Do I need a marketing strategy for a pre-seed startup?
Developing an early marketing strategy for your pre-seed startup business is the most crucial step you can take. Pre-seed marketing strategy serves a different purpose than later strategies. Establishing a powerful business plan, building the correct group, and implementing a marketing strategy will help you succeed in the pre-seed stage of your business (K., 2024).
Marketing strategy begins when an idea is conceived, and developing the right strategy for your pre-seed startup can give your business a boost from the start. Matching the item or service with a specific group is what drives the concept. Is there a real need for your idea? Does your idea solve a problem? These are fundamental questions that should be asked fearlessly in order to pinpoint your purpose, drive your innovation, and refine what you have. Pre-seed marketing is crucial.
Pre-seed startup marketing will provide proof of concept.
Pre-seed funding is the first rung on the financial ladder in growing a business. It is less formal than seed funding, but plays an equally important role. According to TechGyant, “…42% of businesses fail due to a lack of market need”(Olufemi, 2024). Ideas must be researched to assess need and feasibility. This research, often skipped, provides valuable information about how your idea will mesh with consumers.
Gaining pre-seed funding will enable you to create a prototype and begin the investigation process to discover how your idea is received by your intended audience. Product development and marketing strategy should happen simultaneously (n.d.). This means that while you are testing your idea, you are also continuing to redesign your product or service based on feedback from a test market.
Consider this: A paper artisan who has begun to create school memory binders has started to test market the binders on social media. Each binder contains a separate page for each school year, and a pocket to stash report cards and other memorabilia. However, in her particular culture, families have an average of six to eight children. Buying that many binders is not feasible or practical, and consumers said so. The artisan modified the item to enable one binder to hold the information of four children. This would have been a costly mistake in the design of her item had the artisan manufactured ahead of test marketing.
Building your team is a marketing strategy of its own.
Another important part of your pre-seed marketing strategy is to carefully build your team. Make selections based on expertise and ability, but make sure each member of the group exhibits passion about the item and mission, and displays a willingness to serve the intended audience. It’s also important to assemble a group that has a wide variety of talent or specialization, but build a squad with overlapping skills to avoid over hiring at this stage.
When your team is assembled, bring them together with team building events that encourage them to get to know each other, trust one another, and respect one another’s talents. Do this often to maintain a positive work environment and flesh out issues before they go underground. As their leader, give praise to the rightful owner of success, and take on responsibility for team failure, providing a session to discuss and pinpoint a problem.
According to Jeff James Martin, CEO and founder of Collective Genius, your team and how they work together is the determining factor on whether your venture will succeed or fail.
“Winning teams are differentiated by how they collaborate, collectively and individually. How does the team operate on a daily basis? What is their culture? What are their core behaviors?” (Martin, 2024) It’s worth the time and effort to build a squad that clicks on all levels.
Align your marketing strategy with your business plan.
Target audience research, creating a group, and building a basic functional prototype should be the initial set of actions in your pre-seed marketing plan. But it is also important to build a marketing strategy that aligns with your business plan. Business plans are a roadmap of where you want your business to go. A marketing strategy is what you do to get there. For example, if you want to increase brand visibility by 10% in your first month, your marketing strategy should correspond with that by implementing strategies to increase awareness and an online presence.
Important marketing strategy characteristics for pre-seed startups:
| Social Media Marketing | Content Marketing | Networking |
| Quick and inexpensive | Takes time | Requires physical effort and energy |
| Assembles initial customer base | Creates community | Real world brand awareness |
| Establishes accessibility via engagement | Establishes expertise and builds loyalty | Establishes organic relationships in the industry |
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is a quick and inexpensive way to gain consumers’ attention. Individual social media platforms are a plethora of target audiences. Selecting a few that are favored by your specific target is simply a issue of analyzing the social media platforms for the appropriate demographics. Crafting material that connects with consumers regarding your item and how it can assist them in real ways is essential to speading awareness using engagement. The accessibility of social media increases consumer awareness and builds brand loyalty.
Social media has influencers, and they are experts at gaining attention. Followers trust them completely. Consider influencer collaboration to get the word out on your new product. Make sure to track your influencer metrics and keep your goals in focus to measure ROI. Take care in selecting the right type of influencer to speak about your merchandise. A conspiracy theorist probably isn’t the best influencer for a password-keeping app. Make sure the influencer’s persona aligns with your company’s objectives and goals.
Content marketing
Content marketing is also crucial for your pre-seed marketing strategy. This is the time to show your expertise and create a culture around your product rather than just selling one. Content marketing will build your brand, increase brand loyalty, build trust in your merchandise, and tell consumers that you care. It creates an online community that expands your product into other areas, building a unified lifestyle around your product.
The basis for content marketing strategy is to offer information and advice for free that encompasses the versatility and uses of your product. For example, your company has created a high-tech seat cushion that relieves back pain. Creating an online topic cluster with information on back pain in general, healthy posture practices, pain relieving postures, and guides for stretching all work toward building a culture around your product. Start a blog where consumers can ask questions and learn.
When you show you care about consumers in this manner they respond accordingly and their pain points become a testimonial through word-of- mouth and online reviews. This strategy blossoms slowly, but the wait is worth it, and the foundation is solid.
Consider this: Susan decided to follow her passion for crystals and mindfulness and open a crystal shop. She had made it a lifestyle, and wanted to share it with the world. Unfortunately she shared her plan with her best friend, who quickly gathered funds and opened a crystal shop of her own. Susan was devastated. She went ahead with her original plan, building a business and staying true to her purpose. She was knowledgable, enthusiastic, and developed many content marketing strategies that created an entire crystal community. Today, her business is booming, having just opened her second, much larger shop in the heart of the city. Her friends’ shop faltered and closed in the first year, because consumers gravitate towards authenticity if given a choice.
Networking
Networking is essential, and your pre-seed marketing strategy should include it. Networking increases brand visibility organically by getting you out into the real world and making those important connections with like minded people in the industry. Attending events and trade shows, taking part in community projects, meeting experts and learning about new developments, and evaluating suppliers; all of these will help you build solid relationships and increase your reach as a company. Before technology, networking was the only way to grow your business. It is still used because it still works. Plus, it’s fun.
Networking reaps other benefits as well. It will help you forge relationships with your competitors and enable you to gain knowledge about successes and failures. Just because they are not your mistakes, doesn’t imply you can’t learn from them. From these relationships, you can also keep abreast of new developments in your field and how to implement them. You can also gauge customer service levels and apply ones that competitors do not offer. In the race to supply the perfect product, you need to know your position.
Today, marketing strategy for your pre-seed startup isn’t an option. It is a requirement. Implementing these marketing strategies for your pre-seed startup will help you develop good habits and great motives for your venture, pinpoint your purpose, establish expertise, and provide excellent customer care. Please, share your thoughts on this article as more can be gleaned from additional dialog in the comments, which will benefit everyone!
