Build a Pre-Launch Email and Contact List
If you can start building a list of email contacts who may be interested in your business once you’re ready for launch, you’ll set yourself up for success post-launch.
Email is the most valuable way to reach your target audience, because you actually OWN your email list. Unlike social media platforms, which can decide your content isn’t worth showing in people’s feeds, email lets you send whatever message you want to your list whenever you want.
So how can you build a list before launching your business? There are a few common ways that can help you find interested customers and build a list: giveaways, eBook downloads, and free trials.
Publish Guest Posts
If you recently launched your website, Google and other search engines probably don’t yet see your site as an authority in your industry. You should definitely focus on publishing content on your website and building high quality backlinks to your site to set your site up for long-term success. However, if you want to speed up that process and start building awareness organically and start getting referral traffic to your site, guest posts are a great way to do so.
Guest posts are basically blog posts, but you publish them on other websites with existing readerships and established traffic. You can share value with those sites’ readers while also getting people to click links back to your website.
Use Influencers to Accelerate Growth
Influencer marketing is a fairly new concept, but it really has been going on forever. Think about how fashion brands get celebrities to wear their clothes so that more people will want to buy them. This is the same concept that you can use to promote your brand.
The most important part of influencer marketing is qualifying and selecting which influencers to work with. If you are a software product for businesses, obviously you wouldn’t want to promote that with an influencer who talks about fitness products. You probably already know who the biggest influencers are in your industry, so now you just need to reach out to them to see how much they charge for mentioning your product or sharing it with their followers.
Establish Credibility on Reddit and Quora
You’ll need to be sneaky about openly marketing your brand on Reddit and Quora, but if done correctly you can find major benefit on both of these sites.
Reddit gets millions of visitors every day and the site is broken into subreddits that cover specific topics. If you can find a community that may be interested in your product, you can scan the discussions in those communities to find insights about your customers.
The best way to use Reddit and Quora to attract customers is to insert yourself into conversations related to your product and casually drop a link to your website, or casually mention your brand. Both of these sites, specifically Reddit, are very against people blatantly promoting their businesses.
Build Virality and Growth Loops Into Your Product
Many of the most successful companies over the past decade or so have risen to success thanks to building strategies for growth directly into their products. If you can incentivize your users to share your business with their networks, you can drastically accelerate your growth.
Companies like Dropbox and Clubhouse used this strategy well. Dropbox rewarded anyone who referred a friend with free storage space. As a result, Dropbox’s growth skyrocketed. Clubhouse used a different strategy. It made its platform exclusive to select users and gave them each a limited number of invites to refer their friends. Because the platform was exclusive, people were motivated to ask their friends if they had any invites. The combination of exclusivity and FOMO (fear of missing out) can be an incredibly powerful way to drive growth.
Leverage SEO for Free Traffic
Many startups are constantly fighting and clawing for short-term wins as they just try to stay alive early in their lifecycle. Although short-term wins are important, they often come at the expense of overlooking longer-term more sustainable growth. SEO is a long-term investment. It can take 3-6 months to see any traction at all.
So why then would any startup focus on SEO? Because it can provide a constant flow of new visitors to your site for years without you doing anything after publishing new content. Organic search traffic is incredibly valuable because it allows you to target people based on their intent (and what they’re looking for).
If you can get your site ranking on the first page of Google, you can continue to see traffic on a daily basis for free. And if you target the right keywords for your business you can get your site in front of people who are already looking for your product.
Establish a Crystal Clear Value Proposition
Startups have a habit of using unclear or overly broad value propositions, and that ends up being a barrier for their growth. To maximize the speed at which your company can grow, you need to make sure that your messaging around what your company does is as clear as possible.
Information taken from Christian Stewart
