New Website Announcement: The Ultimate Promotion Checklist

Congratulations, you did it!

Your new website is live, and you can’t stop smiling about it.

But now you need a “New Website Announcement Strategy” to make sure you make back the money you spend for the website redesign.

This article will give you some actionable tips to do exactly this.

However, before we do that, we need to discuss a tiny little fact most entrepreneurs and marketers completely ignore.

Fact Is, Nobody Cares About Your New Website Announcement! What You Should Do Instead

The biggest problem with your new website announcement is that the vast majority of people don’t care about it as much as you do.

Nobody wants to see a beautifully designed website if it doesn’t help them in some way.

Yes, I know, we are selfish creatures.

So even when bragging about your new web design, you still have to find a way to provide value.

Otherwise, you are basically just saying:

“Hey, you there, please look at me. Do you see how beautiful I am?”

So if you don’t want to come across as needy, you need to use your website redesign with some other changes you made in your business. For example a new

• Product line
• Service
• Pricing
• Product features
• Team
• TeamStrategic partnerships

Anything that would give your potential customers a reason to visit your website even without the new redesign.

So instead of announcing a new web design, you’re showing a business transformation.

Your website is the face of your company, especially in our digital world.

Maybe it is also a great time to make some critical changes behind the pretty face and get your whole team, work systems, and processes to the next level.

The 3 Critical Things You Should Do Before Announcing Your New Website to The World And Avoid Embarrassment

Before you start telling everybody and their mother about it, you might want to consider a few things:

I. Ask for feedback (from people who don’t like you)

You spent some weeks or even months developing and fine-tuning your new design.

You likely got so familiar with the new pages that you overlook some elements that other people might find confusing.

However, asking your best friend who loves you to death and wishes you the best in the world might not be the right person to ask for feedback.

Instead, contact someone who is brutally honest or even doesn’t like you that much.

Why?

Because they don’t have any benefit of telling you that your website looks pretty and you couldn’t have done anything better.

They might exaggerate with their critic, but it’s still better feedback than:

“Oh, wow, it looks very nice!”

II. Observe how people use your website

You know that old saying:

Don’t listen to what people say – watch what they do

Instead of asking questions, you need to observe how people use your website.

You can do it by showing someone your new web design on your laptop or phone and look over their shoulder.

Or you set up a heatmap tool like Crazyegg, Mouseflow, or Hotjar.

Critical areas to pay attention to are,

• How far do they scroll on your pages?
• At what sections do they get stuck and leave the pages?
• Do they read the content or just skim through it?
• Where did your users click on and where not because they possibly don’t see the button?

III. Be ready to make some more changes

Yes, I hate to break it to you, but

Your website is never finished

If you’re committed to growing your business online, then you need to stop treating your website like a resume or company brochure but as a marketing tool.

The fact is,

traditional web design with a “finish and forget” project mentality will hurt your business in the long run.

Instead of redesigning your website from A-Z every 3 years, you should adopt a more liquid approach and update it a bit every month.

Of course, based on your website visitor’s feedback and behavior, not because you think it’s not pretty enough.

If you need help with it, you should sign up for an unlimited web design service or ask your agency for a retainer plan. The latest might just be much more expensive, though.

Ok, now you’re ready to promote your new website and boost traffic, leads, and sales.

15 Actionable Ways to Announce And Promote Your New Website Without Looking Needy

To be totally clear here.

By “new website,” I’m referring to your redesigned website and assume that you are already running your business for some time and therefore have at least a small audience and customer base.

I don’t mean that the tips outlined in this article won’t work for a startup launch, but they would require a small shift.

Ok, as we also have this out of the way, let’s get started.

Gary Vaynerchuk popularized the concept of

“Document, Don’t Create.”

Some years ago, to push marketers and entrepreneurs not to overthink the content creation process and adapt the success formula of reality shows.

People love to be part of a hero’s journey.

There are more and more startups now that document their growth journey.

GrooveHQ was the first company that I came across years ago when they blogged regularly about their startup growth journey.

A website redesign is mostly not only just a fresh new look.

It is an opportunity to revisit your customer profile and update it with insights and learnings that you gathered over the last months.

Then write an article or shoot a YouTube video about the process of redesigning your website, about

• What did you learn in the process?
• What worked well?
• What would you do differently the next time?
• What were the results?

In 2017 alone, 269 billion emails were sent according to Statista and it will probably grow to over 319 billion in 2021.

Email is still the #1 communication channel in business and offers a severe traffic opportunity.

Create a custom banner in your team’s email signature for your new website announcement.

Pro Tip: Use a tool like signitic to centralize your team’s email signature designs and make sure you present yourself with consistent branding.

If you’re in the startup and tech scene, you are probably familiar with Product Hunt.

I personally use it as a search engine for new tools and tech products.

But it is also awesome to launch your startup, get feedback on your products and services and drive a great amount of traffic to your site.

It won’t last that long but it is worth it.

Here is the traffic we got from PH after our second launch.

But no one says that you can’t launch more than once.

For example, Drift managed to promote its product over 30 times…

Every new product feature is introduced with a new landing page and promoted as new product.

Well, why not. 🤷‍♂️

Every experienced marketer knows that people love before and after images.

Well, a picture says more than 1000 words, right?

Seeing a transformation is better than hearing someone talking about it.

These pictures have some of the highest engagement rates on our Instagram channel.

Shameless plug: Follow us on Instagram @growmodo!

You can easily create these posts yourself.

1. Add the Full Name Screen Capture Chrome Extension.
2. Go to your old website and click on the extension button.
3. A new tab will appear with a full-screen picture of your website.
4. Save it as an image.
5. Do the same with your new website.
6. Go to Canva and create a new Instagram post design.
7. Upload both screenshots and add a rectangle behind one of the screenshots
8. When you’re done with it, download it and upload the picture on Instagram.

If you already missed taking a screenshot of your old website, you might want to contact your web designer as she might have the old page saved in the backend.

Otherwise, you can use the Wayback Machine.

When you just launched your business or don’t even have an existing website, you can use this situation to run a referral launch campaign.

The internet is full of examples of how other startups launched with a big bang.

One of the most famous ones was the trading app Robinhood.

Instead of launching the complete website right away, they started with a simple splash page, asking people for their email address in exchange for early access to their app.

Once signed up, you got asked to share the site with your friends on social media or via email.

The more people you refer to the product, the faster you will get access to the product.

The results?

In the year before the actual product launch, Robinhood collected over one million email addresses.

Yes, that is not a typo: 1 Million.

The good news is that it is pretty easy to create a similar campaign using Viral Loops.

Viral Loops allows you to copy proven referral campaign strategies by using predefined templates.

However, please keep in mind that setting up a splash page with an email form won’t get you a million email addresses.

The success of your campaign is highly dependent on your product or service offer and how well you promote it as well.

Two things that make people take action are discounts and time-restricted offers.

Your new website redesign could be another opportunity to offer precisely this.

The easiest way to promote a special discount is through pop-ups or sticky bars with a countdown timer.

We are a fan of the elfsight widget.

They make it super easy to set up a discount offer on your website within minutes.

Of course, you can also run Facebook and Instagram Ads to promote your discount.

To be honest, I personally believe a classic press release is overrated.

One reason for it is that many business owners and marketing executives don’t really know the purpose of a press release.

They think that news publications are just waiting to write about companies with new products that we can’t distinguish from their competitors.

Ask yourself:

Is my press release newsworthy? What is so new and exciting about it that a journalist would pick it up and spend time writing about it?

Please keep in mind that other people might not be excited as you are about your new website or even business.

Look for yourself. Imagine you’re a journalist, would you enjoy writing an article based on a press release like this one?

That being said, it doesn’t mean that you have a tedious business.

Many great companies in boring industries have exceptional products and services.

But they are just not exciting to read about without any context.

So as I mentioned above, use your new website announcement to combine it with some other changes in your business that are more newsworthy than a new website design.

I know, sending out an email newsletter to your subscriber is pretty much the easiest promotion you can think of.

Here is an example that you can use as inspiration:

But what most companies do wrong is that they only send out one email per promotion.

They don’t consider that the majority of your subscribers will never open your emails.

On average, only 15-20% actually open them.

You just don’t know which one.

As most people check their emails almost every day, you can boost your open rate by trying multiple subject lines.

But instead of risking to annoy some of your subscribers who receive the same email with different subject lines multiple times.

You need to set up an email marketing automation like this one:

Tools like Active Campaign allows you to set up rules and send out the same email with another subject line, but only if they didn’t open your previous email.

If you’re a fan of automating your business, here is another article that you will probably like: 35+ Little-Known Marketing Tools & Services to Automate Your Business

Medium is a great social network for bloggers with 85 to 100 million monthly users.

It is full of professionals interested in entrepreneurship, personal development, and other topics.

It allows you to create a new publication (like your own blog on Medium) or publish on other publications.

Nevertheless, it is a great place to share your personal entrepreneurship story and how you came up stronger after going through challenges.

Now you start again fresh with a new website. 😉

A positive side effect is that you humanize your company and make it easier to connect with your customers.

If you are active on Linkedin on a regular basis, you will probably have seen multiple of these kinds of posts:

Well, there is nothing wrong with these kinds of posts, but I would recommend putting it up one notch by optimizing your Linkedin post for more engagement.

As I already mentioned at the beginning of this article, you should make it about your audience, not you.

So here are a few tips to boost your Linkedin post engagement when announcing your new website:

• Instead of sharing an image, record a screencast video with CloudApp or Loom. The Linkedin algorithm favors video over images and gives a better feel for your web design.
• The first sentence needs to be a proper hook and evoke curiosity
• Use hashtags but less than five (according to Houtsuite)
• Join a Lempod group with other professionals who share similar content and boost your likes and comments

Your blog posts likely attract the highest amount of organic traffic on your website.

That makes sense because people use Google primarily to get information and learn about new things.

However, your blog visitors are very often not even aware of your business and need to be guided to your homepage or other relevant content.

Yes, we do it too. 🙋‍♂️

If you don’t use a Pop-Up plugin already, I would recommend Convertflow.

It allows you to create different kinds of calls-to-action on your site from general forms to full-page overlays and even landing pages.

But my favourite feature is the ability to create a/b tests and test the best converting CTAs.

Give it a try.

Everybody knows that the organic reach on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is shockingly low.

According to Social Media Today, only an average of 6.4% of the accounts who like your page will see your posts.

So similar to your email newsletter, you need to be more persistent and promote your posts more than once.

If you want to automate the process as much as possible, you can use a tool called Missinglettr.

This social media automation tool takes your blog post in which you announce your new website, and create up to hundreds of post variations.

In this way, you get the most of each page you share on Facebook, Twitter, and co.

As a result, you drive more traffic to your website.

Note: Existing audience required.

Similar to Facebook, the organic reach on Instagram dropped massively over the last years.

However, with stories, you still have a way to engage with your audience in a fun way.

One feature that more and more brands utilize to connect with their followers are quizzes and polls.

In fact, there are multiple use cases for Instagram Stories.

So why not use it to showcase your new web design and receive feedback from it.

When you have more than 10,000 followers, you are able to activate the swipe up feature and send them straight to your website from Instagram.

One advantage of Stories is that they are only visible for 24 hours, so you can be a little bit courageous and test multiple variations to see what works best for you.

Reddit is a vast social network that many people forget because it doesn’t have such a sufficient advertising platform like Facebook.

It is also more anonymous than Twitter and Co.

That often leads to more negative comments, especially when someone tries to use the platform to promote themselves shamelessly.

So instead of just promoting your new website launch, I would recommend you ask for website feedback.

Find a subreddit with your target audience and ask them for honest feedback and suggestions.

Don’t give them the impression that you only want to promote it, but that you want to start a discussion about things you can still optimize.

By picking the right subreddit you increase the chance that some potential customers check out your site and become curious about what you do.

The last tip for your new website announcement strategy is web design inspiration sites.

You might have come across them when you did some research about trending web design.

These sites get pretty decent traffic, and everybody can submit a page within a few clicks.

Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to be accepted.

You need to have a custom-designed website that stands out from your competition.

But you should definitely give it a try. It is worth it in terms of traffic.

Here are my favourite design inspiration sites:

• Landingfolio
• Land Book
• Lapa Ninja
• DesignMunk
• SaaS Pages
• Page Flows
• One Page Love

Conclusion

I hope you got some valuable insights to execute your new website announcement strategy.

But even if you forget most of these tactics in the next minutes, I want you to remember one thing.

Always make it about your audience and provide value instead of just going for the shameless plugs.

Also, don’t forget to make updates to your website regularly and don’t leave your site untouched for the next 2-3 years.

The world is changing faster these days, and so is your customer.

Keep studying your ideal customer and optimize your pages to make it a no brainer to buy from you.

If you need help with your ongoing web design tasks, feel free to check out Growmodo and book a demo to discuss how we can help you unlock your website’s full potential.