Anaita Sakar and Vik Davé came home one day to find their kids playing in piles of plastic wrapping material left over from their business. They were disgusted. “It made me feel sick,” Anaita says. “I knew we had to do something differently.”.
The couple couldn’t find any sustainable alternatives, so they experimented with their home compost bin and different materials. The result? One hundred percent home-compostable shipping packages and a new brand, Hero Packaging.
Anaita and Vik’s idea has been such a hit that just last year the company received more than $1 million in investment funding, and served their 50,000th customer.
Ahead, discover Anaita’s three tips for marketing a new and innovative product that nobody had ever seen before.
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How to bring a new product to market
1. Create targeted ads
In order to get a sense of the demand, Anaita and Vik ran targeted Google Ads. “Anyone who was typing in ‘sustainable packaging’ was hit with our landing page,” Anaita says. This helped Anaita and Vik determine there were more people out there like them searching for more sustainable options. And the ads drew more traffic to their website before they’d even launched a product.
2. Build your email list pre-launch
After driving traffic to Hero Packaging’s pre-launch site, the founders offered a free sample to anyone who showed interest and signed up, thereby building an email list. “In a week, we got a thousand people signing up [for a free sample], and that was the first sign where we said, ‘people are really interested in this,’” Anaita says.
With enough demand for compostable, plastic-free packaging, Anaita and Vik were able to start production with the confidence that they would hit their goals.
3. Develop a content marketing strategy
Hero Packaging uses the real questions customers and businesses send them to create impactful, informative, and eye-catching content for social media channels, blog posts, and the brand’s FAQ page.
“It is critical that we are just pumping content—whether it’s educational or just product base—to every platform at any given point in time,” Anaita says. This approach has helped Hero Packaging draw in almost 100,000 followers on its Instagram page.
Through the successful growth of Hero Packaging, Anaita has learned the power of having strong, targeted content that educates and excites the audience.
To learn more about the unique marketing strategies behind Hero Packaging’s success, tune in to the full Shopify Masters episode.