The Ultimate Pre-Launch Marketing Game Plan

6 Months Before the Launch

Know your competition

Have a marketing consultant identify your competition’s products, pricing, and position. Do the research to see what marketing strategies they are using, and what keywords they are targeting. Know who you’re up against and see what you can offer that they aren’t! Doing this research will give you a huge advantage on what perks you should highlight during your marketing launch.

Define your target

Hire branding services to define your target down to the most minute details. Doing comparisons of different prospects and trailing through the likelihood of their interest in your company will help narrow down further what you should be pandering to.

If B2C:

• Location
• Age
• Job
• Interest
• Lifestyle
• Family, kids…
• Sex
• Habits
• Income
• User vs Decision maker

If B2B: 

• Industry
• Location
• User vs decision maker
• Business size
• Pain points

Define personas

One great example is Lululemon. The activewear brand narrowed their entire audience down to two specific personas: Ocean and Duke. Each persona has specific characteristics like age, annual income, interests, and even relationship status.

Design

Design a strong logo: Set up a few concepts, get the team together for a showdown, and then make the final decision. Don’t be afraid to reach out to designers, or to implement an online competition with a reward for whose logo you choose!

Design your website: there’s a lot of components to work through for this, check out our expanded insight on how to load up your website!

Strategic planning & marketing strategy

Plan, plan, plan! Now is the time to work on your marketing strategy!

3 Months Before the Launch

That was a lot to take care of! You’re not out of the woods yet though, now we have to take a look at what needs to be done for your marketing game plan by the 3 month prior mark.

Create a landing page

When creating your landing page, you can have a lot of fun, and don’t be afraid to seek ou for a marketing consultant, but you need to make sure you are hitting the 5 key components:

1. Simple design – keep it clean and focused
2. Prominent logo and form – even a self-made logo can look great, but don’t be scared to ask a professional.
3. Sharing incentive – why should they pass along your message? Give them something that piques their interest.
4. Clear, concise, and impactful content – look around and see what your competitors have been talking about, then find something new!
5. Interactive – whether it’s polls, videos, or click-through links, give the client something to do instead of just reading.

Help at events

Take a look in your area, and just beyond that, for client events, partner events, and launch events that could be useful for you to attend to spread your word and make strong connections.

Create a crowdfunding campaign! 

This could help you:

• Finance your project
• Create buzz
• Test your market
• Generate presales

Contact the press

Communicate with the press: Prepare a PR release that you can send to journalists

Media kit: Have all the information journalists might need ready to go: biography, pictures, logo, details information about your business story and your products…

Journalistic source platforms: SourceBottle and other similar platforms are used by journalists when they are writing articles and need the help of experts. This is an opportunity for you to create a network among journalists and start building brand awareness in different publications.

Work with your influencers!

• Offer free products
• Offer a commission on sales
• Organize an Influencer event
• Publish Co-branded content
• Use them for beta tests

Run ads

Start creating a momentum around your brand through online ads, whether you do them yourself or reach out to PPC services.

1 Week Before the Launch

You’re almost there! In the final week before your official launch you should be down to these last few tasks.

• Test your different platforms
• Plan your communication of social media
• Prepare an article and communicate with the press for the launch
• Create relevant content
• Share viral content on social media
• Prepare an e-mail to your contacts, partners, and influencers saying that you are open for business!

If you follow along with these points, you are sure to feel more prepared than ever to handle all of your pre-launch marketing game plan needs. Whether you do it all by yourself, or do the prep before a marketing consultant comes in, marketing is an often overlooked, key component of getting your business off of the ground.