So you want to start an online business, huh? 

With e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Amazon, starting a new business is a piece of cake. That being said, launching your store with a bang and setting the stage for successful business growth is another thing entirely.

Knowing what problem your customer wants to solve, which products you want to sell, and how you want to sell them, is half the battle. Assuming you know the answers to these questions, here are the exact steps to take to ensure you have the right strategy in place to launch.

3 months pre-launch: Create an online community

First, do your research into which platform your target audience spends most of their time. For instance, Facebook is a well-used platform amongst parents and the 30+ demographic. Another reason you might choose Facebook is that once you create an Instagram business account, you can control both advertising platforms in Facebook Ads Manager. 

All you need to begin is your branding. This gives you the next few months to sort out the nitty-gritty of e-commerce: designing, manufacturing, and shipping your product.

At this point, your marketing strategy should be to forget your product entirely. Sounds backwards, doesn't it? What’s more important is to focus primarily on how you can provide value to your target audience and help solve their problems by answering their questions.

Start conversations and pay close attention to what your audience needs. For instance, if your audience is parents, maybe they need easy and simple tips, tricks, activities, and recipes for their kids. And maybe some humour so they can laugh at themselves on the journey through parenthood.

Top tips for building an online community:

• Commit to the platform you choose. Figure out how and why your target audience uses your platform of choice. Then make sure the content you create is formatted to the correct dimensions.
  
• Use a post scheduler, like Later, Loomly, or Zoho Social, to save time working on marketing. Plan and schedule your content days or weeks in advance and post regularly - around 1-3 times a day.
  
• Stay true to your brand mission. Having a variety of content is great, but make sure it always aligns to your core values. You’re building an audience and you want them to know exactly who you are and what you stand for.
  
• Fight the instinct to invite all your friends and family to like the page. Inviting friends and family may boost your vanity stats (i.e. follower count), but it will just skew your data. It’s more important that you build a small following of people who will buy from you, rather than a large following of those who won’t actually grow your business.

2 months pre-launch: Spend $1/day on engagement ads

Once you are posting consistently and your page has some depth, it’s time to start running engagement ads on Facebook. This helps to put momentum behind your community growth by getting eyes on your content and encouraging engagement amongst those who will be most receptive to your launch.

That means investing in engagement ads on your highest-performing content.

How to create Engagement Ads:

1. Open Facebook Ads Manager