You are ready to get the word out about your business and you want to use social media advertising to do it. So you go ahead, create a new Facebook and Instagram profile, and invite all of your friends to follow it, voila, start posting a few times a week and the job is done right, that’s the ease of inexpensive modern advertising!
If this is all you are going to do to promote your brand-new business online, then this is likely going to lead to a lot of heartbreak and disappointment. The reality is that social media advertising for businesses, is highly competitive, and organic-only free tactics don’t typically garner much return simply because the visibility of the post announcing the business will be little. Additionally, even if you are able to get some attention when you start from enthusiastic friends and family sharing your posts, that action is very unlikely to turn into a sustainable business. The truth is, if you are starting from zero and launching brand new today, you are going to need a proven strategy to get your business off the ground.
Want to know the perfect strategy for an impactful launch? Keep reading…
There is actually a much better way for any business owner to get their business in front of the right people when they first start out, that we are willing to share. The only catch is you are going to need to put aside a minimum of $620 in ad spend dollars to pull this off because this is a paid advertising strategy.
Here is what you do.
Step #1 – Come up with a fantastic grand opening giveaway, it should include offers or products from your business primarily but it can also have other items within it that make sense with your brand. If you are a local business this bundle could be a basket of other local small businesses that you have gathered items from. The only rule here is you want your giveaway to appeal to whomever your desired “target customer” is, for instance, if you are a Golf Equipment Store, you might give away a gift card for golf and a bunch of products that you sell in your shop.
Don’t be shy in stacking your giveaway because the better it is the more people are going to sign up and enter it. Dud giveaways don’t work, this thing has got to be sweet!
Step #2 – Create an enter-to-win form and make sure that they are required to provide you with their name, email, address, and phone number, and include a disclaimer that you will be adding them to your email marketing list when they sign up. This is vital to the success of this giveaway campaign because you want to be collecting contacts for your business, that’s the whole point of this, to capture the potentially interested people onto your marketing lead list.
Step #3 – Once you have a functioning opt-in to enter form ready to go you want to set up simple automation so that the action of opt-ing in puts that person onto a sales page on your website where you explain, who you are, what you sell, and why they may wish to buy from you. This is going to be where people are redirected after they opt-in and is your chance to make a sales pitch to them right after you have offered them a chance to win.
Step #4 – Set up an automated email trigger also using an email automation tool like Klayvio or Mailerlite. This will trigger and send a welcome email to those who have entered your giveaway, again you want to introduce yourself. A clever trick here, if you want to make sales right away from this campaign, is to offer a very enticing first purchase discount that they can use while the grand opening campaign is live. A certain number of people will be excited to have discovered you and take you up on your enticing offer, buying from you with a discount instead of waiting to see if they win. This works especially well when the giveaway bundle is on point and you have targeted your audience correctly.
Step #5 – Create an attractive ad where you present the grand opening giveaway and write a post where you explain the rules of the campaign.
They must sign up to enter the draw to win and provide their genuine contact details. For legal reasons you must allow them to unsubscribe at any time AND that you will not share the details of their entry with anyone else. Data privacy should be taken seriously here, as well as spam laws. If you intend to contact them via phone you must include a box for them to tick giving you permission to do this.
Your social media ad should also include some details about who you are, what you do, and most importantly what you have for sale. Make the giveaway ad exciting and enticing, because first impressions matter!
Step #6 – Promote that bad boy with a minimum of $10 a day in ad spend to a relevant target audience. Make the objective of the ad campaign “leads” and set up your ads manager event to count the number of leads captured. *You will need to have your pixel installed on your website in order to do this.
Turn it on, sit back and relax, you’re up and running.
Step #7 – Write a second ad that is specifically promoting a grand opening offer for a limited time. This ad should encourage a purchase. Set this ad up to be shown to an internal audience of people who have been captured as a lead on your website, and spent 25% of the most time on your website out of all of your visitors. Give this ad campaign a budget of $2 to start and scale it up as more people interact with your first ad. This secondary ad is here for the purpose of making back the investment in the campaign. To increase uptake on this ad you may also want to promote a generous first-time customer discount.
Step #8 – Run this campaign of two ads for around 30 days and allow your lead list to grow. Around day 15 start sending out marketing emails to the list that you have built keeping them up to date about your business and continuing to encourage them to buy. By the time the 30 days have run, you should have a good start to an email marketing list. Complete a random draw for the winner and send out an email to the entire list announcing who the winner is.
At this time some people will unsubscribe. Don’t freak out. Instead, focus on those who have been reading your email.
Export that list as a .csv and upload it into your ads manager. Create a new remarketing campaign and promote it directly to that list of subscribers. If you have enough data, you may also want to create a lookalike of the email readers and start marketing your business to them, because you are starting to find your truly interested audience.
What do you think of this business launch approach and a way to build your list and find customers for your business quickly? This is the type of thing that we do best at BP Creative Marketing Strategies is identify effective ways to capture the attention and convert into customers the people whom you have created your business for.
The reason why this launch strategy is so proven and works for a variety of businesses is because the vast majority of people are enticed by an opportunity to win something. Breaking someone’s social media scroll and getting their attention is most easily done when you show them something that they are interested in and would love to engage with.
Some may argue that doing a big giveaway to launch your business is going to get you a lot of freebie seekers, but this would be the case in any instance where you are trying to get the word out. Yes, some of these people will unsubscribe when they find out that they didn’t win, but if you are presenting a product or service that is appealing to them in a way that is interesting to them, the ones that could potentially buy will stick around, while the others will be filtered out and removed when they do not read or open your emails.