Congrats on your new website going live and all the hard work which has taken place.
So, what’s next??!!
It’s no good having your new website but not shouting about it – you need to make the site work hard for you and your business. A good place to start is to announce to the world that your new site is live, but how best do you do this?
We can help! The following provides our 7 top tips on how to launch your new site.
But first…
Why announce your new website?
- It will help drive the right traffic to the site, therefore effectively ranking your site in search engines
- It’s a good opportunity to bring your business back into the forefront of your customers’ minds and that of your target audience
- It’s a chance to explain how your customers may benefit from your new site – what are the new features and functionality? How does it make their lives easier?
- It’s a good opportunity to crack open some champagne and celebrate the hard work you and the team put in!! If not champagne, it might be a box of cookies!! #sharethecookielove
Here’s our 7 tips on how to put together a launch campaign to announce your new site across your marketing channels…
1. Tell the world on social!
There’s no escaping that social media will likely be one of the biggest drivers of traffic to your new website, so it’s all important to make sure it’s announced on social. This can simply be in the form of a post with an image, link to the new site, and tagging in contacts who may share the news, or you can adopt a different approach with the following…
- Host a competition – Why not run a competition to celebrate the launch of the new site? You could run a simple competition inviting people to like the post and therefore win a prize, or you could hide a piece of content in your site for visitors to find. Once found, they have to send you a message to confirm and therefore enter the competition. You could also collaborate with another company (or your web company!!) to win a combined prize. This means the competition (and your site) would be visible to not only your social media audience, but theirs too
- Promote an offer on social media to encourage visitors to your site
- Run a Facebook conversions ad – if you are on Facebook, for a small (or big) budget, you can run a Facebook conversions ad which drives traffic to your website, you can even capture data in the process too. They are simple to set up and manage
- Write a blog on your website about what’s changed and publish this on social media – you could even be brave, and step out and post a short video about the new site
- Write a guest blog for a related website and ask them to push this on social media – you’ll get access to their website and social audiences, and they will get fresh content for their blog
- Promote the website to any social media groups you are in
If you need assistance with any of the above ideas, do let us know. We can facilitate it for you, or provide training. And don’t forget, don’t just post about your website once, space out some posts across several weeks in order to capture a wide as audience as possible.
2. Send a mailing
If you have a set of subscribers who you send content to via electronic mailings, then do consider sending them a mailing to announce the new site. Your current customers will be your biggest beneficiaries of the new site and your main advocates who can encourage others to visit your website also. Your newsletter subscribers should be one of the first groups of people to know about your website. Tell your subscribers about the new features and functionality and how they can benefit from using the new site, and don’t be scared to ask for feedback. You could also run a ‘giveaway’ competition as well through your mailing to encourage people to visit the site. The competitions ideas above can apply here.
If you need help crafting a newsletter, do let us know. We can create designed mailing templates, and also provide the content creation, audience list development, testing and sending of mailings. If you don’t have a mailing facility or an active set of subscribers, now is your chance to get mailings up and running! We can help with this too.
3. Get your employees on board
Often we consider our external audiences, but not our internal audiences – our staff and wider team. Why not complete an internal launch of the website? This is a good opportunity to get your team familiar with the new site so they can best direct customers on how to use it. Ask them for feedback – they might have brilliant ideas on how to continue the development of the site. It’s also a good opportunity for a team social and a bit of team building!
4. Celebrate face to face
There’s nothing more satisfying than sometimes coming back to basics and communicating with our customers face to face. Why not organise a small (or large) event to invite customers and other interested parties / target audience to your business to enjoy a glass of bubbly and see the new site? It’s also a good opportunity to share more with them about how your business is evolving, and any recent changes.
5. Print and post
This might seem ‘old school’, but there’s nothing nicer than receiving in the post a tangible, well put together piece of print. You could send a creative new website announcement in the post which can tie into some of the ideas above, whether it’s an invitation to a launch event, to encourage customers to engage in a competition or more.
And yes, you’ve guessed it, we can help here too! Our talented team of designers can assist in creating a piece of print which customers won’t want to put in the recycling bin!
6. Promote the site in your email signature
We can easily overlook the simple marketing tools including adding messages to our email signatures. Add a link to your email signature to encourage website visits. We offer a dynamic email signature service which involves creating and installing email signatures which carry the correct information and messages, and when downloading attachments, just the attachments download and not your logos and other images. If you’re interested, do drop us a line
7. Inform local and trade press
We often discount good old traditional marketing channels including the written word. Why not help capture your local audience and increase local searches on your site by sending out a press release? You can also use it as an opportunity to shout about anything new in the business, and also send it to any trade publications. If you need some assistance crafting a press release, let us know – we can help!
So, you’ve launched your new site, now what do you do?
- You might feel that the news of your website is like a broken record, but for your customers and stakeholders, it will still be new news! Don’t forget to continue to share about your new website over the next few months.
- Monitor your web traffic – this is key, use Google Analytics to review your website traffic on a regular basis, and look at how visitors are finding your site and what they are then doing on the website. Are they going to the pages that you want them to go to? This can help shape your future content and might show a few surprises!
- Set up Google alerts– this is useful in order to track when your business name and website are mentioned on the internet. You can then thank relevant parties for the mention, which in turn, helps grow connections and boost your social media followers
- Keep content fresh and up to date – make sure you continue to publish news and blog articles, and consider how to grow the content on your site. If you need assistance with blog writing and exploring the next steps for your site, please do contact us
- Push new content via mailings – if you have a plan for your mailings, don’t forget to incorporate links to pages on your website and any latest news articles and blogs
- Consider increasing SEO (search engine optimisation) and undertaking PPC (pay per click / Google Ad Words / Google re-marketing / social media advertising) – sometimes sites need a little assistance with getting the right traffic consistently visiting the website. We provide a range of SEO and PPC services which helps your site become visible to the right people and includes tools such as backlinking – getting links to your site from other websites.
Congrats again on your new website going live!
If you have a digital project in mind, please do drop us a line to have a chat (and a cookie #ShareTheCookieLove)! We’d be more than happy to help.
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