A Complete Guide To Pop-Up Marketing (With Ideas And Tips)

Updated 31 October 2022

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Pop-up marketing is a digital marketing strategy that provides additional contact points for customers besides a physical store or a website. Those contact points, sometimes called touchpoints, may help a business reach more prospects, attract new leads and test new concepts. If you are planning to build a career in marketing, you might want to know how this marketing works. In this article, we define pop-up marketing, discuss its objectives and benefits and share a few tips for using this marketing technique.

What Is Pop-Up Marketing?

Pop-up marketing is a marketing technique that uses a quick point of contact to attract customers who otherwise did not know about the product or brand being promoted. Some of the most common ways for businesses to use pop-ups include ads, shops and quick content drives. Marketers often use this marketing technique to generate leads and build brand awareness.

The pop-up technique can create broader brand awareness by presenting the brand to people who might ignore traditional advertisements. It can bring leads to the engagement and purchase phases of the sales funnel quickly by presenting opportunities for certain prices or products only for a short amount of time.

Benefits Of Pop-Up Advertising

Marketers often use pop-up ads to create brand awareness and interest. The strategic objectives may differ, but here are some common benefits of using pop-up ads in marketing:

Testing new concepts

Marketers can use pop-ups for experimental purposes. For instance, a company can use pop-up advertising to test a new concept directly with customers before introducing it into the market. This can help in gathering consumer feedback and finding critical data to assess the impact.

Generating content

Using pop-ups in marketing creates a suitable environment to capture content on both the brand's and the consumer's side. Professionals can design a pop-up that encourages capturing content through photos, videos, contests, art collaborations and testimonial booths and share them on various social media platforms. This can enable the brand to reach new audiences and create further opportunities for revenue growth.

Engaging new audiences

Pop-ups can be an effective marketing tool for brands looking to reposition themselves or trying to test the impact of their appeal and reach. With the right location and message, a pop-up ad can help a brand increase its appeal and attract new customers. Pop-up adverting campaigns can also help grow a brand's niche audiences.

Improving customer retention

Pop-ups that have an element of surprise can generate an emotional response among prospects. Most customers look for memorable experiences that can surprise and delight them. Once a brand provides a memorable experience to its customers, the customers remember why they prefer that brand, which encourages them to purchase the brand's products again.

Promoting seasonal sales

Pop-up advertising is useful for generating seasonal interest in a brand, as it can present a product in a spontaneous context. Pop-ups can help brands market and sell their seasonal products without having to spend a lot of money on traditional retail shops. Selling seasonal merchandise via pop-up advertising can help a company generate substantial returns on investment if they can sell promptly and at high volumes.

Creating a sense of urgency

Pop-up adverting can help reduce the conversion time for new leads, or the time between when a potential customer learns about the company and when they make a purchase. Pop-up ads and shops put the brand where the customers are and create a sense of urgency by announcing a limited-time offer or discount. This often makes it difficult for the prospects to ignore the message.

Ideas for pop-up marketing

Businesses can use pop-ups in many ways to achieve their desired goals, such as building brand awareness or earning more revenues from seasonal sales. Here are a few ideas for how to use pop-ups:

Website promotion

A pop-up promotion on a website's homepage can act as an awareness initiative, an engagement piece or both. When used strategically, pop-up ads can help create a positive impression on new visitors. It can also help increase the ad's visibility for the customer and the likelihood that the customer acts on the call to action.

Limited time offers

Limited-time offers can help a company create a sense of urgency among its potential customers. When a customer only has a few hours or days to act on an offer, they are more likely to click the pop-up and take advantage of the offer. These offers typically attract a huge number of potential consumers, which can increase the company's sales for a short period of time.

Exclusive offers

Announcing exclusive offers via pop-up ads can help a company encourage loyalty among its customers. This helps in increasing engagement and in generating new leads. A pop-up ad that presents an exclusive offer can quickly make people interested in the offer. For instance, food ordering portals often create pop-up ads with exclusive offers for their customers, which help them in increasing customer engagement and sales.

Web events

Web events like webinars and live streams can generate temporary interest among audiences, and help the brand hosting them generate new leads. Pop-up ads for live events also offer customers an opportunity to interact with the brand. Collaborations with other brands, inviting experts and celebrities for web events are a few common tactics that brands can use. Fashion brands often host live streams on their social media channels, where they invite experts and celebrities to host or be a part of the web event.

Upgrade offers

Upgrade offers and subscriptions can be effective for engaging customers with a brand. Offering a discount increases the chances of the customer acting on the call to action. You can offer upgrades and discounts at specific stages in the buying process. For instance, shopping portals and food ordering websites offer discounts when the customer adds items to the cart. Offers like free delivery, or an additional free item, ensure that the customer does not cancel a subscription.

Tips For Pop-Up advertising

There is an array of opportunities that can help a brand get recognition, generate leads and increase sales using pop-up techniques. Once you identify your core audience, you can design pop-up ads or shops accordingly so that you can generate more leads and nurture them. Here are a few tips you can follow to enhance your pop-up ad marketing strategy:

Offer real value

Newly generated leads look for real value. Offering promotions and offers can enhance the brand's image in the eyes of prospects and offers more value than a traditional advertisement offers. Alongside offering onetime promotions, if possible, you can also offer a free demo of the company's products or services to help customers make an informed decision.

Use multiple channels

Pop-ups help you reach out to potential customers through different social channels. Using multiple platforms can help in broadening and enhancing a brand's reach. You can use different pop-up ideas for different channels and branch out your efforts to maximise the brand's relatability with the audience.

Recruit influencers

Social media influencers have become a powerful marketing resource in recent times, as they have a wide audience reach and can effectively market products. You can have an influencer-based strategy for lead generation campaigns. Recruit influencers to advocate the brand you are promoting and drive traffic to the brand's pop-up events. This can help the brand reach new audiences.

Partner with major brands

Reach out to major brands with similar businesses, as they sometimes allow similar businesses to set up pop-up shops outside of their stores or in retail spaces such as malls. This can maximise the exposure of the pop-up store and generate more sales and revenues from store traffic. Customers have a tendency to trust a pop-up shop that partners with an acclaimed brand or store they already trust.

Reduce shopping cart abandonment

Even if a new lead clicks on a promotional banner, shopping cart abandonment can occur. Customers add items to their carts and leave the page. Make sure that you send a follow-up email or a pop-up reminder when a customer is about to leave their shopping cart.