If you want your tech startup to be successful, you’ll need to spend time generating excitement about its new technologies – and about yourself. This can be a challenging endeavor, especially if you don’t have much entrepreneurial experience or existing brand assets.
How can you start making people excited and enthusiastic about your new tech startup?
Strategically Positioning Your Tech Startup: Start With Your Business Plan
You should start with the elements of your business plan. It’s very unlikely that your target audience is going to get excited simply by reading and understanding your business plan. But this pivotal foundational document is going to help you understand what your business is at the conceptual level so you can create better messaging for it and be more effective in how you build that excitement.
These are some of the most important sections to nail:
Core Product
The tech product at the heart of your startup is going to be its nucleus. What is your company going to build or offer? How is it unique? What problems is it going to solve? Why is it better than everything else on the market? The better you understand your tech in context, the better you’ll be able to position it.
Target Market
Who is your target audience? How do they think about the world? What are their core beliefs and values? What types of things have made them excited in the past? Once you do a deep dive here, you should have a good idea of what types of things will get your customers talking. For example, are they eager for a new solution to a common problem? Will they be enthusiastic to see a product similar to existing products on the market for a lower price?
Competition
Next, thoroughly analyze your top competitors. How did they launch? Who are their customers and how did they win them over? What types of marketing and advertising techniques are they using to generate excitement? This section of your business plan is a great source of inspiration, but you should also be wary of excessive mimicry. Remember, it’s also important to stand out from the crowd.
Unique Differentiators
In line with this idea, pay close attention to your unique differentiators. What are the aspects of your business that set you apart from your competition, and which of those aspects are your customers going to love? Offering the lowest prices or the best service? Or, do you offer a fundamentally new type of experience?
Early Advantages
Also, what advantages are you going to have early in the formation of your startup? You may have a limited budget and an even more limited circle of influence, but do you have novel creative ideas? Can you capitalize on an emerging trend?
Supporting Your Technology: Flesh Out Your Personal Brand
A compelling piece of new technology should be able to sell itself, but it doesn’t always happen that way. If you want better odds of success, it’s a good idea to marry your tech to a personal brand – a human face that can carry, uplift, and support your tech. Many startups find early momentum not just because they successfully reached their target audience early via company channels, but because the founder, president, or other authority in the business has a strong reputation.
Accordingly, it’s in your best interest to flesh out your public-facing persona and start generating some good publicity and excitement among people in your target audience. You can start by getting a professional headshot. You can even use an AI headshot generator for this purpose, making things even easier. Once you have it, you can use it as the foundation of all your social media profiles.
From there, start generating content in line with your industry and the niche of your startup. This is your chance to demonstrate your abilities as a thought leader and set yourself apart from your rivals. Distribute your best content on the networks most favored by your target customers and start networking to generate a following. At this stage, it’s up to you whether you want to start talking about the upcoming brand or not.
Throw Out Some Teases About Your Core Tech Product
At a certain point, you’ll want to throw out some teases of the tech to come (even if it’s not quite finished). Don’t be too general: a phrase like “big things happening” isn’t going to generate much excitement. At the same time, don’t be too specific. If you give away all the details upfront, you’ll spoil the surprise, and people won’t have much to look forward to.
This is essentially an opportunity to demo your product, test out some of your marketing and pique interest in the startup that’s about to emerge. It’s also a great opportunity to see how your customers interact with your messaging, so you can tweak it in the future.
Develop Key Assets for Your Brand and Products
You’ll have a much stronger brand identity when you start building an audience if you already have key assets developed for your brand and its products. These can include photos, short videos, white papers, and pretty much anything else that your target audience can consume. Screenshots and video demos are going to be crucial for showing off your core tech.
When developing these assets, make sure they look professional and that they highlight some of the unique differentiators of your brand and its products. Also, take the opportunity to demonstrate thought leadership however you can. Be ready to distribute these assets across multiple channels.
Start Collecting Tech Fans
At this stage, you should be ready to start building an audience for your upcoming startup. If you haven’t yet, this is the time to start claiming the social media profiles for your startup and any key products associated with it. You can use your personal brand as a leverage point to create a seed audience. By engaging with the tech enthusiast community, you can make that following grow.
Submit Big Press Releases
While there are some drawbacks and limitations associated with press releases, they remain some of the most effective ways to circulate information about new businesses. You can announce that your startup is launching, announce new rounds of funding, reveal new products, or talk about anything else that’s newsworthy. It’s a great opportunity to promote your brand and get some relatively inexpensive publicity.
Host (and Attend) Tech-Centric Events
You and other leaders on your team should also consider attending tech events and events relevant to your target audience. Depending on the nature of the event, you may even have an opportunity to make a presentation or promote your brand and products with promotional products, demos, and reveal parties. If there are no events you can attend, consider hosting one yourself.
Reward Your Fans With Fun Surprises
You’ll be able to build even more excitement for your startup if you start rewarding your earliest fans with fun surprises. These people will have been with your company from the beginning, or nearly so, so consider giving them some freebies or special privileges that they can show off. Surprises are generally linked to positive emotions and strong memories, so this is a great way to ingrain your brand in their minds. It’s also an opportunity to have your target customers do some marketing on your behalf. Most people are excited to talk about free things they’ve gotten or fun surprises they’ve enjoyed.
Get Feedback and Improve
Throughout this process, get feedback from your target customers and work to improve your approach (and your tech product). No two target audiences are exactly alike, and neither are any two startups, so it’s going to take some experimentation and refinement to find the right blend of marketing strategies for your needs. If you commit to continuous improvement, you’ll keep attracting new people to your brand, your messaging will grow stronger, and by the time you’re ready to launch, you’ll have a loyal audience of fans who will patronize your business.
Generating early excitement for a tech startup isn’t especially easy or straightforward. Even so, this is such a critical time for business development and marketing that you can’t afford to neglect it. Hopefully, these insights have shed some light on the process, so you can devise a successful campaign for your own upcoming tech launch.
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