Pre-Launch Marketing Checklist: 5 Steps (2023)

Creating a new product or starting a new project is always overwhelming. Whatever it is you are starting, there are always lots of dots to connect, from competitor research to product development.

And while setting up a new site or creating a new (digital) product is quite challenging in itself, there’s at least an end to that process, which is almost encouraging.

Sadly, that’s not something you can say about marketing.

Marketing is never done: You always need to be on top of things, try new tactics, find new partners, etc., if you want your sales to keep growing.

While marketing a new project is always a tedious, never-ending project, you can at least make it easier and even scalable by developing an effective pre-launch marketing.

Pre-launch marketing has two main goals:

• Build interest and buzz for the upcoming project
• Pre-plan your future marketing by knowing who is helping you, who you are going to reach out to, which platforms are going to be more effective, and how exactly you will utilize each of your marketing channels.

Here’s your actionable checklist to creating an effective pre-launch strategy:

1. Build a Lead Generation Pre-Launch Landing Page
2. Start Building Interest within Your Subscriber List
3. Identify (and Engage with) Your Influencers Who Will Help You Out
4. Draft Your Editorial Calendar
5. Start Segmenting Your Audience
6. Takeaways

Let’s get started!

Pre-launch Marketing Strategy Checklist

Any marketing strategy should always start here: Which page (or which site) is going to be the center of everything you do. This page needs to be hosted on your site. Never invest in marketing something you don’t own (like a Facebook page or a mini-site on any free hosting domain).

You need to be sure your page is always going to be there, no matter what. Third-party (free) sites go down and accounts get blocked (for any number of ridiculous reasons). So whatever you are marketing, you’d better 100% own and control that asset.

Setting up a pre-launch landing page is easier than you may think. If your site is run by WordPress, there’s a variety of plugins and themes that will let you set up a coming soon landing page with one click of a mouse. Many of those also come with a nice countdown timer for you to add to your landing page.

Apart from a countdown timer, the only thing I’d add to my pre-launch landing page is a quick marketing video. A video is always a good idea, both for engagement and organic visibility purposes.

To save time, here’s a nice tool that gives you the full power of video and creation tools without forcing you to download anything or take a separate course. InVideo is a cool video creation platform giving you all the tools to put together a cool promo content asset without spending a fortune.

If you are launching something completely new and you think there’s a solid branding potential there, do invest into a new domain. If at any point you find yourself unable to build another brand, you will always be able to merge your mini-site with your main site by redirecting one into another.

Besides, now that we are able to find more than .com domains, finding a catchy brand name is easier. Radix is a domain registry allowing you to find and register catchy domains that will make launching a new brand easier:

Whether you already have an email list you are going to use to launch your project or you are still building it up (using the lead generation landing page above), this step is essential.

You need to gradually work on engaging your email subscribers on a regular basis for them to recognize your email address in their email inbox.

Here are a few ideas for you:

• Set a weekly task to send your newsletter on a specific day at a specific time. Being consistent always improves engagement.
• Provide real value: Curate industry news or share some really useful tips. You want your subscribers to know and trust you.

The two tactics above will help you to build some brand recognizability among your subscribers, so they are more willing to hear about your launch (and more likely to engage). It will also let you segment your list allowing you to personalize your future campaigns. So think about this step as investing in data.

When you know your launch date, create a sequence of emails that would announce it and send follow-ups. This creates a feeling of scarcity which is a powerful concept when it comes to launch marketing.

Here’s a great case study on how Graham Cochrane used pre-launch email sequence to launch his new course. Using Kajabi, Graham set up a new course and then used the re-sale email sequence to boost his sales:

This is one of those tasks that is actually never done, but if you start earlier, prior to even launching the project, you will have many engaged influencers by the time you launch.

Buzzsumo is the perfect influencer finder platform. You can find influencers on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, as well as identify influential authors.

For Twitter you can search for:

• Influencers who have tweeted an article on the topic of your interest
• Users who mention your keyword in their Twitter bio

I recommend using both of these options for best results.

[Buzzsumo also allows you to sort results by the engagement rate allowing to find influencers are likelier to respond to you]

Facebook search allows you to find most popular Facebook pages on any topic:

When searching for your influencers, make sure to:

• Create a Twitter list to keep in touch with them
• Retweet and comment their tweets on a regular basis
• Take notes of Twitter chats and communities they frequent (and consider joining as well)

Overall, at this point you just want to become known in the niche. But this process is another way to collect data too: By the time you launch you will know which of those influencers are likely to respond and what makes each of them tick.

Down the road, this will allow you to craft a more effective influencer marketing campaign.

You may not be ready to create all of your content just yet, but this is a good time to plan things out. Pre-launch content planning will allow you to capture all seasonal trends and create timely, and thus more effective content assets.

I always start my higher-level content planning process with trends and question research. This combination of focusing on popular niche questions while being able to meet seasonal trends.

I have already shared some tools and tactics for seasonal content planning and optimization, so use that resource for more guidelines.

Just to sum up, I use a tool called ContentCal that allows for collaborative content planning and marketing. You can quickly schedule seasonal content marketing campaigns there and use content briefs to store your specific ideas and details to act upon them when you are ready:

Your content briefs can be as detailed or as brief as you want them to be. I tend to keep them pretty detailed because I know that I should make the most of my quiet pre-launch time to focus on more burning issues when I launch.

For question research I use Text Optimizer’s “Content Ideas” section which extract popular questions on any target search query.

Finally, as you are building up some buzz and generating some traffic, you need to find ways to collect and utilize this data.

Data is your biggest brand asset: The earlier you start collecting it, the more informed decisions and better-targeted campaigns you will run when you launch.

At the pre-launch stage, make sure to start collecting and segmenting your traffic by using the following two methods:

• Facebook advertising campaigns: You can boost your content pages, promote your “Coming soon” page, or build up your page followers.
• On-site analytics: Finteza is the best solution here as it offers a wide variety of conversion optimization features.

Both of these methods have one thing in common: The ability to re-target your ads to your existing audience, based on their prior engagement with your ad and/or your site.

So when you launch, you will be able target your Facebook ads only to those people who previously engaged with your ads. Or, you can set up a custom sales funnel or a personalized deal to those site visitors who previously read your article.

• Pre-launch marketing strategy will make your launch easier on both the fronts: You will already know who should be the first to announce it to and how to promote your project further
• The first step in any pre-launch marketing campaigns is to create a page (or even a standalone site) you can use as the central point for all your promotional tactics
• The biggest part about your pre-launch marketing is that you invest in data, i.e. segmenting your optin list, your Facebook audience and your site audience.
• This is also a good time that you start engaging with your niche influencers. All of that data will help you make more informed and productive decisions when you launch.
• Pre-launch phase is also a perfect time for planning. You will be utterly overwhelmed when your project goes live, so use your quiet time now to brainstorm and form your future content strategy in detail.

Launching is always hard but the steps above will help you keep your sanity and keep moving to success!