Congratulations! If you’re reading this blog post, you are on your way to officially inaugurating your business. Not only are we happy for you, we’re proud that you are proactively educating yourself on the best way to market your business before you open your doors. Thankfully, you’ve landed on the right article with advice from a digital marketing company. Keep reading to learn about the four phases to marketing your business digitally and successfully.
Phase One: Brand Awareness and Lead Capture
Your business does not have to be up and running before you can start promoting it. In fact, getting the word out about your business before it opens can build up anticipation from potential customers.
To start promoting your business, we recommend a few things.
1. Create a landing page that allows visitors to know when you plan to open and what your business is all about. You’ll also want to implement a contact form for people to subscribe and get updates as you launch. Make sure your landing page has analytics tracking (for the following steps).
2. Choose the most relevant social platforms for your business and run ads on them. Video ads are a great way to relay information to viewers. However, images are good as well. You’ll want to target people who share relevant interests to the products and services that your business offers. Targeting an entire area around your location will also work if the population is low.
3. Search ads can also fit into this strategy, depending on your type of business. If you are opening a new restaurant, for example, you can target keywords, such as “new restaurants near me.” Similarly, a new apartment complex can bid on “new apartments [city].” You can also target searches that don’t include “new,” but you’ll want to emphasize that you are opening soon in the ad copy for the best user experience.
At this point, you have created your landing page and started running ads promoting your soon-to-open business. People seeing your ads on social media or on search engines such as Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo can click through to your landing page and fill out the contact form to remain up-to-date with your launch timeline.
Phase Two: Retargeting
With each person seeing upwards of 10,000 ads per day, you’ll want to ensure your target audience interacts with your ad more than once. To achieve this, we recommend setting up a retargeting strategy.
While keeping what you set up during phase one live, phase two’s retargeting strategy should run parallel to the ads you have running.
Who to retarget and how.
1. People who have clicked on an ad, visited your landing page, but did not fill out the contact form. Also, people who have interacted with your ad without clicking to visit the landing page. You’ll want to retarget this audience with the goal of capturing their contact information. The social and display ads for this audience could mention that your business is opening up soon and for them to stay in the know of any updates.
2. People who have clicked on an ad, visited your landing page, and filled out the contact form. You can reach this audience via an email newsletter or SMS, but having them continue to see your ads can help them keep your brand top-of-mind. The social and display ads for this audience could remind them that your business is opening soon.
3. This last retargeting strategy is aimed towards the same audience as above—people who are now email subscribers. You’ll want to update them via email regularly. The first email thanking them for subscribing and the following with updates of any new information.
At the end of this phase, you will have had multiple touch points with different audiences. The key is to keep your brand top-of-mind to potential customers and provide updates with new information to your email subscribers.
Phase Three: “Now Open” Messaging Push
Yay—your business is now open! Since you’re probably not busy at all… right now is the perfect time to work on the third phase. We’re joking, we know you are super busy! However, this phase is straightforward.
Website and Landing page
At this time, you’ll want to start directing traffic to your main website or a landing page that lets people know your business is open.
Social and Display Ads
Set your targeting settings to anyone and everyone who has interacted with your ads at this point. Let your messaging alert everyone that you are open for business.
Email Newsletter
Send out an email to your loyal subscribers updating them about your business and inviting them to stop by or reach out.
Search Ads
Similar to phase one, you can target relevant keywords that include or don’t include “new” with “now open” messaging.
Phase Four: Post-Launching Review and Adjustments
We recommend starting this phase between one and three months after opening your business to the public. You’ll want to collect at least one month of initial data’s worth and analyze your findings.
Maybe your Instagram ads have a higher engagement rate than your Facebook ads. Or your email newsletter has a low open rate. This type of data is what you want to gather from your initial push in order to best move forward with your marketing strategy. Here are some more examples on what to look for:
- What type of ad copy performed better?
- Videos or images?
- Are search ads making a return on my investment?
- Can my website conversion rate improve?
Dedicated Designs
We hope this article helped shape your pre-launch digital marketing strategy. If you have any questions about what was presented in this article or want to discuss how you may be able to apply this to your business, please reach out to us. Get in touch with us by filling out the form below or emailing marketinghelp@dedicateddesigns.com, and we will respond to you quickly.
Dedicated Designs is a digital marketing company that offers a full range of marketing services including paid advertising, graphic design, brand image strategy, social media management, and web design. We look forward to helping you grow your business!
