There are many benefits to starting marketing operations for your startup long before you are actually ready to start selling products and services. Customer acquisition always ends up being harder than you think it's going to be, so begin the process of building a marketing foundation now.
Here's a quick list of (nearly free) things every startup should do:
Landing Page
Don't put off building your startup's website, thinking that you need time to develop content and hire a designer. Just get a quick landing page up! Use one of the many DIY platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress. Get a nice photo for free from Unsplash, write a few sentences about your startup, and say, "Launching soon — sign up here to find out more!" While you're at it, install Google Analytics on your landing page. It's free. You can get all of this done in less than an hour.
Collect Emails
Growing an email list of followers is essential, so when people arrive on your landing page, you want to make it easy for them to enter their email address for future updates. Use the free versions of MailChimp or HubSpot to create a sign-up form on your landing page and keep your email list in a way that is fully compliant with all privacy and spam laws.
Get on the Socials
It costs you nothing to create accounts for your startup on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, etc. Start posting things that are relevant to the sort of customers your startup will be targeting, with links to your landing page. For almost all startups today, a social media presence is important for building awareness.
Be in the News
As the founder of a new startup, start building your personal brand around being an expert in your field. Write an interesting article on Medium and post it to all your socials. Publish a LinkedIn article and share it with your network. Find online magazines looking for contributors and submit an article to them — Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Fast Company, TechCrunch, and the New York Times all accept contributor submissions. Always make sure anything you publish has a link to your startup's landing page. Also, sign up on Help a Reporter Out (HARO) — if a Wall Street Journal reporter is writing an article about your sector, you want them to contact you for a quote.
Find Out What People Are Searching For
Free tools such as Google Trends, Answer the Public, and UberSuggest will give you insight into what people are searching for online. This will help you craft articles and posts that align with current search traffic, and it will give you market visibility that informs all of your marketing efforts.
Be Active in Online Communities
If you've developed a new brand of ice cream, join all the online groups for ice cream lovers. Check out Facebook Groups, Reddit, Slack groups, and Quora, and find communities relevant to your venture. Join the conversation. It costs nothing, you'll learn a lot, and you'll develop leads that will be valuable for your startup.
Create Content That Performs Well
What matters is not just generating content — it's generating content that engages well and ultimately drives traffic to your landing page and email signup. Tools like BuzzSumo can help you find what sort of content performs best in your space.
Stalk Your Competitors
Browsing review sites such as G2, Capterra, and Product Hunt will give you insights into what consumers are saying about your competitors. This will help you understand the competitive landscape and give you ideas on the sort of messaging and content that will resonate well with your audience.
A "sweet" example of early marketing
One year in my Stanford course, our fictional venture was "Uber for fresh-baked cookies" — just push a button on your phone, and fresh cookies arrive at your doorstep. Our assumption was that young men would be our typical customer persona: they get the munchies at midnight and don't know how to make cookies. We spent $50 on some social media ads just to test the idea, and upon looking at the demographic responding to our ads, we were surprised to find that the core demographic clicking on our ads was women over fifty.
We reached out to some of them, and they told us the reason they'd responded was that freshly delivered cookies looked like something they'd love to give as a gift. So, for $50, we uncovered a key insight: we thought men in their 20s would be our early customers, but it turned out that women over 50 loved the idea of giving our product as a gift.
Not only that, we gathered real metrics: $50 in ad spend yielded 15,260 impressions, 235 clicks, and 17 direct inquiries. Now we can start to project what our Customer Acquisition Cost will be based on actual data instead of wild-ass guesses.
Great entrepreneurs know that successful startup methodology means doing customer development while doing product development.
Even if your startup is many months away from actually having a product or service to sell, executing on some of the ideas above will give you insights, data, leads, and online equity that will dramatically improve your odds of success. Don't wait until your product is complete before beginning some marketing activities.