Is today. But don’t stop reading! - it might not be what you think it’s going to be. I know you’re probably still in the development phase or demonstrating proof of concept or still sorting out IP. And I know you don’t have the investment or funding yet (and what budget you do have is rightly allocated to the science) but bear with me... I’ll explain.
Lots of People need to Know about You
If you are setting out with a vision that other people will change their behaviour as a result of your idea – coming to your service instead of someone else’s, buying your product instead of someone else’s, outsourcing to you instead of trying to figure it out themselves, collaborating with you for research funding instead of someone else – then you need marketing. That’s because there will always be attrition from the number of people who are aware of your organisation to the ones that ending up changing their behaviour and working with you. And that attrition can be pretty significant – around 1-3% of an audience become customers.
So, you need enough people aware of you and your product so that, by the time the inevitable conversion rates occur, there are enough people outsourcing to you or buying from you to make your business viable.
And you absolutely should not wait until you have a product before you do this because...
Building Awareness Takes Time
The inevitable conversion rates mean you need hundreds, if not, thousands of people aware of your business in order to realise your vision and grow a business – and that is absolutely possible. But, there are only so many events in the year and so many minutes in the conference day to meet new people. Social Media followings never happen overnight – they start from 0 and grow incrementally over time as you contribute to the platform and engage with like-minded people. Google only crawls your website once every three months so increasing your ranking for relevant search terms is a 12-24 month process. And advertising? Well, it’s expensive and for many technical, science-based companies, it just isn’t sophisticated enough.
But here’s the great thing...
You don’t need a final product to start marketing
I know. Crazy.
Crazy for traditional, big, fast-fast moving consumer brand marketing. But your business is so much more sophisticated than that and is likely to fall into the “high-consideration-purchase” category, right? We’re not talking chocolate bars by the checkouts here. We’re talking highly innovative, cutting-edge science; products and services that require a foundation of knowledge and understanding to appreciate their value. And it’s that foundation of knowledge and understanding that can form your marketing activities years before you launch.
Not only that but...
You don’t even need a website
You just need a platform and a few of them. Thanks to social media and the number of niche organisations in related fields that can operate online, there are a number of mechanisms that enable you to share your knowledge and insight to start raising awareness – not peer-reviewed journals, but everyday sources of industry insight that people absorb and consume as part of a decision-making process. And, if you do it really well, you’ll start building your own credibility and thought leadership in the field.
Decide to Start
Every single piece of content you publish will contribute to building awareness. Even the online content that never gets read by another human being will still contribute to your reputation with Google. You have an abundance of knowledge, insight and experience that can be translated into a marketing strategy so that, by the time you launch, you already have thousands of people aware of your work and hundreds of people engaged.
Whether it’s once a month or once a day, our advice is to actively decide to start.
One day you’ll be thanking yourself for doing so.