While a website launch is exciting, it’s not going to bring in visitors on its own. Without a good build-up, most people are unlikely to visit your site or show any interest.
Doing a last-minute promotion on social media and your email list for your website launch isn’t effective either. A successful and impactful launch is possible when you’ve built a strong community before-hand.
Building a community brings together an audience that can benefit from your business. They are interested in what you have to offer and are willing to engage with your business.
When you’ve built a community, your website launch will get far more visitors, engagements and conversions. It also creates a strong buzz and benefits your business all around.
So, how do you build a community before you launch your site? Let’s take a look at five different ways that’ll help.
There are several platforms you can use to build your brand community while your website is underway.
Social media platforms are great because they’re free and effective ways to reach out to people. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram makes it easy to engage with people and spread the news about your business.
Get a community started by creating pages or profiles on different social media platforms. Find out the most popular hashtags that are relevant to your audience and start creating content.
You can also create groups or join existing groups to share information. It’s important not to spam your groups with promotional content. Share useful industry information and news. You can also talk about your products and business when it contributes helpful information to the community.
Use social media to spark interest in your business before your website launch. Aim to build relationships and having conversations rather than promotional monologues.
Over time, in weeks, months or a whole year, you will have built a following that will have a genuine interest in your site launch.
People are online looking for useful and relevant content. When you create good content, you get rewarded with engagement.
Content needs to be the heart of your community-building strategy. There are different things you can do to ensure that your content reaches out to people.
You can create content in different ways. Try creating a podcast or a Youtube video series. You can post on platforms like Medium, LinkedIn Pulse and other places. The sooner you create content and promote it, the better your chances are of creating a strong community that wants to hear from you.
There’s a creative way to build a community while your website is still in the works. You can do this with an attractive prelaunch page or a Coming Soon page.
This isn’t like a standard “We’re coming soon” sign that many websites use. That doesn't tell users anything about a business and is completely forgettable.
A great Coming Soon page can create excitement with a countdown timer. You can use it to build stunning backgrounds and compelling text that tells the user that your fantastic business is launching soon.
A plugin like SeedProd lets you create a user registration form on your Coming Soon page. You can notify visitors who gave their email through the optin form notifications about your website launch. It’s also a great opportunity to build your email list for email marketing.
A prelaunch page or a Coming Soon page can help you build a community even before your website is complete. It’s far more memorable than a standard maintenance notification and serves your audience by giving them information.
Contests are engaging, fun and memorable. Most people love the opportunity to win something. When you create an online contest, you catch the attention of your audience and they are more receptive to your communication.
A giveaway contest can even make people curious about your business and make them want to know more. It’s a great way to create a buzz about your upcoming website launch while offering people something of value.
Use a giveaway contest as a launchpad to create brand awareness. Once you have people’s attention you can engage with them and make them a part of your community.
Creating a giveaway contest works well for many reasons. It’s entirely exciting on its own because it gives people something for free. It has a viral component which makes it very shareable on social media, it’s also something that people will remember. You can create a large community and generate a buzz at the same time.
Email marketing is still the most effective way to create conversions. It outperforms all other digital marketing channels in terms of ROI and is still a great tool to use to reach out to people.
You can use your social media platforms, content marketing strategies and a Coming Soon page to build an email list. With an email list, you can send people regular and compelling content that builds their interest.
It’s a powerful way to inform users about your business and product. You can also update your list with industry news and your blog posts. It can create a sense of familiarity over time and make people trust you.
You can build a large community with email marketing. It can also be used to create genuine interest and enthusiasm for your website launch. Keep your audience updated about the launch with an email blast. Offer them discounts and other benefits for sharing your content.
With email marketing, you can build a supportive community that will be there when you launch your website.
Make your website launch successful with your online community behind you
People don’t pay attention to canned marketing communication anymore. Their eyes glaze over and their ears tune out forced advertisements.
Your audience is looking for personal and authentic interactions through the internet. Building a community around your business can give them a platform where they engage with you and their peers.
This is a powerful way to build a base of followers who care about your business and your products. You’re far more likely to win customers from an enthusiastic community than from reaching out to people randomly.
You can create a successful website launch with great traffic and conversions from the get-go by building a community. It’s a meaningful and effective way to make your mark in a digitally-crowded marketspace.
This is actually something I've been thinking about a lot. As someone who's been on the design and build side of app creation most of my career it's easy to get sucked into the desire to build more and build faster and hire more devs etc. At the end of it all the product is left without an audience and valuable learnings and feedback that would have made the development more efficient.
I think a big part of it is that doing the things described above are long tail action and also quite hard if you aren't a great writer. I think the David Cancel and Dave Gerhardt at http://drift.com were the first I noticed that really took this next level. I was a fan of the Seeking Wisdom podcast long before I used Drift on any products. But I was happy to and very loyal by the time I did.
This comment was deleted 2 years ago.