Once you’ve perfected your landing page and planned your onboarding process, it’s important to consider how you’re going to reach your customers. If promoting your new system to your existing customers is the name of the game, you know where to find them. But new, prospective clients are a bit trickier to engage.
The key is to think about the channels that will best reach your audience. Once you’ve decided on 2 or 3, commit to them with regular, powerful content, rather than attempting to use every different channel in a mediocre way and spreading yourself too thin.
You know that once your target clients visit your site and learn more about your tool, they’ll want to try it – but how do you get them there in the first place? Here are 5 affordable ways to promote your new system and generate more traffic, based on what we’ve learnt from launching CoSend.
#1 – Product Hunt
Product Hunt is an online community where tech enthusiasts, creators and customers share and discover new products. It’s based around a voting system, whereby if you earn enough Upvotes, you’ll rise to the top of each day’s top product list on the homepage.
Due to its popularity and global reach, Product Hunt is the perfect platform to show off your product to millions of founders, investors, reporters, and makers – and it’s completely free! It can help you increase website traffic, build press coverage, generate valuable feedback and, most importantly, find potential users.
Featured posts and promotions are ranked using a (top secret!) algorithm, and although we don’t know the exact calculations, there are certain known factors that will help you climb the list:
- Upvotes for your product by other users – the sooner after launch the better
- Comments & discussion on your post – particularly by influential users
- Click-throughs to your site – prove that your post is resonating
The best way to drive these actions is through eye-catching visuals. Make sure the images and videos in your listing do your product justice and communicate its value to your audience.
Your thumbnail is a good place to start. This is the first thing users will notice when they come across your product, so it needs to be engaging. One powerful way to stand out amongst all the other products is to use a GIF as your thumbnail. A moving image will instantly grab a user’s attention and you can use it to very briefly explain your product too (just keep it under 3MB).
#2 – Organic Social Media
Let’s face it, you don’t need convincing of the power of social media. Just remember – your social media scheduling tool doesn’t have to just be for your clients. When you’re encouraging your customers to promote their businesses on their networks, it can be easy to forget to lead by example.
If you’re offering a social media tool, your prospective customers will expect your social presence to be first class. What better way is there to show off what your product can do?
If you don’t already have accounts on the all the leading networks, we recommend you get set up prior to launch and begin to grow your following, in order to reach a greater audience when you post about your new product.
#3 – Content Marketing
Content marketing comes in many different forms (case studies, white papers, research reports, etc), but the most popular format is blog posts. This type of content provides the ideal opportunity to position your brand as a thought leader and share industry insights with your website visitors, social media followers and email subscribers.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, B2B companies with blogs produce 67% more leads than those without. They’re an effective, sustainable way to reach new audiences, boost engagement and generate leads. In fact, many SaaS companies base their entire marketing strategy around content marketing.
If you don’t already have a company blog, we highly recommend you start one ready for the launch of your new tool. Write about trending subjects and use regularly searched terms that will help drive organic traffic to your site through search engines.
The more popular your blog becomes, the higher you’ll appear in future search listings – so it’s worth really considering what your audiences want from their content.
On top of generating organic traffic from search engines, you can use your content to reach more people on your social networks and boost your company credibility.
To learn more, read our posts: How to write b2b content people actually want to read and 7 powerful ways to get your blog content noticed on social media.
#4 – Social advertising
There aren’t a lot of differences between the benefits of organic social marketing and paid social advertising – it’s more a matter of scale. Social ads will reach more of the right people at the right time, resulting in greater awareness and therefore more leads.
The potential is incredible; however, it does cost – so you don’t really want to be A/B testing with it. You want to be sure that whatever you’re paying for is going to achieve what you want it to achieve.
Nevertheless, if you’re sure what you’re saying is going to resonate, using social advertising at the launch of your new product is sure to give you a faster start. And there’s no doubt that paid-for posts receive greater visibility than organic ones.
Plus, the rise in popularity of social advertising means organic content quite often gets lost and its reach drops significantly, so if you’re in a crowded market, paid-for posts might be your best option to get off to a strong start.
#5 – Gartner Digital Markets
Our final recommendation is to request a free listing on Gartner Digital Markets. This wields similar benefits to Product Hunt, in that you’ll be joining a community of software buyers and sellers where you can network your new tool.
Signing up to Gartner will enable you to list your product on their three leading software search sites: Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice. With your listing, you’ll receive a detailed product profile, the ability to collect reviews and access to Gartner’s management portal & resources.
Between them, these three search sites see over 9 million visitors per month, so a listing could boost your reach massively. Your can request a free basic listing here.
These approaches may not all suit your business, and regardless, you shouldn’t try them all at once. Choose 2 or 3 methods for promoting your product when you launch and put your energy into delivering them effectively. Once you’re up and running with your system and you’ve onboarded some new customers, you can start to think of new ways to expand your reach.
No matter what, our golden rule is – never stop launching! You shouldn’t just launch once. If you treat every week like it’s launch week, you’ll uphold a higher level of energy and enthusiasm for your product. There are always new ways to promote your product, so keep launching!
