How to Open a New Business to A Flood of Customers

Pre-Opening Marketing Secrets for a Packed House

Dream of opening your doors to a line of eager customers? Not the crickets and tumbleweeds kind of opening? You know, the kind where the cash register is singing a sweet song all day long?

Well, that's the magic of pre-opening marketing, and I'm going to show you exactly how to make it happen for your business!

Over the last 15 years, I have helped open dozens of new client businesses nationwide (primarily brick-and-mortar businesses). During that time, I developed and implemented pre-opening marketing strategies and tactics that launched each new business with immediate and substantial positive cash flow and revenue, and in many cases, profitability in the first month. In this post, I'll share those secrets I have learned over the years. 

Timing is Everything: When to Start Your Pre-Opening Marketing Blitz

Think of your business like a cake. You wouldn't frost it before it's baked, right? The same goes for your marketing. Ideally, start your pre-opening marketing 4 to 6 weeks before your doors open. 

But here's the thing, every business is unique. Consider these factors:

Build Your VIP Club Before You Even Open

The goal is two-fold: 

Offers are great for capturing contact information from future customers. The way this works is you come up with a giveaway, sweepstakes, or pre-open discount that is only offered during this pre-open phase. 

For example, a $50 gift card where a winner is chosen each week. Or give away something free from your services or products. I've even had clients giveaway coveted concert tickets. 

The more frequent the giveaway, the better the opt-ins typically. So, pull one or two winners weekly, versus one winner monthly. You can even structure it so users have a chance to win each week if they haven't won yet to keep them engaged with you the whole way until opening. The more enticing your giveaway and the more frequent you pull winners, the more opt-in you will get. And with a 4 - 6 week lead time before opening, depending on your ad spend to promote the offer, you can easily build a list of hundreds or thousands of future customers. 

Best Practices for Building a Pre-Open Landing Page

Your landing page is typically a standalone page apart from your website. Don't use your website's standard page templates if you can avoid it as "normal" web pages have many distractions. Building effective landing pages means that you remove all the other distractions that decrease the likelihood of someone filling out your form, such as, links to other parts of your website (Contact Us, Locations, About Us, Home page, etc). Read my related post on creating effective landing pages for Google Ads for more actionable tips.

Here's an example landing page wireframe:

Consider using Exit Intent to Boost Conversion Rate

Let's say someone lands on your page and for whatever reason and doesn't fill out the form.  With exit intent enabled on your landing page or website, if they go to close the window or open another browser window, you can have a pop up that gives them one more chance to enter. If they're going to leave your site, you might as well try one more time to capture them. 

Between Google Ads and Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram Ads), we can market to almost anyone in the U.S. and ensure we're reaching the people with the discretionary income necessary to buy your product or service. 

You can run ads promoting the offer using only one channel, but you can be more effective with two channels. With two channels, you can cross market visitors in each platform. So, if someone comes in on a Google Ads, you can remarket to that person with Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram) improving brand awareness and conversions. 

Here's an example Facebook ad driving people into a landing page. And to increase the likelihood of any particular visitor winning, if the customer also shares the post, "likes" and comment they get additional entries. 

And here's an example of a car wash giving away five car washes every week. Ads were run to people within a few miles of the location. 

Here's an example of a restaurant giving away a $50 gift card. 

Meta and Google Campaign Objectives

Your campaigns should be focused primarily on conversions (entering the giveaway by filling out the form), brand awareness, and engagement. You will need to ensure that your "digital plumbing" is in place to accurately track conversion actions so Meta and Google Ads can learn from and act on the data. I have a related post on setting up digital plumbing. 

Pre-Open Meta Ads (Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads):

With Meta ads, there are more than 10 different campaign objectives that align to business outcomes. Don't just blindly use a Facebook Boost Post for promoting your pre-open offer (here's a related post that goes into more detail about the differences between a Boost Post and Facebook Ads).

Ideally, you will be operating in the the Meta Ads Manager where you have more options and flexibility for running campaigns. Below is an example the campaign objectives available in the Ads Manager. Many of the campaign objectives also have additional refinements as well giving advertisers a wide range of options to achieve their goals. 

I recommend using a Leads campaign objective with the thank you page that visitors are redirected to after filling out the form as the conversion, or Traffic with Landing Page Views where the views are set to the Thank you page. Your campaign objectives control a big part of your outcomes so choose correctly. 

Post-Opening Meta Ads

Once you're open, to get the word out, retarget all those past landing page visitors from the last four to six weeks using the Brand Awareness campaign objective. 

Pre-Opening Google Ads

For Google Ads, I recommend running Performance Max campaigns. Like Meta, Google Ads have a number of different campaign types and objectives to choose from. 

Performance Max (Pmax) are a good fit for pre-opening ads for two reasons. First, they are focused on conversions (i.e. form submissions), and second, they have access to all of Google Ads inventory channels which include Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, and ads in Gmail even giving them broad reach and increased views.  Below is a summary of the all the Google ad channels Performance Max campaigns have access to. 

Post-Opening Google Ads

Like the Meta campaign strategy, you will use Google retargeting ads to reach all the past landing page visitors with your post-opening ads. For these ads, you can continue to use Performance Max campaigns, except now the focus on conversions post-opening will shift to phone calls, driving direction requests, online orders - whatever conversion actions are most important to you. 

This is a brilliant way to bridge the gap between offline and online marketing. Once someone scans a QR code from a poster or any print material and they are directed to your pre-open landing page, you have just captured them into both Google and Meta ads remarketing campaigns where you can market to them ongoing for months later. 

Below is an example of a QR code that takes you to a page on my website. So, imagine you have a large poster in your window, or you're doing a direct mail postcard promoting your pre-open offer, people can snap a picture with their mobile phones and instantly open up your landing page to enter to win. 

Remember that the people opting in early into your campaign will easily forget about you if you do not continue to keep your brand front and center. The consequences are that you will have lower grand opening customers visiting you.

So, to prevent that, use marketing automation to keep your list "warm," while taking some of the manual labor out of your to-do list.  Marketing Automation is an efficient way to automate marketing tasks to make your life easier. For example, Email Marketing or text messaging can be automated. (here is a related post I have on how marketing automation can streamline your efforts and improve sales and profit). Anytime someone enters to win, you have an automated personalized email that goes out thanking for entering with additional details about your company, along with features and benefits of your product or services.

First, if you're pulling weekly winners, for example, I would suggest that each week you announce your winners and send an email to everyone - this gives you an excuse to reach out to the list. Then, consider allowing people to sign up each week - this keeps people engaged and excited to win. 

If you're not pulling weekly winners, and instead perhaps you're pulling one or two winners at the very end, consider automating an email that goes out weekly leading up to your opening with updates on the buildout, features and benefits of your services or products, or a countdown email to opening. 

I would also suggest that you send out an SMS message in addition to an email as well. 

Google Local SEO is not a quick process. But if you plan ahead and start the process of Local SEO, you can gain a foothold in Google Search and Google Maps before you're open which means people will find you when searching for your business. 

I have quite a bit of local SEO content for you that will help you get going and ranking - be sure to check the pre-open local SEO resources below. 

Don't forget to update your ad copy and retarget your website visitors to maximize your reach. So, you've got ads, emails, and SMS messages all pushing the same message and calls to action. You are now off to a cash-flow positive launch of eager customers that want what you have. 

I have used the process for dozens of businesses nationwide over the last 15 years. Multiple new openings set company records for first month sales and profit. So, regardless of your pre-open budget, get started marketing before you open your doors - you will thank me later!

And if you'd like us to implement this pre-open marketing strategy for you hassle free, reach out to me today and let's discuss your project.