money at paid scale.

Week 6: partners, press and community. Activate local or industry partners, send the press release to relevant trade or local outlets, and brief any creators. Under FTC endorsement rules, any paid or gifted creator content must carry a clear disclosure, and you are responsible for making sure it does. For a location, this is the week for the grand-opening event, local sponsorship or chamber-of-commerce visibility.

Week 7: paid launch. Turn on paid media with the proof gathered in weeks five and six. A typical starting split for a US launch is 50 to 60 percent to the channel closest to purchase intent (paid search, or Shopping and retail media for products), 30 to 40 percent to paid social for reach and retargeting, and the remainder to local or niche placements. Launch with at least three creative concepts per channel and set a 10 to 14 day minimum before killing any of them. Retarget everyone who visited the landing page but did not convert.

Week 8: read the early data and fix the leaks. By now you have enough traffic to see where people drop. Common fixes at this stage: shorten the form, add proof near the call to action, clarify shipping or scheduling, add the top three objections to the page. Check the lead or order handoff: how fast are inquiries answered, and does the sales or front-desk experience match the promise in the ads? Response time under five minutes for inbound leads is the standard worth aiming at, and automation can handle the first acknowledgment.

Week 9: channel review. Build a simple scorecard: spend, conversions, cost per result and quality of result per channel. Cut the clear losers, double down where cost per result is under target with headroom, and move 10 to 20 percent of budget accordingly.

Week 10: message and creative review. Which positioning angle produced the best results? Which proof points did people click on? Feed the winners back into the landing page, the email sequence and the next round of creative.

Week 11: retention and referral. First-time buyers from the launch are the cheapest second sale you will ever get. Set up the post-purchase or post-visit sequence, a review request and a referral offer. For a location, this is loyalty sign-up and the second-visit incentive.

Week 12: the day-90 review. Compare actual against the one number set at the start. Document what worked, what did not and what the steady-state plan looks like. Decide the ongoing monthly budget based on the measured cost per result rather than on the launch spike.

Treat these as typical ranges, not targets.

• Landing page conversion to lead or sale for a focused launch page: 3 to 10 percent for lead generation, 1 to 4 percent for ecommerce.
• Email open rates on a warm launch list: 30 to 50 percent, with click rates of 3 to 8 percent.
• Paid social cost per click in US consumer categories: often $0.80 to $3.00; paid search in competitive service categories can run $5 to $40 per click.
• Time to statistically useful creative data: 10 to 14 days per concept at modest spend.

If you are far outside these ranges, look at the page, the offer and the targeting before blaming the channel.

• Launching with paid media before the warm list. You pay to find problems your existing customers would have found for free.
• A launch page buried in the main navigation. One dedicated page, one call to action.
• No proof at launch. Ten honest reviews beat a hundred thousand impressions.
• Operations sized for the target, not twice the target. Stock-outs and booking backlogs are the fastest route to bad reviews.
• Judging creative in three days. Give each concept its two weeks.
• No handoff plan. The lead that waits two days for a callback was wasted media.

We run launches as one connected system rather than a campaign. Discover: audience, competitors, pricing and the real reason to switch, pressure-tested with customers before design starts. Plan: the 90-day sequence above, with the one success number, the channel split and the go or no-go checklist agreed up front. Build: positioning, identity, landing experience, launch creative, email and SMS flows and the lead or order handoff built by one team on one timeline, so the ad, the page and the follow-up say the same thing. Improve: weekly reads during the launch window, a channel and creative review at day 60 and a documented steady-state plan at day 90. The brand side of this is brand strategy and identity; the media side is performance marketing.

A representative engagement is our Brand & Digital Launch. The pattern ran from positioning through identity, a launch website and campaign assets as one sequence rather than as separate projects, so the message that was validated early carried unchanged into the site and the paid creative. The launch followed the inside-out order described here: warm audience and proof first, then partners, then paid amplification once the funnel had been tested with real buyers.