Launching a new website in today's world can be challenging. With so many businesses vying for attention in a crowded online marketplace, it can be difficult for new websites to stand out and attract the traffic they need to succeed.
Luckily, inbound marketing offers some great ways for business owners to improve their launch strategy and get more exposure in the process.
In order for inbound marketing to be effective, it is important to understand what exactly it entails and how it can be used in a business context.
Inbound marketing is a strategy in which businesses utilize content marketing, blogging, social media, and search engine optimization (SEO) to attract traffic from search engines. In contrast with traditional outbound marketing techniques such as direct mail or cold-calling, which aim to drive leads into the sales funnel directly, inbound relies on pulling people into the site in an organic, referral-based fashion.
This type of marketing is great for growing your brand awareness because it often results in high-quality leads and increased conversion rates due to its targeted nature. People are brought in by search engines as opposed to being pushed in from ads or other channels. It also helps build trust between you and the customer, because inbound marketing involves creating and supplying high-quality content that your target audience is actually looking for.
Before we look at ways you can use inbound marketing to boost your new website launch, let’s consider some of the benefits this type of marketing fosters.
Many high-profile brands have relied on inbound marketing as part of their success strategy. While it can take some time to master, it should give your business the advantage you need to stand out in a crowded market.
Now that we understand what inbound marketing is and what makes it an effective strategy for building brand awareness and growing traffic, let’s look at some of the ways you can use inbound to help boost your new website launch.
A good pre-launch marketing plan is essential to ensuring a successful website launch. Those weeks and months leading up to your launch are a determining factor to the success or failure of your launch.
Setting up a pre-launch website or landing page in preparation for launch is a great way to create awareness, draw in visitors, and build an audience in the weeks leading up to your launch.
Including a sign-up form on your pre-launch webpage will enable you to start building an email list of interested contacts. You can then send those contacts email updates on your website’s progress, advance details of your product or service, and notify them when the site goes live.
Just because your website isn’t open for business doesn’t mean you can’t begin promoting it. You can start to drive traffic to your site URL before the official website launch to increase visibility in search engines.
There are various ways to do this—including using paid advertising—but many of the organic methods in this post are proven to be extremely effective. Not only should you promote your URL, but also try to get as many links as possible from other sites pointing back to it.
According to a recent HubSpot report, about 64 percent of marketers actively invest time in SEO—and with good reason! Including SEO strategies in your marketing efforts increases both your website's visibility and rankings.
To ensure your site is optimized for SEO, upload an XML sitemap to provide search engines with a list of pages and posts on your site. This will enable Google to crawl your website more efficiently and speed up the indexing of your content, too.
You should also incorporate relevant keywords in your navigation bar, title tags, post titles, header tags, alt image tags, and so forth, to drive more organic traffic and build links to your site.
In order to maximize the success of your new website in terms of driving traffic and increasing SEO, spend some time creating blog posts about relevant topics in advance. This can include video content, as well. By doing this in advance of the launch, you will be in an excellent position to start receiving inbound links from other blogs and websites which, in turn, will help push your site up in search engine rankings.
In addition to topical blog posts, you can create other helpful content-based resources that align with your business purposes. Consider things like e-books, how-to guides, checklists, FAQs, and so forth. As well as being great for SEO, creating high-quality, value-driven content helps you build trust with your audience and establish yourself as an authority in your industry in the eyes of consumers.
To help build an audience for your site before launching it, you can also utilize social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to connect with prospective customers in anticipation of the launch. In addition to sharing interesting industry tidbits that might be relevant for users, you can post links back to your website to encourage organic inbound links.
By sharing valuable content on these platforms before launching your new website, you should be able to build plenty of interest in your site in advance.
You may want to consider Quora as another way to build interest in your website before launching, by sharing valuable content there and answering relevant questions to position yourself as an expert in the industry. Quora has audiences that are typically engaged with the topics discussed, which means their interest in your content will be high.
In addition to posting on the usual public profiles, try posting in relevant groups and forums, too. This will allow you to gain valuable insights from users and experts in your industry—a great way to get feedback about whether or not the launch of your website is heading in the right direction!
Another great tactic you can use to boost your search engine rankings is to work with influencers and the media so that they report about your new site before its launch date. Working with bloggers and influencers in this way will allow you to get inbound links to the site and help you reach higher search engine rankings.
You could organize collaborations, write blog posts for their site that drive back to your site, or have journalists write in-depth articles about your product or service that you can use to gain links from highly authoritative sources.
As you can see, when it comes to launching your new website, inbound marketing is a powerful tool in your arsenal. Investing in inbound strategies for your launch can help generate traffic on day one and grow your site's reach over time.