Start-up Entrepreneurs' Blog

Tips for Building Pre-launch Awareness into the Start-up Marketing Plan

April 29, 2010

A vague marketing plan will not win these days nor will a plan that starts later. A start-up will need to prepare a strategy and plan that uses multiple channels to get your message across to your customers, usually during a phased approach.  And it needs to begin as soon as possible. The pre-launch strategy commences with any communication between your company and its consumer, and much anyway you can attract and engage customers.

Knowing you customer is more than determining what they need in terms of the product; it also means knowing how they conduct their business and how your product or service can add value to their business model. It also includes knowing your customers’ habits and media preferences. This will help guide you to know your customers as an audience before embarking into any program – what radio stations they listen to, what websites they visit regularly, what magazines they read, which analysts they respect, which trade shows they attend, what sports they like and so on. This level of understanding will help you find the communication channels relevant to your customer.

People buy what’s most familiar to them. Even if your competitor has a superior product, customers still have a tendency to buy from those they know. Consumers buy more on emotion and businesses buy on empirical analysis. True or False? Psychologists have shown that while people believe they weigh the facts and options and then make a decision, what they really do is intuitively make a decision and justify it afterwards with the data.  The pre-launch strategy needs to build that familiarity with your product and company prior to the actual availability of the product.

Pre-launch Awareness Tips

It is never too early to start the pre-launch awareness. It takes much longer and much more focus to perform marketing when you are completely unknown. Don’t try to go head-to-head with the major players and don’t copy their marketing strategy.

As in Internet marketing, you want to start with the long tail search keywords, not the more generic single words. It’s better to dominant a specific customer segment, a focused niche or local market segment.  YELP has succeeded where other similar and earlier-to-market companies failed. Much of YELP’s success is attributed to first building a tremendously strong local presence in geographic areas, and then expanding into other regions.

Blog About the Problem You Are Solving

Blogging on the subject area does not require the product to be currently available. You can engage with the customer by talking about the problems that your product or service is going to solve, without talking about your solution. Find specific use cases that demonstrate the problem that your product will be solving, thereby illustrating the need for your company’s upcoming solution.  Write guest posts for other blogs, comment on relevant blog posts, write articles, write an e-book, speak at conferences and events, open a Twitter account and start sharing information that illustrates your point of view.  There’s no end of ways to get your message out there.  What forums or organizations do they participate in?  What blogs and newsletters do they read?  Get your message in front of them in the places where they already are.

News Releases Can Be About Anything

News releases are a great way to build pre-launch awareness. Generating new releases by-passes the search engines filters for unique content.  News is something that is meant to be duplicated and thus, it is not de-valued for its non-uniqueness.  In addition to the content, a news release needs to answer the five questions: who, what, where, when, and why.  An essential in today’s web savvy customers is to include link back to your website. Other than the obvious product and company announcements, news releases can be case studies, interviews, contest announcements, human interest, and community service. There’s no rule that says you have to have an available product to start producing new releases. They can be easily and cost effectively released on the Internet through such online services as PRLog.org, PR.com and PRWeb.com.

Visibility Through Publications

Writing and publishing articles, white papers, or books about your topic is a great way to get your visibility. Many trade or professional organization will publish articles of interest to their members in their newsletters or journals. You can also register your articles at ideamarketer.com, selfgrowth.com, submitYourArticle.com and ezinearticles.com.

Build a Relationship With A Ready-made Customer Base

Don’t go it alone unless you have to. It’s much easier to build a customer base if you piggyback on other organizations. Instead of trying to reach the customer directly, it may be easier to build a relationship with another company that already has an establish customer base.

Building awareness and marketing takes a long time. One of the biggest mistakes a startup can make is to engage in marketing too late or to be timid with their marketing.

Filed under: From Concept to Start-Up,Marketing & Sales

Tags: article marketing, blogging, customer awareness, market strategy, pre-launch marketing, relationship marketing, start up, start up marketing