So, your Shark Tank pitch has been accepted, your episode has been filmed, and you got a call from the producer to confirm your air date. Now what?
You may think the hard work is over, but don't start celebrating just yet. There's a lot to get ready before your appearance.
While a lot of resources explain how to prepare a Shark Tank pitch and land an episode, there's not much information about what to do after you find out you're going to air.
The team at Human is proud to have helped Shark Tank entrepreneurs make the most of their brand exposure—including Thompson Tee, Rinseroo, Topsail Steamer, Kwik-Hang, and FlaminGO.
What most viewers don’t see is the work it takes to prepare for the national stage. Behind the scenes, Human worked closely with these Shark Tank brands to get their websites and digital marketing ready to channel new traction into long-term growth.
In this post, we'll share:
Have questions about preparing for your Shark Tank appearance? Connect with us!
The benefit of airing on Shark Tank isn’t just about the exposure to new eyeballs. It's also the credibility and support you build with your existing customers, email subscribers and social followers. Take an active role in promoting your appearance to make the most of your opportunity.
Here's how:
Make sure to prepare your marketing early to ensure a smooth lead-up to your debut.
Blogs, social media, newsletters and email databases are all platforms where it’s advantageous to promote your Shark Tank experience. These channels allow you to schedule announcements, updates and reminders in advance (though automation functions vary).
You can also leverage PR outreach and paid media to spread the word. These channels are useful for engaging new prospects or remarketing to existing leads.
Entrepreneurs typically get confirmation of their air date two weeks before—not much time to prepare a comprehensive campaign. You’ll want a detailed plan ready to implement at a moment’s notice so you can hit the ground running.
Sharing your upcoming swim with the sharks with your client base and warm leads is a fantastic rapport-builder. Current customers will feel reassured by your brand’s confidence, and the excitement will help reel in those on-the-fence prospects.
Posting a countdown to your air date on social media turns the announcement into an ongoing event. Consider leveraging press releases, media outreach and influencer marketing to keep the hype train chugging.
Keep the updates and content flowing to keep your audience in suspense. Make sure to thank your fans for their support of your journey and engage actively wherever your followers are to build a sense of community.
Once it's confirmed that you'll air on Shark Tank, your contact at ABC will provide guidelines for how you can promote your appearance. Here are some examples of the restrictions you’ll have to follow when promoting the episode:
Keep in mind that Shark Tank airs at 8/7c (8 PM Eastern Time/7 PM Central Time), which is tricky to promote. To avoid confusion, we make sure our messaging contains showtime reminders with both time zones specified.
To help Thompson Tee prepare for Shark Tank, we developed a modal popup with a welcome discount to capture email addresses from new traffic.
Next, we promoted the episode by:
The result: Thompson Tee gained 8 million new organic visitors.
In the United States, the audience demand for Shark Tank is 24.1 times that of the average TV series. One of the biggest nightmares you can encounter during your episode airing is generating a ton of new website visits that your servers aren't prepared to handle.
Nothing turns a warm lead cold like a slow or dead website. Make a strong first impression with these preventative measures:
Before your air date, familiarize yourself with your server’s current capacity. You may need to contact your web hosting provider for details. If your ecommerce store is hosted on BigCommerce or Shopify, it should handle the surge in traffic seamlessly.
Some hosting companies have special experience with traffic surges. These providers offer media packages that let you scale up when needed. Other common solutions include migrating to a high-capacity server or establishing overflow servers to host excess traffic and prevent slowdowns.
Another essential step is load testing, or simulating high-volume traffic, to see how your website responds. Load testing highlights vulnerabilities that could compromise performance so you can fix them in advance.
You may also want to establish new engagement features to smooth the pipeline from visitor to customer. FAQ sections, live chat support and AI-powered help centers can all answer questions preemptively so your visitors don’t get stuck.
Building a strong user experience is always important, but even more so before a traffic surge.
User experience, or UX, is broadly defined as a web visitor’s feelings and perceptions about your website. Is it slow and hard to navigate, or easy-to-use and seamlessly informative?
Optimizing your UX is an ongoing process, much like branding and business growth.
Here’s a quick-reference list to consider when evaluating your website user experience:
During your episode airing, watch your live traffic on Google Analytics. We do this to make sure users have an optimal experience on the site (and to record the record-breaking traffic to show it off later).
We also closely monitor for any errors or site crashes during airtime, allowing a speedy resolution for any issues. If the site were to go down, we could attempt to identify and resolve any issues promptly.
Topsail Steamer needed a website revamp to prepare for the inevitable influx of traffic.
Human provided a digital renovation by:
The result: Incremental marketing return on investment (ROI) increased 670% year over year.
Let's say you've properly promoted your big appearance on Shark Tank and upgraded your digital storefront to handle the incoming traffic spikes.
The night of the show, thousands of new people visit your website hoping to purchase your product, but stock is sold out. They leave disappointed and with a tarnished impression of your brand, making them less likely to engage in the future.
Don't let inventory issues derail your big day!
When planning your inventory for Shark Tank, remember that you're most likely reaching an entirely new demographic. The products that are most popular with your current customers may not match the products that are most sought after by the TV audience.
In short, stock up on everything because there's no surefire way to predict what will sell. While you should try to forecast potential sale volume, recognize that any prediction is an educated guess.
It’s also wise to develop a clear backorder strategy in case orders outpace your supply.
First, you’ll have to decide whether to allow back-ordering at all. While the practice can facilitate more sales, orders left unfulfilled for too long make for unhappy customers and poor reviews.
Developing a sustainable backorder system requires extensive knowledge of your supply chains and a realistic idea of how many orders you can fulfill at maximum capacity.
If you decide to allow back-ordering, communicate clearly with your customers to manage expectations for delivery time.
Once you’re confident in your inventory management, you can implement more advanced strategies for boosting your average order value (AOV).
Consider using email sequences to remind users of abandoned carts, suggest items relevant to their search, and upsell buyers with add-ons, upgrades or bundles.
However, these added features should not sacrifice the smoothness of your checkout experience. Confusing, inconvenient or frustrating checkouts lead to many abandoned carts and, therefore, lost revenue.
If nothing else, be sure to leverage the most time-honored trust-builder of all — social proof. People resonate with human experiences better than any brand. Testimonials, reviews, endorsements and awards all go a long way in building a trustworthy ecommerce store.
Time was of the essence when preparing Rinseroo for the spotlight.
Human helped optimize their ecommerce site quickly by:
The result: During the airing period, Rinseroo saw a 482% increase in sales and a 210% increase in conversion rate.
With only a few weeks before the episode airing, we needed a solution to handle inventory issues. Prior to the episode airing, we ran a few promotions that were larger than average. This allowed Thompson Tee to test how an influx of orders would impact their inventory system.
While it's not recommended to make major website changes so close to a big event, we decided it was necessary to reconfigure the ecommerce platform to handle backorders. If new customers ordered something that was out of stock, the platform no longer prevented them from completing their purchase.
The result: Thompson Tee increased their average order value by 44% year-over-year.
Most people watching your pitch will pick up their phones and type your domain name into their browser or search for your brand name in Google. This presents two other major channels that shouldn't be overlooked: Google Ads and SEO.
Google still gets the lion’s share of searches, so it’s essential for your ecommerce brand to appear there.
When you spend as much time looking at search trends as I have, you get a sense of how people ask questions and look for information. Understanding how users search is the first step to choosing effective keywords for your Google Ads campaign.
There are going to be people who see your product or hear your story but completely forget your brand name. Your marketing needs to account for that by including closely related search terms that users are likely to use.
Let’s imagine a scenario where someone watches your Shark Tank pitch and tries to look you up the next day, only to find that they can remember the product but not its name.
Nine times out of ten, they’ll turn to Google and search “[product type] shark tank” or some similar variation. Including these phrases in your Ads campaign (and overall SEO strategy) can pay dividends long after your air date.
It can take multiple touchpoints before a visitor decides to make a purchase. Staying in front of them with retargeting ads will keep your products top of mind for people who recently discovered your brand on Shark Tank.
Retargeting pixels work by implementing a harmless cookie that allows your ads to appear wherever they are across the web. This repeated brand exposure culminates in brand familiarity, trust and intrigue.
Because retargeting campaigns require a web visit to start, they’re most effective to implement during the Shark Tank ramp-up while you’re busy spreading the word. Increasing your retargeting budget from your initial air date through to the rerun will help maximize your returns on both of the two big waves of traffic.
Though we would normally start paid advertising before the air date, inventory concerns led us to hold off on preparing Rinseroo for its debut.
In the meantime, Human kept busy preparing their digital marketing by:
The result: During the episode airing period, Rineroo fielded 3,400% more website sessions and saw a 501% increase in orders.
Throughout your efforts to plan marketing, upgrade your ecommerce site and prepare your inventory, remember to give your team the resources needed to thrive through the coming rush. The strategies we’ve discussed so far will get customers in the door, but your team of Humans will follow through to cement those great client experiences.
A surge of orders and inquiries from your Shark Tank spotlight will test the limits of your sales team’s skills. Beyond preparing your team for the high volume of communications to come, prepare them to exemplify your brand and its values.
Share your brand’s story with the team, emphasizing its core values and unique sales propositions. Every salesperson should be able to respond to objections, answer questions and share product specifications in your brand’s voice.
No one knows your differentiators better than you, so remember to impart those benefits to your sales team so each prospect hears a consistent message.
Your brand messaging should be cohesive across all communications, including verbal.
Though sales are often considered one event, they should be considered a multi-stage process designed to retain first-time and repeat customers.
Any time you change, update or optimize your sales funnel, you should test the purchasing process from start to finish to ensure a seamless flow. Testing helps weed out any broken links and website bottlenecks.
However, testing only goes so far. At the end of the day, your visitor’s experiences are the ultimate measure of success.
Google Analytics is an excellent resource for identifying where and why users tend to lose interest. Analyzing their journeys reveals a lot about your ecommerce site’s UX and potential friction points.
Remember, the user journey doesn’t end at the sale. Simple measures like order confirmation messages and shipping notifications create more positive experiences where users feel informed and well-supported.
Don’t forget to ask every customer for feedback on their experience! No information source is more valuable than real customers who went through your sales funnel and purchase process. Take all feedback with an open mind and use it to find areas for improvement.
A successful Shark Tank airing doesn't stop once the show's over. Your appearance has a lot of mileage!
Shark Tank airs on a Friday, and many viewers record the show to watch it over the weekend. Keep this in mind while planning any post-show promotions, and expect to see your website traffic greater than average over the weekend.
Even after your episode airs again as a rerun, it’s not the end of your show. No matter how the journey turned out or whether you cut a deal, appearing on Shark Tank is a novel experience that listeners want to hear about. There are plenty of entrepreneurs who didn’t get a deal or walked away to forge their own path and still used the experience to their advantage.
Leverage your national spotlight to land interviews on news stations, podcasts, radio hosts, and anywhere else that appreciates an entrepreneurial story.
Keep engaging on social media to keep the hype train chugging along. Use new reviews, interviews and success metrics as social proof that interest in your product is at an all-time high.
The more you can emphasize your brand’s journey through Shark Tank and its resulting success, the more intrigued viewers will become in your story. Everyone loves a good story!
Shark Tank has been airing since 2009 and is still one of the most recognizable TV shows today. Even people who don’t watch it tend to have some level of familiarity with its premise, even if only through GIFs and memes.
All this is to say that the Shark Tank name goes a long way as an instantly recognizable signal of merit. Even without any details of your pitch or how it went, the very fact you were featured builds curiosity in your offer.
The best way to piggyback off the show’s renown is to include its branded assets everywhere ABC will allow. Wear your “As Seen on ABC’s Shark Tank” badge with honor. You deserve it!
Reinforce to your audience that they were instrumental to your journey. Attributing the brand’s success to its customers builds a sense of community.
If you’re familiar with Human, you know we don’t do one-size-fits-all solutions. Our tailored approach extends to Shark Tank brands, which often require unique strategies to maximize post-show momentum.
After Thompson Tee appeared on Shark Tank, we did the following to keep the buzz going:
Though there was some strategic overlap, you’ll notice differences in the approach we used for Rinseroo:
Using the tactics described above will help you properly prepare for your Shark Tank appearance and boost the lifetime value of your new customers — so you can reap the rewards for years to come.
We’ve covered a lot, so here’s a quick reference guide to summarize what your pre-show prep should plan out:
For specialized service from the Shark Tank marketing experts, contact Human for a free strategy consultation.