Have you ever wondered how to get thousands of customers before you even have a product? If the answer is yes, you’ve come to the right place! We talked to Simon Solotko, Chief Marketing Officer at IdeaPros, about one secret successful marketers never reveal.
The Process
The secret we are talking about is a continuous process, but some key milestones can help you separate marketing activities. We divided it into 4 phases: pre-disclosure, pre-marketing, pre-sales, and launch.
- Pre-disclosure: Everything you do before you disclose is what you have. You may build early audiences while understanding who your potential customers are. The modern paths to generating an audience are all about social media, web marketing, content and online marketing, and crowdfunding. Once you capture them, you want to gather their email, name, and sometimes a phone number. Texting is a powerful strategy. Email campaigns are too. The more info you have on them the better off you are in the long run.
- Pre-marketing: You start to market your product or app, but you are not selling yet.
- Pre-sales: Starts after you’ve disclosed your product or app. You’ve done marketing and you’ve injected yourself into communities of potential buyers. At this point, you start taking pre-orders for your product. They could be on a crowdfunding platform, simple deposits, or expressions of interest and email addresses. The best approach is to try to get people to buy or commit to buying your product before the launch.
- Launch: Starts when you have the product available for sale in a normal and traditional way.
“The intimacy that you build with your customers early on is extremely valuable because it helps you to sell the product subsequently.” – Simon Solotko
Identifying Communities of Interest
The first thing you want to do is to identify people online and offline who might be interested in your product or app. Embed yourself in these communities. The best time to do it is before you have a product or a commercial interest. As people will accept you more, you will know all the rules of the community once you start selling.
“If you’re perceived as someone who’s legitimately trying to solve a problem, people will accept you more openly.” – Simon Solotko
Social Media Engagement
Once you have identified your online community, you need to join and participate in online groups such as Facebook groups and LinkedIn groups for certain areas of business. You can also join more localized forums like Next Door.
From 2018 to 2019, there are 2.1 million more users on social media. This does not take into consideration our current situation. We are all spending much more time there. In case you lack a friendly and accessible personality together with knowledge about social media, find a partner who can help you reach people, and understand social media better.
Content Marketing
Once you’ve engaged with your online community tell them your story through great content. Choose topics you are an authority in. A great way to create content is through video. Apart from being a huge part of marketing campaigns, you can turn a video into many different things such as infographics, blogs, podcasts, SlideShares, and etc. Be ready to invest TIME. Content marketing is one of the most consuming parts of marketing.
Web Presence
Web marketing matters. Get your web presence up and running early. Tell people what you do, capture their interest, and engage your audience. You can create a landing page in MailChimp and start building your list there. Put your best foot forward even if it’s a limited foot.
Management Tools
The most important management tool in the universe is writing things down. You can use Google Docs to share your documents with collaborators and get everyone to participate constructively. There are also tools for managing lists of people called CRMs or customer relationship management applications like Nimble, for example. It helps you track your contacts and how you engage with them. Now you know the secret, don’t forget to start working on making it happen.
The “Idea Pros” at IdeaPros have the resources, experience, and tools to help you at this step or any step in the entrepreneurial journey.
We partner with entrepreneurs at any stage and who are ready to invest their ideas. Apply for an interview and let’s explore partnering together.
Want to see the products we have launched? Check out IdeaPros Launchpad!