In this article, we’ll share my advice for SaaS marketing  to provide you with eleven concrete ideas for establishing a successful pre-launch marketing strategy in four critical areas:

• Marketing website
• generating leads
• Nurture as a leader
• stack of technology 

Website for pre-launch marketing

Your website serves as your central core. It serves as the framework for your future marketing activities, and it should be constructed with your marketing structure in mind from the start. A website is necessary regardless of the stage of your product and its introduction. It makes it simple to communicate your solution with supporters, the press, investors, partners, and even future clients. During the pre-launch phase, your website should assist you in sharing your brand, story, and product while collecting data, building your list, and testing your fundamental systems.

1. Display your company’s logo

Your website is the first location where you can show off your brand. First, collaborate with your design, content, and development teams to explain your brand strategy and ensure that your design, typography, and copywriting decisions represent a refined, consistent brand. Pay attention to your voice and make sure it is consistent with your product and how you want it to be seen by potential buyers.

2. Tell your story

Your product’s backstory is almost as crucial as the product itself. Use your SaaS website to tell the story of how your solution was conceived, how your founding team met, or an amusing anecdote about the problem that started it all.

An example of a Mail Chimp brand story

With so many brands and options available, your narrative can serve as a significant distinction. Your potential supporters and customers need something to connect with, so research the tale you want to tell thoroughly.

3. Explain your product

Because you are not constrained by the constraints of any external platform, your website is the ideal arena for presenting the specifics of your solution and how it works. Use bespoke visuals or animation to highlight the many components of your product. To explain your more difficult features, consider making a video. Schedule one-on-one walkthroughs with prospective leads with your sales staff.

To inspire genuine interest, focus on the benefits your SaaS solution provides and customize your product explanations to each of your buyer personas.

4. Identify your target audience.

Use your website to learn more about your visitors and modify your website and other marketing assets to provide the best experience possible. Use heat maps and other analytics to analyze how visitors engage with your site, which assets catch their eye, and where they get stuck. Before launching, make changes and generate new marketing materials depending on the actual demands and habits of your users. As a result, when you launch, you will have a higher number of conversions and customer recommendations.

The lead generation before launch

Just because your solution hasn’t been formally released yet doesn’t mean you can’t start generating leads. If you have a solid website foundation, with working forms, as well as email automation, social networks, and other communication channels in place, it may be time to start developing your list, offering a sneak preview of your freemium edition, or even enrolling individuals in your free trial.

To attract potential leads, many of our clients include a call to action in the menu of their pre-launch website. The idea is to have systems in place that capture and organize contact information as it comes in and then serves segmented, automated marketing to those leads. As a result, your pre-launch efforts can begin to stack up, so that when the switch is flipped, you have an eager audience ready for exactly what you have to offer.

5. Put your lead forms through their paces.

The forms you employ to capture leads should be one of the most significant aspects of your launch strategy and testing. Not only should your form be effective in terms of adding leads to your CRM and processing the information you require, but it should also be visually appealing and have the proper length.

A good rule of thumb is to add everything you want to know about someone and then deduct one thing. “Hm, I’d like someone’s first name, last name, firm name, and email address,” for example. Then, keeping in mind that you can usually deduce the firm name from the email address, you may narrow down the form.

An Example of Lead Capture

A quick tip: Include a personalized thank you message or page so the user knows her submission was successful.

6. Collect feedback from freemium subscribers.

If you have a free version of your solution, make it available as soon as it has been tested and debugged. Make sure your beta users receive special pre-launch and improvement communications and show off your brand’s individuality. Your website is frequently, if not always, the first prolonged engagement your audience has with your product. Use your freemium to collect data on your audience and how they use your product before launching it. Then you’ll be able to include data analysis in your content marketing plan.

7. Allow for a free trial period

Along with your freemium, you can use your fully free trial version as part of your pre-launch marketing strategy before launching your full sales drive. Whether you choose a more traditional beta launch that allows access to a select audience first, or you ramp up on list building and marketing at the same time, your free trial can work like a magnet to attract your first leads.

Lead nurturing before launch.

Lead nurturing begins the moment someone completes your form. Your success message and follow-up are your first opportunities to begin nurturing your lead, regardless of how they arrived. Once they’re on your list, consider what would be most useful to them as they travel through your free trial or begin using your freemium. You may nurture leads before and during your launch by using email, social media, and marketing automation.

8. Send out automatic emails.

Once you’ve compiled a list of pre-launch leads, consider how you may improve their experience with your free trial, freemium version product, content, or your brand itself. Depending on the complexity of your data, separate your pre-launch list and send a consistent stream of helpful marketing or confirmation emails tailored to each persona or section.

Consider a pre-launch trial in which you introduce your solution to your initial users. Try out the two examples below from my previous essay on SaaS email campaigns.

During your free trial, try the following five email themes, spread out a few days apart:

• Welcome to the trial: Tell us how you get the most out of your product.
• An Example of a Use Case Shares a couple of easy use cases for your product.
• Show off your top reviews as social evidence.
• Soft offer with content: Dig a little deeper with your content and make a suggestion about your offer.
• Direct offer: Sell your product with a sense of urgency.

Increase your open rate to make these emails even more effective!

9. Expand your social media presence.

Even if you don’t have a large following, attempt to be consistent with your social media material and keep active and on-brand. Begin with a series of videos that describe your answer in layman’s terms. Include anecdotes about how you got started, how people are using the solution, and the potential benefits.

10. Form a community

Build a community as you go, and you’ll go a lot further in terms of establishing a reputation and amassing a list of people who will care when you debut.

Create a community.

Social media presence is one component of this, and you can take it a step further by hiring someone or hiring an agency to handle continuous involvement and relationship building across all of your channels. This includes responding to pertinent messages with the company account, sharing important content with links or @mentions, and providing helpful information within Slack channels or other forums.

Pre-launch marketing technology stack

Whatever marketing strategy you choose, one of the most important aspects to consider as you prepare for launch is the technology stack that will power it all.

11. Organize your stack

Nothing is more likely to lead to failure than an unstructured tech foundation for capturing, nurturing, and selling leads. The majority of businesses manage between 26 and 75 tools. That’s a lot to keep track of.

When you’re first starting, it’s critical to select the key tools that will develop with your company. Some of the most critical components of a marketing technology (mar-tech) stack are as follows:

• System For Managing Content
• Relationship Management with Customers
• Automated Marketing
• Email
• SEO
• Generation Of Content.
• Administration Of social media
• Chat In Real-Time.
• Paid Promotion
• Analytics

Some platforms meet more than one of these criteria at the same time, and the majority of them offer a freemium or free trial version that you can use to test your upcoming SaaS service. As an added benefit, pay attention to the marketing you receive when testing solutions—after all, these are instances of SaaS marketing plans in action. You could find some inspiration.

With a great pre-launch marketing campaign, you can outperform your expectations.

Having your website, free product versions, and marketing technology structure in place during the pre-launch phase means you’ll be better positioned to attract, engage, close, and please your leads and customers throughout the process. Use your internal team or a SaaS marketing agency to put in place each of these core marketing structures before launch. It makes all the difference in terms of planning and developing content that generates leads and running your marketing machine to its full potential.