How to Develop a Successful Pre-Launch Marketing Strategies?

A good pre-launch marketing strategy could be the single factor that separates a successful product launch from a failed one. You could easily generate initial revenues and sales with the right pre-launch marketing strategy.

By taking the necessary steps, it would be easy to create massive awareness and generate the needed buzz around your product. And if you’re looking to build a list, a pre-launch marketing strategy can help you.

Asides from list building, a pre-launch marketing strategy will help you convert visitors into paying customers.

In this guide, you’d discover elements of a pre-launch marketing strategy, and how to create one for your business.

What is Pre-launch Marketing?

Pre-launch marketing involves everything that goes into generating the needed buzz around a product. The primary aim is to generate interest, anticipation, and buzz among the audience. This way, your target customers get to buy the product when it’s released on the market.

Why is Pre-launch Marketing Important?

Pre-launch marketing allows you to generate buzz and excitement around your product. You get to create awareness and possibly generate leads for the product. Furthermore, pre-launch marketing helps you evaluate how effective the various marketing platforms are.

With pre-launch marketing, you can seek feedback from the audience. Using the feedback, it becomes easy to identify what your audience desires and also optimize your marketing efforts.

If done the right way, pre-launch marketing will help you:

• Establish a search-engine-optimized website. It also helps in the creation of a strong online following and social media presence.
• Engage the audience that wants to buy from you and recommend your product to their circle.
• Connect with influencers and ambassadors who will promote your product.
• Gain positive news coverage.
• Create a marketing plan that shows who your audience is. You also get to come up with ways of connecting with your audience.
• Create expectations, positive chatter, and excitement around your product.

Pre-launch Marketing Examples:

Below are few pre-launch marketing examples:

Robinhood:

The commission-free stock trading app generated about a million users before the app launch. Here are some tips that made the pre-launch marketing strategy successful.

• Come up with a pre-launch waitlist
• Offer pre-orders
• Create an easy signup process
• Engage users via gamification
• Build a referral program.

Dropbox:

The company used referral marketing to generate lots of users for their product. The company grew from 100k registered users in 2008 to 33.9 million users in 2020. Here are some tips that made them successful.

• Create a referral program that rewards the sender and the recipient. This way, both parties will be encouraged to get involved
• The referral program has to be part of your onboarding process
• Get customers who have a good grasp of the referral program. These are the people you have to recruit quickly.

Apple:

Apple is a Fortune 100 company that generates lots of hype and excitement about its new products. They do that with relative ease and on a small budget. Their success ingredient is in their master storytelling ability.

A close look at the company reveals that they sell experiences and lifestyles to their audience. And they do that using technology. Their product launches are always filled with ways the Apple product will improve the customer’s life. Little or no technical details are revealed.

Furthermore, they’ve mastered the art of secrecy and mystery. These all add to the level of excitement and anticipation in the heart of their audience.

Here are some key takeaways from their pre-launch marketing strategy.

• Build anticipation and buzz before the product launch
• Focus on the selling experience and not the product or service
• Incorporate secrecy and mystery into your marketing. Limit the information you give away.

PayPal:

PayPal recorded a 10% daily growth. Sometimes, they had a rival user growth for their product launches. The company generated about 100 million users via referral programs.

During the referral program, users were offered a $20 bonus for each signup. Another $20 was offered for referring a friend. As their user base grew, the reward value dropped.

Here are some key takeaways from their strategy.

• Referral marketing can be relatively more effective and somewhat cheaper than regular advertising
• Double-sided referral and signup rewards work
• The referral program should not limit your profitability.

Pre-launch Marketing Strategies

There is no fixed timeline for your pre-launch marketing. It could be from a few weeks to several months. At the end of your pre-launch marketing, you must have:

• A receptive audience that is willing and ready to buy from you
• Email subscribers and social media followers
• A thorough insight into the kind of marketing that is effective for your organization and target demographic.

Here are the strategies to help you accomplish all these.

• Build a compelling pre-launch landing page
• Take advantage of social media
• Leverage the power of effective content marketing
• Collaborate with relevant influencers
• Launch an email marketing campaign
• Run a raffle
• Create some press kit
• Host a webinar
• Host events
• Publish guest posts.

How to Create a Pre-launch Marketing Plan?

Here are easy steps for creating a pre-launch marketing strategy.

Know Your Target Customers:

A good marketing strategy should have practical insight into your target audience. These insights could be information about your audience preferences, demographics, hobbies, and other metrics. This way, you get to create custom content that resonates with your audience.

Find Your Message:

Humans are creatures of emotions. Therefore, your marketing should appeal to your customer’s emotions. Your message should resonate with their hearts, not their heads. You have to position your brand in such a way as to stand out from the crowd.

Set Goals and Metrics:

There is nothing wrong with having ambitious objectives. Your objectives are valid provided you can back them up with action. If your goals are well-defined, the next step is to track them. And that’s why you need to know the right metrics to track. Furthermore, you need to come up with ways to achieve these goals.

Use Exit Pop-Ups:

Existing pop-ups typically pop up when a visitor tries to leave your website. They’re designed to make the visitor stay on your website. You can ask the visitor for their email address so they get to be in the know about future offers. There is also the option of offering a voucher or discount code to your visitors.

Have a Clear Call-To-Action (CTA):

A clear call to action directs your visitors to the next step to follow. It has to be written in polite language and also provide clear direction to the visitor. Simply put, CTAs direct your visitors to take your desired action. It’s a sure strategy that helps you generate the right results during your pre-launch.

Clearly Describe the Product:

You have to provide a thorough description of your product offering. A good explanation of your product helps your potential customers understand your product better. With a good description, you’d likely boost your customer’s confidence in your product. As a rule of thumb, your product description should not be long. It has to be concise and to the point.

Leverage Social Media:

The pre-launch social media marketing is of the essence. During social media marketing, you get to generate excitement and suspense around your product. Here are some easy ways of going about your pre-launch social media marketing.

• Your video teasers should build suspense and have some level of mystery
• You need to offer some explanation about your product and why customers should choose it. This can be showcased during product development updates
• You can elicit excitement using a timer or countdown
• A live ask-me-anything (AMAs) session can come in handy. It can be done with the CEO or any top employee
• Surveys and polls for a better understanding of the needs of your potential customers
• Competitions, contests, and prizes on various social media posts
• Social sharing and posting ratings from creators and influencers
• Monitor your consumer questions and mentions across various social media posts
• Create a distinct hashtag for others.

Things to Check during the Pre-launch PPC Marketing Campaigns:

• You need to have access to an active Google Ads account. The ads account could be yours or that of a client
• Your PPC campaign strategy should be ready
• Approved assets like multimedia and ad copy should be ready
• You need a mobile-friendly and optimized landing page
• Have a list of the needed parameters in your final URL. These should be parameters you’d want to track
• Set up event tracking and on-page conversion
• Have a ready reporting template.

Launching and leaving a campaign without monitoring is a recipe for disaster. You need to keep a close eye on it. And that’s why you need tools like the PPC Signal. The PPC Signal tracks your campaign using smart artificial intelligence.

How PPC Signal Helps You Manage and Optimize Your Google Ads Campaign?

The PPC Signal can accurately analyze the current campaign performance and give idea what may wrong with your campaign. This way, you get to prepare beforehand and possibly come up with ways of evading any issue. However, manually tracking your campaign is somewhat risky. That’s quite true for people who are running multiple campaigns from a single account.

With the PPC Signal, you get to automate the process. And also reduce any form of waste of your time and resources. The tool is built with artificial intelligence and machine learning. It offers accurate tracking, and it helps in optimizing your campaign for improved performance.

Let’s say you want to create more awareness for your product or business. The right metrics to observe are the impressions metrics. The image below shows you the impressions metrics on the PPC Signal tool.

From the signal, you’d see that as your impressions increase, your clicks decrease. That’s an anomaly that needs to be corrected. From the signal, you can see that people are seeing your ads but they’re not interacting with them. Therefore, you need a keyword to revamp and start targeting the right keywords.

However, if you’re more concerned about brand awareness, then you need to keep a close eye on the second signal. This signal is found on the right side of the dashboard.

The PPC Signal shows you how your campaign is performing. Both the good and bad happenings are displayed on the tool.

FAQs:

How Do I Promote My Pre-launch?

• Identify your target audience before launching
• Start early
• Release teasers
• Run a contest
• Build excitement and buzz using influencers
• Create a press kit
• Throw a launch party
• Take advantage of Amazon Live.

How Long Is a Pre-launch Campaign?

To generate a good impact, the pre-launch campaign has to take about three to four months.

What Are Pre-marketing Examples?

The goal of pre-marketing is to create anticipation and generate interest in the product or service, and to build momentum before the official launch. Best examples of pre-marketing is to use teaser and spread through online campaigns. You can also partner with some influencer to give a hint to the followers about product or services before it is properly launch.

What Are the 7 Marketing Tips for Launching New Products?

Here are marketing tips for your product launch.

• Understand your competition
• Target the right customer
• Know your unique value proposition
• Create marketing tactics and strategy
• Perform some A/B testing
• Roll out the campaign
• Have a good grasp of your product’s lifecycle.

Wrap Up:

A successful business goes beyond having the best products and services. You need to have a strong connection between the business and the customers. And that’s where the pre-launch marketing strategy comes in.

If you start building a marketing strategy after creating your product, then it’s probably late. A pre-launch marketing strategy is the foundation of a successful product launch.

The primary essence of a pre-launch marketing strategy is to build brand awareness, excitement, and buzz around the new product.

All marketing assets have to be in place. The articles, social media posts, emails, and everything in between have to be ready. You should also consider incorporating a sense of mystery and secrecy into your campaign.

If you give out too much information, potential customers may become familiar with the product. And like they say, familiarity breeds contempt – and you don’t want that for your new product!

To track your PPC campaigns, you need to consider the PPC Signal tool.

Now you know how to prepare a pre-launch marketing strategy, what marketing assets will you be using for your next launch?