MARKETING BEFORE LAUNCH?

How Unbounce got 20,000 monthly website visits and over 5000 leads before launch.

The best product is not a product with a ton of amazing features but a product that customers love.

Episode 3: Startup Marketing: Simple answer on how to save more than $10,000

Unbounce is a Landing Page Builder & Platform, co-founded by Rick Perreault in 2009. Rick started out as a designer and saw a problem that needed to be solved.

I saw time and time again that, while we were running these marketing campaigns, our clients couldn’t get landing pages made. They’d have to go through their IT department for anything related to their website. It was really frustrating and slowed people down. - Rick

When I talk with founders, their idea of marketing is running ads when a product is launched but I tell them that’s not the case. Unlike popular belief, marketing should start when the idea is conceived.

2 reasons why you should do marketing before launch

1. To validate your idea and build a product for users
2. To get early traction for your product.

These are 2 core reasons for the survival and growth of your product. We will be using the Unbounce growth story as a case study on why marketing before launch is a priority for startups.

To validate your idea and build a product for users

The one thing we did really well was, long before we started coding, we did a lot of interviews of prospective customers and other marketers, to really validate the pain. That allowed us to focus on building something that people were actually going to pay for. — Rick

It’s one thing to have an idea from a problem and it’s another to build a product from that idea that people will love and pay you for.?

You need to make sure;

• Your idea actually solves a need/problem for your target market.
• Your target market will be willing to use your product when developed.
• Your target market will be willing and able to pay for your product when the time comes.
• You are able to scale the idea or product by using market expansion or product expansion.

? Warning?: Do not build without validating your idea

Case study 2: Google Wave

It’s hard to believe the mighty Google will create something that failed, but it actually happened. Google launched “Google wave” in 2009. Wave is a web-based computing platform and communications protocol designed to merge key features of communications media, such as email, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.?

The product was built with the intent of solving a problem, but it failed because of its complexity. The users just couldn't understand how to get value from the product. Unfortunately, Google pulled the plug on the project but it left with a great lesson to startups.?

Know ye thy customers — it will make or mar any business

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How to validate your idea

Validating your startup idea is not and should not be rocket science, it’s as easy as creating a survey or talking to friends and family, depending on your market segment.

• Write down the problem and solution?
• Write down your market segment
• Build your hypotheses
• Build a landing page or create a survey or 1:1 chat
• Run ads to drive traffic to your landing page or post organically to groups where your target market are located
• Get insights from them.

If possible talk to a lot of them. Communicating with your target market give you a sense of how to build the solution for your market.

I had the pain, and I needed a solution, but I wanted to see if other people had the pain. At first I went out to my network, and that was encouraging, because others in my network had the same pain. But then I thought, ‘my friends and family think it’s a good idea, let’s go out to the world and see if this pain is universal.

I used Facebook ads and sent people to a survey I created on Survey Monkey. I remember that you could target people by profession, so I had 42 marketers fill out my survey and leave me their email address where I could contact them. They all expressed the same pain. The more people we interviewed, the more the vision and the solution came together.

Those early days of customer development helped refine Unbounce’s vision, and even exposed the team to some flawed assumptions they had made:

I actually had assumed that the real pain was just getting the landing pages made, and that once that was done, marketers could then just plug in Google Analytics and use Google website optimizer for testing. That’s what a lot of marketers were using, but it turns out that that was a huge pain as well because it required somebody with coding skills to tag all the pages. This was long before Optimizely made it super easy, so that was a problem.

We assumed marketers would use the tools that were out there, but they found those tools too hard, so we actually had to build it into Unbounce if it was going to be something worth buying.

Can you even imagine Unbounce without A/B testing?. As it turns out, that core feature only exists because of the customer development the team did early on.

FYI: Validating your idea will give you a shoo-in when talking to investors and partners in the building stage.

To get early traction for your product.

Tell me which is better…

Spend time and money building the “perfect” product, and have to wait for another 2 to 6 months (depending on your market and budget) to start seeing traction on the product

Or Start marketing before launch and have over 1k leads ready to use and pay for your product when it is launched in the market just like Unbounce.

I will leave you to decide????.

Unbounce started blogging 6 months before the launch of their product. Their aim was to warm the market and get leads before the product is released in the market.

We worked hard, blogging, guest posting and promoting, and by the time we launched, we already had a reputation in the space. The thought leaders we had built relationships with talked about our product and got people interested. I don’t think there would’ve been any other way to succeed. — Rick

They started SEO and content marketing early on even before it became what it is now, and maintain consistency, by the time they launch they were already ranking no 1 for their main keywords, getting 20,000 monthly visits, and had over 5,000 people signed up for their email newsletter.

How to market your product before launch

While you might not go all out with billboards and TV ads, you can definitely start small.

• Start building a following on social media — create social media channels to meet your target market.
• Build a coming soon landing page with early beta users (You can add exclusivity effect to make it more valuable)
• Run ads to your landing page
• Of course, start content marketing and SEO — creating content for blogs, newsletters, podcasting, guest posting, etc.
• Attend/sponsor events with your offline merchandise

Basically create buzz for your product before it is released to the market.

Don’t wait before you start marketing your product even if it is just an idea, most times the market don't buy a product they buy an experience — Kate Ovwighose

FYI:?Unbounce raised $38.4M to build better landing pages with automation

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See you in the next episode — Growth marketing series EP. 5