How to Build Buzz and Capture Early Interest for Your Startup Product Launch?
Learn how to build anticipation and ensure a strong launch with compelling content, beta programs, and influencer collaborations to secure excitement and early interest in your product.
One of the biggest challenges, for any startup, is customer mobilization. A strong launch is often characterized by gaining early traction and user interest even before the product hits the market. Especially, if the product requires more than one type of user to function, i.e., buyers and sellers for a marketplace. Startups can struggle to build momentum, capture user interest, and create a buzz that can make or break the product's initial reception. The absence of initial excitement can significantly impact the overall success and market perception of a new offering.
First, let’s define what a product launch is. Product Marketing Alliance defines a product launch as a process in which a new product or service is brought to market by a company. The primary purpose of a launch is to provoke a sense of anticipation and generate awareness of your product amongst your target audience.
Generally speaking there are three phases of a product launch:
Pre-launch
Launch
Post-launch
In this edition, we’ll focus on the pre-launch process. We have identified three powerful strategies that can help you build anticipation and gather early user interest:
Online Engagement
To effectively reach and engage your target audience, identify key platforms, and niche forums where potential customers are active. By creating compelling content that tells a captivating story about your product and its benefits can help you create and maintain user interest.
This can be done through a variety of formats including blogs, videos, teasers, and infographics. Additionally, running interactive contests and challenges with attractive incentives like giveaways, early access to the product, or exclusive rewards for participation and engagement can be a powerful tool as well.
Exclusive Previews
Developing a beta program, by selecting a group of potential users who can provide valuable feedback, helps to refine your product while it generates word-of-mouth promotion. Even in today's age of viral content and online ads, word-of-mouth is still an incredible tool to lure users. After all, what makes something go viral is thousands of people sharing it with their social circles online.
Launching a referral program that encourages beta testers to invite others by rewarding referrals with discounts, exclusive content, or early access to premium features, helps to organically grow your user base before the official launch. On the other hand, teaser campaigns can build anticipation too, by releasing sneak peeks and behind-the-scenes content that showcases the development process will spark excitement if done correctly.
Influencers and Brand Ambassadors
Having influencers use and share your new product or service will generate the pre-launch buzz you are looking for. It serves as the ideal customer testimonial from genuine and relatable users of your brand.
Partner with influencers to host collaborative online events, including webinars, live Q&A sessions, or virtual launch parties, to significantly amplify your reach and engagement before the product launch.
Turning Strategies into Actionable Steps
Phase 1: Preparation
Step 1: Conduct audience and market research
Start by by collecting insights through focus groups, personas, and customer surveys to grasp the demographics and user experience requirements. This will help you identify your potential customers and the issues they need resolved. Additionally, perform competitor research to gain a clear understanding of the market landscape and how your product integrates within it.
Step 2: Content Strategy
Defining a clear and compelling brand message that highlights the product's unique value proposition is key for your content strategy. Use this message consistently across all content types to ensure a cohesive brand voice. Content pillars that align with key themes such as product features, company story, customer testimonials, and educational material can help you create content material.
Step 3: Platform Selection
This step is rather straightforward, choose primary platforms (e.g., Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok) based on target audience to plan accordingly time and type of publication.
Phase 2: Social Media Marketing
Email Campaigns
Emails in pre-launch campaigns can build anticipation, drive website traffic, gather feedback, generate early sales, and nurture customer relationships. To build an email list, use strategies such as creating an engaging landing page, placing opt-in forms on your website, offering incentives for sign-ups, starting referral programs, and using social media promotions to drive sign-ups. These tactics enhance conversion rates and subscriber base.
A powerful tool to aid you on campaigns so you can easily capture customer emails is ScoreApp. A Scorecard is much like a quiz (questionnaire / assessment / test) but rather than just collecting answers from people with no value returned, a Scorecard uses the data collected to instantly provide valuable insights back to the person taking it. This makes it an amazing lead magnet in it’s own right. Your lead gets more value than ever because it’s tailored specifically to them, and you get a tonne of data in the process which increases your ability to sell.
Teaser Campaigns
Teaser campaigns create anticipation by revealing just enough to engage audiences, without fully unveiling the larger campaign or project. They effectively elevate a company's profile prior to the full campaign launch.
Waiting Lists
A waitlist is a group of potential customers who express interest in your offer before it becomes available, typically by providing their email address in exchange for perks like early access or exclusive bonuses. This strategy is especially effective if your offer involves scarcity, such as limited spots in a coaching program or exclusive 1:1 sessions. Incorporating a waitlist in your pre-launch plan allows your audience to demonstrate their interest early and gives them more time to decide on purchasing, increasing the likelihood of conversions when the product officially launches.
BTS Content
Behind-the-scenes (BTS) content has emerged as a powerful tool for creators and marketers, captivating audiences through its authenticity, educational value, and ability to humanize brands. It achieves this by showcasing the people behind products and services. It educates and inspires by providing insights into skill development and creative problem-solving. It also generates excitement and engagement by offering previews of upcoming projects, building transparency and trust. This unique approach strengthens connections with audiences in ways traditional marketing cannot achieve.
Phase 3: Partnerships
Step 1: Identify Key Collaborators
Choosing the best influencers means looking at their followers and their special area. Followers include both direct followers and others who engage through social media features. The special area is what the influencer focuses on. While followers help brands connect with a large, trusting audience, the special area can be used for plans about certain topics.
Step 2: Outreach and Collaboration
Please ensure your outreach messages clearly present the objectives and mutual advantages of the collaboration. Suggest various launch-focused collaborations, such as exclusive previews, live event coverage, countdown posts, and pre-launch teasers. Remember to allow influencers creative freedom to preserve authenticity.
Step 3: Amplify Content
For an effective product launch, use a strategy including cross-promotion, paid ads, and hashtag campaigns. Share content from influencers and partners, boost important posts, and use unique hashtags for user-generated content. Engage with the audience through likes, comments, and shares, and maintain interest with interactive content. Highlight influencer content, distribute press releases, and collaborate with similar brands.
Without an effective pre-launch strategy, you risk launching your product to a market that is unaware or uninterested, leading to poor initial sales and visibility. No matter how good your product is if no one knows about it, or finds it valuable enough to recommend it to their social circle it will not take off leading to stunned growth.
Building anticipation and interest for your product before its launch is essential for a few reasons. It allows for market validation, confirming there's demand for the product, thus reducing the investment risk in a product that might not meet market needs. Engaging potential customers early fosters a sense of involvement and loyalty, making them more likely to support and promote the product upon release. Such engagement also boosts sales since pre-launch activities like teasers and waitlists encourage early purchases and create a sense of urgency.
Creative Corner
Creative corner showcases innovative examples to inspire out-of-the-box thinking.
Making it easier to keep track of daily hydration goals, Emily Chong and Nathan Chan started Healthish and created sleek water bottles with timestamps. In this episode of Shopify Masters, Nathan and Emily talk product development and building their business through influencer marketing. Click here to listen to this episode on Spotify.
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