I've listed here below some important steps to take into account from pre-launch to a successful launch that has helped me with various projects 🙂
By doing a brand style guide at first can ensure your brand is reflected across all channels effectively. You don't need to go through the process of what a design agency would do, but creating a guide for yourself for colours, logo, messaging + fonts can help you save time to create assets fast for all channels.
It may seem like a no-brainer but you need to make sure everything is as polished as possible. If users come across something which feels like "amateur hour", it may hurt their trust and decrease their chances of signing up for your product.
What can you learn from other companies who have successfully launched their brand/product/service? There's a lot you can learn from top launches that you can take into account for your own launch strategies.
- What companies did successful pre-launch strategies?
- What did companies that did well do when they did their launches? What channels did they use? What was the messaging?
Similar to the above, get a list together and do in-depth research into what your competitors or even companies not within your niche did with their launches. It's easy to do. Create an Airtable or Google Sheet and aim for 10. I can say from experience doing this exercise helps save time and provide more ideas.
In conjunction with the above, do an analyse into what your competitors are doing across all their active channels. How can you do an even better job?
Bonus resource: I wrote this guide on social listening & competitor spy tools to help with tracking what competitors are doing.
Unless you have a lot of funding behind your startup or product, then you're going to have a hard time to ensure your product can be found on Google under a 'competitive' name or term.
Google organic search will be a key channel for your product or startup as you grow. The importance of this consideration may not seem as important right now, but it will be in 12+ months time after your launch.
There's nothing worse when you do a launch and your hosting let's you down with a slow site. When your launch is successful, there's nothing worse than being let down by your hosting. I've seen this happen a lot and has happened to me once as well. The feeling isn't great. Pay for good hosting.
There's an array of options on the market for email marketing tools, but which ones makes sense for you? Try and focus on choosing an email provider that you can grow into as your subscriber list builds. So if you require advanced automations based on user actions, I suggest going with that tool. You can of course change providers down the track, but it's tedious + annoying (again, speaking from experience).
Make it easy for users to find other critical pages that will help their decisions to turn into paying customers. Prioritise which other pages make sense to make evident both in the main header menu, footer menu or even within the homepage content.
Give the attention these pages deserve in terms of design, content + other elements which make a great landing page. Don't underestimate good design and great messaging.
Setup your analytics for your own personal success. By this I mean ensure you can setup everything from end-to-end so you can see which a full view of what happens when users enter the funnel. Having this working can help you quickly identify what leaks/gaps you may have which you can then fix.
Social proof = big factor for user conversion. Collect as much social proof as you can which you can then leverage by using across all channels of your funnel. Embed reviews on your website, share reviews on your social channels, include testimonials in your ads, etc.
This is the best form of content to start generating buzz for your brand fast.
Just before you launch and have everything essentially in place, test with some beta users to get their feedback. Based on their feedback, make the key changes before going live. Even at this point, collect social proof quotes/testimonials you can use for your branding.
Before launching your product to the public, consider sharing your product to a dedicated niche community to get some further feedback. This only makes sense if it's a smaller niche community such as a Facebook Group. If the group or community forum has a large user base of potential customers, then hold off until you have ironed out bugs or problems.
Another strategy worth considering is cold emailing potential prospects. Everyone has different opinions when it comes to cold emailing, which these opinions are certainly understable if you don't do this strategy correctly, but can be a powerful low-cost strategy to get some initial feedback. Ensure you do personalised outreach not generic. In fact if generic messaging, it can work against you.
Another great way to get some early user feedback before pushing hard to the public is using super targeted, low-cost ads. Facebook, Instagram + Google Ads are a great way to run ads to your target audience and get some traffic flowing in. See how visitors engage with your website + what actions they do after.
Running ads also as a strategy is a great way to build a waiting list.
If it makes sense, consider building a waiting list consisting of your early beta users + then acquiring more via other channels. Run some ads or post in forums talking about your product and why they should sign up for the launch date. Lots of startups + successful products have done this.
Woo! Now it's time to launch your product and there are numerous channels + communities to do this at a low-cost. If you're in the startup space then the likes of Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Makerlog, Slack Groups + other communities are great to launch to a larger audience.
Now you have a solid base, how can you potentially get PR or influencers/bloggers within your niche to get them to right articles about your product at a low-cost? Send personalised Loom videos of your product or an epic blog post explaining why your product is a must-try.
Consider submitting your startup/product into directories where your consumers may be. Of course, be careful not posting into too many directories.
I think this is a good strategy as it focuses on momentum for all the attention your recent launch will receive. Why not run a small competition? It can be focused on UGC to try and get more people talking about your brand or product.
As an idea, you can have a prize of winning "1 of 5 Annual subscriptions", and users go into the chance of winning by sharing a tweet with using 140 characters or less why they should receive the prize. Of course, you can come up with a better idea than this, but you get the point.
In relation to keeping the momentum high to try more hype/buzz for the brand and launch, considering paying influencers within your niche to do a post/video advocating for your product. It's a great way to build credibility fast and relay the main message your trying to get across to potential users.
Once a lot of your main launch work is underway, focus on creatine videos + larger pieces of content around your product solution. Again, a focus on creating content that can keep up with the momentum of the launch can help generate more traffic + increase word-of-mouth.
However, it's not just about creating content. You then need to have a distribution + even a repurposing of content plan to get as much mileage out of the hard work you're doing for creating the content in the first place. Share like crazy :)
