Building Demand Before Launch Day
Most product launches start marketing on day one. I started three months early — building awareness, capturing interest, and creating a warm retargeting audience before Gig Internet was ever available to buy.
The Challenge
You Can’t Convert Someone on a Product That Doesn’t Exist Yet
Comporium was preparing to launch Gig Internet — their fastest internet tier — into a competitive market dominated by larger providers with significantly bigger marketing budgets. The typical approach would be to launch the product and then start marketing.
The problem with that approach is that it means starting from zero on launch day — no audience, no awareness, no warm prospects ready to convert. In a competitive internet market where AT&T and Spectrum are constantly fighting for the same customers, starting cold is a significant disadvantage.
I saw an opportunity to solve the cold start problem entirely by treating the three months before launch as a marketing runway, not a waiting period.
The Cold Start Problem
When a product launches with no pre-built audience, every marketing dollar on day one goes toward introducing the product for the first time. There’s no warm audience to convert, no retargeting pool to work with, and no momentum to build on.
The Competitive Context
Internet is one of the most competitive local markets in digital advertising. Comporium was a regional provider competing against national giants with unlimited budgets. Winning required being smarter, not just louder — and that meant being earlier.
The Approach
A Three-Phase Pre-Launch Strategy
Rather than treating the pre-launch period as downtime, I designed a three-phase strategy that would have a warm, interested audience ready to convert the moment the product went live.
Campaign Timeline
Months 1–2 · Awareness Phase
Build Awareness and Capture Interest
Partnered with the creative team to develop “Coming Soon” assets and launched Google Demand Gen and programmatic awareness campaigns. The goal wasn’t conversion — it was introducing Gig Internet to the market and identifying who was interested. Partnered with the web team to build a dedicated landing page with form fills to capture user data from people raising their hand early.
Month 3 · Audience Building Phase
Grow and Segment the Retargeting Pool
As awareness campaigns ran, anyone who engaged with the ads or visited the landing page was added to a structured retargeting audience. Partnered with the SEO team to ensure the landing page had strong organic content to support both paid and organic traffic. By the end of month three, we had a meaningful pool of warm prospects who had already expressed interest in the product.
Launch Day · Conversion Phase
Convert the Warm Audience Immediately
On launch day, shifted budget from awareness to bottom-of-funnel tactics — paid search campaigns targeting high-intent keywords and retargeting campaigns for the pre-built warm audience. Instead of starting from zero, we were converting people who had been primed for three months. Also ran a launch promotion to give warm prospects an additional incentive to convert immediately, including existing customers looking to upgrade.
The Results
A Launch That Started Warm
The pre-launch strategy fundamentally changed what launch day looked like — instead of cold outreach to an unfamiliar audience, we were converting people who already knew the product was coming.
New Customer Acquisition
The paid search campaigns targeting high-intent keywords captured net new customers who were actively searching for faster internet options — users who may not have been in the warm audience but were in market at the moment of launch.
Existing Customer Upgrades
The launch promotion also drove meaningful revenue from existing Comporium customers upgrading to Gig Internet — a retention and upsell outcome that made the campaign dual-purpose: new acquisition and existing customer revenue growth.
Key Insight
The Takeaway
“Growth doesn’t start at launch — it starts with building demand before the product is available. The upper funnel investment we made in the three months before Gig Internet launched is what made the bottom funnel work on day one. You can’t convert someone on a product they don’t know exists.”