Scaling Strategies and Marketing Insights for Opening a Second Location

If your business has been growing steadily, it may be time to scale up and add a second location. Opening a second location can significantly increase your income, improve your productivity, and help you build a better brand presence.

However, scaling up to open a second location can be tricky. You need to guard against overexpansion when opening a new site and should be prepared to put in extra time to market the location properly.

A robust marketing strategy can minimize your costs and help you break even sooner, too. This is crucial as the business recoups the outlay of expansion and you will want to see the new location performing to its maximum potential as soon as possible.

Market Research

Opening a second location is like starting from scratch in the marketing industry. You don’t yet know anything about your audience and may struggle to adapt to their needs and expectations. Fortunately, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when scaling up a business. Instead, go back to the basics and lean on tried-and-tested market research techniques, including:

• Demographic analysis: Utilize secondary research (like census data and publicly available records) to gather key demographic insights like age, income, education, religion, and socioeconomic status.
• Competitor analysis: How do existing brands market themselves in the region? This will streamline your own content strategy and give you an insight into your audience’s expectations.
• Focus groups: If you’re planning to sell to a niche audience, focus groups are your best friend. Bringing in a focus group can help you understand your market segment and put you on the right path when creating content ideas.

A thorough market research plan can help you create targeted marketing campaigns and connect with folks in the new region. These insights will be pivotal when putting together a pre-opening strategy, too. You’ll need reliable, insightful data when creating your strategy for a second location and should be prepared to put in extra effort to learn more about your new audience. This helps you side-step any marketing faux pas and ensures that your paid advertising connects with your customers.

Pre-Opening Strategy

Opening a second location is a huge undertaking for any business. Whether you’re opening a second factory for production or another storefront to increase your sales, you need to take plenty of time to plan and produce a pre-opening marketing strategy.

Start by diving into local SEO in your new location. Finding out about the major players in the area will help you figure out whether you can compete for keywords in the area or need to focus your efforts on finding low-hanging fruit. Researching local SEO will help you understand the new audience that you’re trying to target and will empower your efforts to build awareness around your new site.

You’ll have to set aside some serious funds for paid advertising, too. Failing to set aside funds for paid advertising may mean that your posts do not reach the right people. Utilizing online platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google will seriously boost interest in your second location. This is crucial if you’re planning a launch day and want to get consumers in the door from day one.

Consider experimenting with some outside-of-the-box marketing ideas, too. When opening a new location, you need to build appeal with prospective customers quickly. This means that otherwise risky marketing methods suddenly become more viable. If the idea of unusual marketing ideas appeals to you, consider tactics like:

• Bring VR goggles into your store so folks can see how your product would look in their home
• Foreground sustainability efforts and making big, climate-conscious promises to grab consumers’ attention
• Hire local influencers who can communicate your brand story more effectively
• Run prizes and giveaways for folks who come to your opening day

Be aware that these unusual marketing tactics will drive up costs. However, your primary priority should be to secure long-term interest in the second location. As such, it may be worth running at a temporary loss to maximize exposure and secure a larger part of the regional consumer base.

If you’re still worried about scaling up operations, consider testing the water with budget-friendly second-location options. For example, if you currently trying to market a mac and cheese store with a physical storefront, consider opening a food truck before committing to a second store. Food trucks require less funds upfront and incur less risk. Temporary pop-up shops and mobile stores give you a chance to trial-run your strategy, too. This gives you room to experiment with content ideas and helps you adjust your plan in response to customer feedback.

Adjusting as You Scale

Scaling up your operations to a second location requires a focused, relatively intense marketing strategy. When you open a second location, it’s as though you’re starting the business from the ground again and need to build your reputation as quickly as possible to secure adequate income.

However, an aggressive marketing strategy doesn’t mean you should ignore feedback and red flags. Instead, try to utilize a continuous process improvement approach to management and marketing. Embracing an ethos of continuous process improvement helps you discover hidden bottlenecks and scale more quickly. Continuous improvement can also identify shortcomings in your current systems and help you make proactive decisions like upgrading your CRM or hiring new marketing professionals.

Continuous process improvement is particularly beneficial if you’re opening a second location in a regional market with more rigorous compliance standards. For example, if you’re a Singapore-based firm trying to break into the EU, you must go above and beyond the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) Act or risk lawsuits and fines. Continuous process improvement keeps you one step ahead of lawmakers and ensures you don’t have to fret about making eleventh-hour adjustments to meet regulatory requirements.

Conclusion

Scaling up a business by opening a second location is a major project that requires plenty of research, planning, and adjustments. You can also maximize the ROI of the new location by investing in local marketing and SEO. This will help you foresee potential issues and avoid branding mishaps. When the location does open, adopt an ethos of continuous improvement to fine-tune your content and build your brand in the new region.

BIO: Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest in the United States. She enjoys writing about better living through education and technology. She is frequently lost in a mystery podcast.