Follow these 10 steps to ensure your online launch results in new leads and sales.
Planning your new website is one of the most important elements of any marketing strategy. So if you’re preparing for a new website, you should complete several crucial strategies to ensure you get the most from the time and budget you’ve devoted to the project.
Here’s your 10-step guide to a successful online launch of your new website.
If you’re taking the time to seek out information on website launches, you likely are invested in ensuring the project garners as much traffic, new business and success for your company as possible.
Follow these steps to help prepare your organization and ensure the new website you’ve invested in helps elevate your brand.
Before you started your new website project, hopefully, you outlined your goals for the project. This can help justify the time and expense a new website requires. But if you haven’t yet outlined your website goals, now is the time to do so.
That way, from the moment you launch, you’ll know whether you’re successful or where you have work to do to reach your goals.
Some goals you might outline for your new website include:
Content is an essential part of a website. Getting your messaging just right can help ensure you convert website visitors into leads and leads into sales. It’s never too late to reevaluate your website content.
Read it with a fresh perspective as if you were your target audience. Does it speak to their pain points and challenges? Or is it all about earning the sale? If it’s the latter, it’s time for a revision before launch.
Website copy should always put the customer and their needs first. It should inform and engage them.
Once you have your website copy where it should be, you’re ready to start thinking about your ongoing content plan after launch.
Your website is not just done once you put it out there for the world to see. It’s an ever-changing and evolving part of your marketing strategy that demands your ongoing attention. Plan how you’ll use longtail keywords to rank for SEO using blog content.
Outline what types of content best serve your customers’ needs, such as videos, podcasts, infographics and blog content. Make a plan for how to distribute your content across email marketing, social media and other channels to get the most from it.
You should have taken the time to outline your differentiators before building your new website. But if you didn’t, you still have time.
Think about your unique selling point (USP) and how you’ll position your products in comparison to your competitors. That way, you ensure you’re serving a different niche from your competitors and carving out a unique path for your business.
Know your greatest strengths and your weaknesses when comparing yourself to your competitors. You should be able to help dispel your customers’ concerns or fears with your messaging both on your website and in your launch advertisements.
For most businesses, social media offers a way to build awareness for your new website and begin driving traffic there. It also offers an opportunity to grow your audience through your existing audience.
Posting to social media about your new website can help build initial traffic as you get the word out. Include links to webpages or new blog posts so people feel enticed to click to learn more.
Monitor your social engagement and consider putting some advertising money behind your best-performing posts.
Once you launch your website, you can take a moment to sit back and be proud of the work you’ve done. But don’t rest too long.
You want to start considering what will motivate website visitors to take the next step with you. Developing lead magnets will add value to your site and help ensure that you convert more website traffic.
As you draft your content plans, consider what content pieces offer the most value to your customers and how you can use those to entice them to share contact information with you.
Lead magnets should be content that your customers can find elsewhere without handing out their contact information. So make it unique, such as independent research findings or unique market insights.
At launch, you should have a strong call to action (CTA) on every page of your website. But you’ll only know how effective those CTAs are once you get them in front of your customers.
Monitor your conversion metrics to see how well they are tracking with your goals. And if you aren’t seeing good conversion rates, test new CTA styles, language or placement. When that doesn’t work, consider hiring a conversion rate optimization specialist.
Once you start driving more traffic with your customer-first website design and strategy, you’re ready to start building out a lead nurture series that helps highlight your best content and guide prospects and customers through the customer buying journey.
This exercise is also good because it will show you where you have potential gaps in your content and what you should be focused on in the coming months for your content plan.
Tie your lead nurture series to actions on your website so that the customer experience is automated and you ensure you are touching base with new leads quickly.
Consider how various products or customer segments could require a different nurture series to close a sale. Develop the most important series first and then start developing the accompanying series from there.
A valuable way to increase website traffic is through high-quality backlinks. To do that, you’ll need to research guest blog opportunities and reach out to see if the website will take your submission. You might also reach out to bloggers with existing content requesting that they link to your content to build backlinks.
When doing backlink research, just be sure that the websites you target have a strong domain authority. Those with weak authority could do more harm than good for your online presence.
Getting good backlinks will also help you elevate your SEO while driving referral traffic to your site.
Once your new website is launched, take some time to review your online listings to make sure all links and referrals are working properly. These listings play a vital role in building website traffic and you don’t want to overlook them in your website launch.
Make sure your information is accurate and that you are on all the most important third-party sites to get the most from your online presence and drive as much traffic as possible.
After launching a new website, many companies sit back and feel pride in their work. And while that’s great, websites require ongoing maintenance. Ignoring ongoing maintenance can leave your website vulnerable to hackers, which can also mean your customers and their data are vulnerable too.
Complete regular upgrades and security patches to keep your website functioning well and adapt it to meet modern standards so it never becomes stale. Once you’ve invested in a new website, keeping it up to date with proper maintenance is important to maintaining your online presence.
Maintaining an online presence requires careful strategy and work. If it all sounds like too much for you to do on your own, bring in the experts. New Light Digital is a team of digital marketing experts who can help you with everything from content planning and writing to website development and maintenance. Schedule your free consultation now to get started.
Further reading:
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