Everything about Web and Network Monitoring
Everything about Web and Network Monitoring
In yesterday’s post we focused on the importance of mobile as a central facet of your small business marketing initiative. Your strategy has to be primarily mobile-first, especially since nearly 1 out of 6 people on the planet are using mobile devices to access their Facebook pages. The solution we pointed to in that post was a nifty platform called ShortStack that helps small businesses create, promote, and manage Facebook apps to drive customers (and revenue!) to your site.
As we’ve said before, there are scores of marketing tools on the market today. So far in this series we’ve tried to identify the resources that you absolutely need in your marketing toolkit. And we’ve approached this in terms of functionality; for instance, email management, landing pages, and mobile. Now we want to turn to another area that doesn’t usually occur to a startup owner or new business seeking to test a new product. What is this often overlooked area? The “launching soon” page.
Consider LaunchRock. LaunchRock is a free web-based application that helps you set up a social “launching soon” page in minutes. Now you might be wondering what the advantage of having a page that only announces a product rather than offering the real deal. For startups obviously the biggest hurdle to product development is finances. The idea behind LaunchRock is that instead of spending cash on building a fancy website before your product launch you focus on build a “coming soon” page. This way you can begin to grow your community right out of the gate without incurring the expenses of a new website. LaunchRock is free with no hidden fees.
The real value of LaunchRock is that it captures the startup at the idea phase and really allows the new entity to test the waters by building and growing a community to see if there’s first even a demand for the product. LaunchRock helps the startup owner navigate through the ideation and product launch phases. Users can create an audience by offering customizable sign ups on their pre-launch page, leverage powerful social sharing tools to advertise their launch, look at audience traffic and analytics, connect and engage with them through email, and then build a more customized landing page once the product is proven and ready.
LaunchRock offers an additional array of services that can help turn your business into a success, with tools like advertising, branding, web design, mobile development and a crowdfunding strategy as well.
Just recently, it was announced that Fundable.com, an equity crowdfunding platform for businesses, has acquired LaunchRock. The new combination will leverage the strengths of LaunchRock’s ability to help startups ideate, create launch pages, and acquire users. Once an idea is proven out through LaunchRock, then Fundable comes into the picture by providing crowdfunding resources.
Join us back here tomorrow as we wrap up this series with primary takeaways and best practices to consider as you build out your small business marketing strategy.
