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What can a marketing guy do for a start-up when the product is not ready yet?

I am planning to start a startup with one of my friend but our product is not ready yet. I want to know what can a marketing guy do in that case? like market research, deciding the customer/client strategy, strategy for approaching VC etc.? Any pointers in this regard will be helpful.

Public Comments

1. You should be able to make a non-working dummy product up that can be shown to prospective buyers. The closer to the real thing the better.

This way you can start selling now before you are even in production.

Start gathering lead generating materials that when you are ready to move forward on sales you really ready.

Are you getting the key word here: sales sales sales

Everything should be geared towards this getting started sooner than later. Money greases the wheel and all the websites, signs, fancy promo packs aren't going to make you dime one.

2. Just to clarify - I am gonna assume you are a Marketing person and not a Sales person. As a Marketing person, you need to have the corporate strategy, product strategy and branding done before the sales person is even hired! As soon as the Sales person comes on board, he can just take ur go to market strategy, use the demo product and start working the market.

If I were to list a few things (in chronological order):
1. Vision and mission statement
2. Branding - create logo, design templates, taglines, colour swatch
3. Implementation of branding - create website, sales collateral, brochures, company signboards, demo products, etc.
4. Marketing strategy - Create an overall go to market strategy including pricing and product feature/benefits listing.
5. Promotions strategy - Create the list of external/internal communications activities that you need to take up

By the time you have done all this, I sure hope the product is ready!

3. You will never "be ready" just go for it !

4. Hi,

I have a lot of experience marketing small companies online (I have 3 companies). One of the best ways is to sign up at business directories and protals. These are basically listings of businesses (simliar to the phone book). The advantage is that these portals usually get a lot of traffic and they're ranked high on Google because of all the quality links they contain.

My favorite portal is called Directory Exclusive. I signed up a few weeks ago because they're giving a away a free business card holder when a person enter's their company info. I received it in the mail 3 days ago =)

I don't know if they still have that promotion, but you can try to get the free card holder here:


http://www.directory-exclusive-listings.info

Good Luck

5. The easiest, fastest way is to use PLR (private label rights) content. Get into a good program, even for a month, and get their training, product, marketing materials and more. Brand with your own name, since you have rights, and go.

Fast and easy.

Here's one of the best out there today:

http://presssuccess.com/PrivateRights


...with video, audio and more....articles to market with on social networking sites (MySpace, HubPages, Squidoo, etc.), in article directories, on blogs and all over......

6. Once you are prepared for the product launch, you should engage in publicity efforts. Agressively worded press releases, interviews, social media, basically anything and everything to generate buzz about your product. If you work it right, your target market can know all about your product before it launches. With a little luck, this will lead to people waiting to buy it.
www (dot) aim-act (dot) com

7. Hi,

Start to build links to your website. A website with
a good page rank is always impressive...

Free marketing magazines and SEO guides is always
a great inspiration http://www.megaadonline.com/html/sales_marketing.html

MJ