Establishing a new start-up and working your way towards taking the new company to success is as exciting as entrepreneurship gets. With the start-up business model, you are forced to adapt to changing situations, establish (and work with) a lean and effective plan, and tackle the challenges you face along the way with creative solutions.
Along the way, there are many important milestones you will get to celebrate. Marketing is a big part of the process; in fact, marketing is something you need to start doing even before you launch the start-up or its products. To help you get started, here are the best pre-launch marketing tips you can implement as you establish a new start-up and take it to success.
Craft a story
The “why” is always more important than the “how” and the “what” when it comes to start-ups. It is more important to understand why you are starting the company – why you want to achieve your goals – than to talk about the products you’re bringing to the market and how you are making those products possible.
The “how” and the “what” are exciting and interesting, but the “why” is what brings value to your start-up. When you start formulating your marketing strategy and key messages, you’ll find that the audience is more engaged when you talk about the “why” of your start-up.
With that in mind, you can craft your story accordingly. Yes, you need to start crafting stories and making them available to the audience even before the start-up is launched. Go behind the scenes, document details about the process of getting the start-up off the ground, and use these details as the main message of your pre-launch marketing.
Connect with key influencers
Influencers and industry leaders are great supporters of your start-up. Don’t wait for them to come to you. Be more proactive and connect with key influencers as you work on getting the company running. The more you invest in these relationships, the more you will get in return.
When Boosted announced their initial concept for the Boosted Board, they already had influencers like Casey Neistat and Marques Brownlee working with them closely. Those influencers actively promoted their love for Boosted Board even without the company paying them. The exposure Boosted received in return was invaluable.
You too can use the same approach when launching a product to the market. Aside from professional testers, the media, and potential users, get influencers involved in testing your future products. You can ask them to keep things under wraps until the official launch date; leaks aren’t necessarily bad as long as you know how to manage them.
Start a mailing list
Another important pre-launch marketing strategy to use is starting a mailing list. Get your start-up site up and running as quickly as possible, add a countdown to your official launch date, and make sure visitors can sign up for updates and newsletters while they are on your site. Let them have the opportunity to be the first to know about your new products and your start-up.
You’ll be surprised by how quickly you can grow your mailing list with the right amount of exposure and some digital marketing savviness. It is also possible to use ads to help the site – and the mailing list – gain traction early in the game. The sooner you start, the more people you can reach by the time you hit the official launch day.
You can use email newsletter templates and valuable content to keep the mailing list active and appealing to the users. You want to send enough emails to get feedback, but you don’t want to send too many before the actual launch of the company; the latter could result in subscribers unsubscribing from your newsletter.
Nail your online presence
Setting up a site with a countdown is only the beginning. You must also set up social media pages for the new company. There are two reasons why you need to start very early with social media account creation. First of all, you want to secure the right handles or user IDs so that promoting the business in the future is easier.
The social media accounts you create for the new start-up are also handy for creating a big hype around the launch of your new products and the company itself. As soon as you have the accounts created, use them to tell stories and engage the audience directly. Let the audience be part of your journey too.
You have the opportunity to build a strong relationship through social media. Since your audience can follow your journey closely, they will feel more involved (and even invested) in the success of the start-up and its products. This is the kind of relationship that will take you to the level of success you have in mind. Everything else is easy to accomplish with the support of loyal followers.