With many businesses here in Nottingham and across the UK preparing to reopen doors from this weekend, finetuning a relaunch strategy and shouting about it on social channels is one of the most important moves a business can make to ensure customers know you are back.
Everything is changing daily due to the COVID-19 situation, and social media can be an extremely useful tool to cut through the noise and update potential customers in real time about the changes that are happening within your business.
We’ve rounded up some of the top ways to utilise social media as part of a relaunch strategy to help businesses come back with a bang:
Run a social media competition
Use social media to set up a simple competition giving away your products or services in the lead up to relaunch day. Competitions are a great way to attract engagement for a post from your existing followers, as well as reaching potential new ones. Use a simple like, follow and share as your terms for entry to reach new audiences and increase your social media presence.
Put some money behind your social media posts
Putting some spend behind a social media post can increase its reach, meaning that more people can see what you have to offer.
You can also target your audience for your social media posts. As a business owner, you know the customer demographic and personality type that will be interested in your relaunch. You can create audience groups based on age, location, job title, likes and hobbies.
Read more about the benefits of paid social media posts.
Be prepared for questions
Things are going to be different, and people are going to have questions.
Before your relaunch, think about the questions that customers will be asking and draft suitable answers. Once complete, post these to your social media channels – social media will be one of the first places people look when they have a question and it is extremely useful for them if the answer is already there.
This should reduce the amount of people messaging the page, but of course you can still expect there to be enquiries – use the prepared responses to reply to customers fast, who doesn’t love a quick responder?
Let your followers know how the first day was
After your first day, people will be interested to see how everything went. Although government guidelines now permit the opening of many venues, some people may be sceptical about interacting with the public.
Let people know on social media how successful your first day was and how you maintained a safe environment.
Encourage customers to interact with your social media channels
Encourage people to tag you in their posts or set up a dedicated hashtag. Customers will be sharing pictures of their experience at your venue and of the new products that they have purchased. Encouraging people to tag you in their photos allows images of your business to directly reach new audiences, attracting more customers.
Also encourage people to write a review, which will boost your overall ranking on review sites, and will let other customers know what an experience at your venue is really like. A good review gives potential new customers confidence that your venue is worth visiting.
Customers will be looking to sites such as Tripadvisor and google for the top-rated places when looking for somewhere to go, so it’s vital you have a presence on these sites.
Engage with comments and reviews
Although hopefully the reviews you receive will be positive, there might be a few criticisms. Respond to these and show customers that you have taken their feedback onboard.
Also ensure you respond to comments on your social media post and thank people for taking the time to comment. This shows that there is a face behind the name and it gives your brand more personality – customers will really appreciate you acknowledging them.
If you use any of our tips for your relaunch, we’d love to hear about it! Find us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.