How would you do pre-launch marketing?
Curious how you would do pre-launch marketing for a new product under a new brand with near zero following and no traction. What would your first few steps be? Would you use any marketing platforms? How would you do it?
Background: My product is https://getassigned.com. We're still a couple months out from launching. We've generated some amount of traction between word of mouth, email marketing and Reddit. But I'm in no hurry since this is a bootstrapped, nights and weekends project and I'm intending to onboarding users one at a time at the start. Originally, I didn't want to do any marketing since word of mouth was working fine, but the feedback has been so positive, I figured I should explore my options.
Would love to know the community's opinion!
I've done a number of GTM strategies now, you'll want to consider a few things:
Identify your ideal audience. What platforms do they use and can you efficiently search for them. This is important for identifying where you should be spending your time and funds. Get specific (segment) - it's easier and more effective to go from smaller to bigger.
How can you generate usage of your product to drive initial engagement, customer stories, and buzz in your community? One way to do this is to provide your services for free (immediate value), for a limited time. You're on a subscription model. Short-term revenue is less important than the insights you'll gain and the overall lifetime value of a customer once you have them.
How will you drive awareness? Paid advertising? Earned media/press? Partnered placements? 1:1 direct messaging? Understanding what you have as resources is important so you can focus on the channels that are viable for you.
Thanks for the detailed feedback! I wasn't intending to do any paid advertising. Initial plan was to do 1:1 DMing for all initial onboarding, but partnered placements might be a good option. Goal would be to purposely onboard extremely slowly to make sure each customer is comfortable with the platform and with reaching out for questions.
Have you tried using referral softwares for outreach?
Not yet. I was planning on launching into referral after launch and after I get a few people paying for the platform.