Early Stage Marketing How to build your follower & ambassador base

1. Marketing & Fundraising for
Your Online Business
eCommerce - Making Customers Happy - London

2. Early-stage marketing
How to build up your follower & ambassador base
David Sayce
Digital Marketing Consultant

3. How important is pre-launch marketing?
Vital…
You must make the market aware of your business if you're to make
sales from the start.
It begins with researching your market to gauge demand

4. No Silver Bullet!
• Plan it out
• Choose benefits over features
• Show, don’t tell
• Use local-targeted content
• Evaluate traffic sources
• Focus on the right audience

5. Examples

6. Build A Pre-Launch Page
Drive pre-launch sign up and sharing

7. Benefits of a pre-launch landing page
• Increase awareness of your brand
• Test interest in your concept
• Understand your customers better
• Prepare people for what’s to come
• Start building your email contacts database

8. Keep your page updated

9. Get your early followers to promote

10. Email Marketing
Not everyone in your target market is
going to know to visit your website, so
you need to go to them.
The best way to do this is to build up a
quality contact list and send out emails
that entice them to visit your site.
Online branding really gets a boost
when the emails include something
timely, like a special sale or sneak
peak at a new product.

11. Build your own website
Websites - Given the variety of affordable
website builders around these days, it
makes sense to take matters into your own
hands
• Squarespace
• Shopify
• Wordpress
Self Hosting
• TSO Hosting (use dsayce10 discount)
• GoDaddy

12. Tell Your Story on Social Media
Build a loyal audience, bring them along on the journey, from the beginning

13. A Twitter campaign was started almost a year before the
store opened
• Tweet often, tweet consistently (Try Buffer App)
• Try tweeting at different times of the day to see when you get the best
responses
• Find competitors and experts in your field and follow them.
• Re-Tweet what others have posted if you think it will add value to your profile.
• Design and add a custom Twitter background for your profile to direct traffic
back to your launch page

14. Find your audience
Try followerwonk.com

15. Target your audience £££
With the correct targeting even modest amounts can get results

16. Dollar Shave Club
Dollar Shave Club went to great lengths to make a video that describes their product
perfectly with some humor mixed in.

17. The original video was a big part of their pitch to
investors, even before it was unveiled on YouTube
• Launched March 2012
• $35,000 + $1 Million funding
• Cost $4,500 ($50,000)
• In the first 48 hours on YouTube
12,000 people signed up.
• Viewed over 21 million times since
• Valued at $615 Million (2015)
If your brand can give someone an
experience unlike any other; something
they can share on Instagram, or
mention to their coworkers, they will be
that much more pleased (and loyal) in
the long run
When you're launching a new business
and sharing a new idea, if you can get
people to remember it, there's obviously
a better chance at success.

18. Using video as part of your marketing mix
The point is, a decent launch video is at least worth the effort. If you're
trying to get maximum publicity at the lowest possible cost, you can't do
much better, though you should consider the following expert tips.
• Don’t release in a vacuum
• Make it funny, or at least entertaining
• Make it Relevant
• Make sure your tech can support it

19. …A few more options
• Use your friends or the influential people you know to refer you and your
product on the social and professional platforms.
• Offer sneak peeks of your product/service/app, show people what it is all
about.
• A great way to engage people is to hold competitions that offers early
access, discounts, paid access or the product itself as the prize.
• Use the signup link in the signature of your normal emails that you send.
• Digital marketing is not everything, also have a real world strategy in mind.

20. Tips
• Track responses from different channels, understand what works
• Segment your email lists through pre-launch
• Be consistent
• Plan ahead
• Don’t stop

21. David Sayce
Digital Marketing Consultant
www.dsayce.com
email@dsayce.com
@dsayce
https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dsayce