Product Launch - Marketing

I also have a start up working on our first product launch in a few short months. I have asked the same question to friends who have gone through this before and most of the time I am getting the same answers:

1. Start your own company Blog and start creating content relevant to your industry immediately (even if your still unsure when your product will launch).

2. Find the "online watering holes" or forums where your potential customers hang out and start joining in on the conversation. Sooner or later you will start getting noticed.

3. Get your website with blog up and running asap, even if you are not ready to sell. This will help alot with SEO, because you will be able to create more backlinks to your site.

4. (This can be extremely valuable). Make a list of the top bloggers in your industry, subscribe to their RSS feeds and post relevant and interesting comments on each new blog post (try to be in the first 10 comments each time to make sure the blogger notices you). When the time is right, e-mail them directly asking them to review your product for their blog (sincerely).

Remember: Getting 5 bloggers each with 1,000 followers to review your product can send 5,000 targeted visitors to your site, costing nothing but your time. How much will 5,000 PPC's cost you?

You'll notice that most of the advice costs nothing (except if you need to hire a web designer). And its the advice i'll be following for my product launch.

Best of luck!

Your best bet is to start creating content (blogging) about your industry. Then I would focus on the industry you are in and try to become active in the community -- reach out to other bloggers and business owners.

Find out where your customers "hang out" online and try to figure out the best way to engage them.

Without knowing any of this information, your adwords campaign will likely be pretty inefficient.

Create the objectives you need to achieve for your company to succeed. Revenue, paying customers, brand awareness...whatever. Work through the tactics you can do to achieve each. And prioritize those in importance to achieving the overall company success.

In the revenue category, look at each tactic in terms of overall customer acquisition costs. Search engine marketing will cost you $x per customer. Banner advertising $Y. Make a laundry list of all you could potentially do, filter it down with your knowledge to those things that make sense then find out however (research, asking others...) you can what the likely acquisition costs are for each tactic. Lowest cost, top priority.

As a bootstrapped start up approaching your first product launch with no brand recognition whatsoever the first order of business is to develop a marketing strategy

In the meantime, here are 6 things that you can do...

1. Buy your own keyword optimized URL
2. Set up a Word Press blog using
3. Set up a business page on Facebook
4. Set up a Twitter account
5. Join some niche specific forums
6. Set up a LinkedIn account and join industry specific groups

Note that completing these 6 steps can be achieved for as little as $10 even if you are not technically minded

Please contact me if you need more help