When it’s time to launch a new business or product, no doubt there are a lot of considerations to be made before hand by the marketing team. Our main goal is to grow our audience and get conversions, but that’s not as easy as it may sound. In my most recent This is Marketing Podcast – Creating a Marketing Blitz for Your Business, I talk a lot about the launch of FoodECrave.com and what we focused on to grow our audience. Our first month showed $1500 in sales, 180 fans on Facebook, 2200 visitors to our website and a lot of local media exposure. I would call it a success considering we spent around $450 for all marketing mediums. The first step in our launch was determining who and where our audience would be most likely to engage with us.

When There’s No Data

As a new business, you may have no data to pull from to determine your audience persona, so you need to be creative in how you approach marketing. For me, FoodECrave has an easy identity to target: Foodies. Knowing that the home cook is our target demographic, I was able to use Facebook’s advertising tool to build my first audience that was likely to engage my ads and convert to fans. This also led to some sales, even though sales wasn’t my goal – this may sound really stupid, but let me explain. Our products on FoodECrave are really positioned to be gifts for the holidays, meals for dinner parties or just gifts in general. With some understanding from one of my partners that is in the food industry that August is the worst month for food sales online, we didn’t have expectations of a lot of orders. The idea was to build our brand and get fans online. This sets us up to begin the courting process of introducing products to them over time.

Engagement / Time = Success

Marketing tells us that we need many touch points with consumers before they will engage with us. In most cases, seven is the magic number. Touch points over time becomes the equation, and with a launch of a business or product, time needs to be respected when it comes to sales. It’s important to develop a consistent brand message, look, feel and tone for your consumers. As you are introducing yourself, you don’t want to change your story with each view. Be consistent so that you are just reminding your audience over and over who you are, and what your selling. With multiple engagements, your audience will eventually be able to tell you who you are.

Multi-channel Engagement

I mentioned that when we launched, we exposed our brand on different mediums. This is important because your audience no longer exists in one channel as it did 20 years ago. There is a market for 65+ in age on Snapchat, and that is ridiculous. Launching your marketing campaign means that you launch on different channels. I sent out a press release to every local media company I could find online when we went live. I had four respond and that led to our rush of traffic in week one. I also set up channels on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, knowing that I have audience potential on each. The idea is that my foodie audience is on all of them, and I want to provide them with content on each, but it’s always consistent to my brand.

Hurry Up and Be Patience

The key to marketing is patience. This is a hard sell for the investor, owner or stakeholders to understand, but it’s key. A launch of any new product takes time and money, and most executives want instant results. Brands aren’t born overnight, they are born over weeks, months and even years. Consistency in message, product quality and audience engagement will lead to success, but this all takes time.