A comprehensive database for everything WordPress related.

TOP
WPKlik Logo Newsletter

Sign up and receive a free copy of How to Create an online Store with WooCommerce (full guide)

Everything You Need to Know About Making a New Website Announcement

Everything You Need to Know About Making a New Website Announcement

The easiest part about launching a new website is choosing the type of website you want to create. After you’ve done that, the real work begins, from picking the appropriate theme for the website, to making sure the necessary plugins for new websites are ready and working. And as if designing and setting up functionalities and features won’t cause you a headache, you’ll also have to think about letting people know you’re cooking up a new website – which brings us to the topic of making a new website announcement.

In this article, we’ll dive a bit more into the importance of new website announcements – and website launches in general – and investigate some of the ways to ensure your announcements reach your audiences with the right message.

Role of the Announcement in a Website Launch

Launching a website is an arduous task with multiple steps within multiple steps. In its simplest form, it can be as easy as buying a domain name, choosing a managed WordPress hosting to get WordPress pre installed, choosing a theme, installing some plugins, and creating some content. That way, you can launch a website in an afternoon.

Usually, however, you’ll have to be a little more deliberate when creating a website. You’ll have to think about its goals, its competitors, the audience you want to attract, safety and security, performance, and all the other things that contribute to the success of a website.

A new website announcement comes up when you think about the audience, more specifically the pre- and post-launch day audience-oriented activities. The announcement can have several purposes, but they all converge on ensuring that your website sees great traffic from the very day it goes online.

The announcement is one of the things that help hype up your new website, and it can also continue maintaining the hype after the launch date. It’s also the thing that informs your audiences, existing and potential alike, about what they can expect from your website and when. It’s a key piece of audience communication you should only forego if you’re deliberately launching a site under the radar.

Choosing the Channels for the Announcement

Audience research is an integral part of launching a new website. You should have a clear image – or a few – of who your target audience members are, what their interests are, and how best to approach them. You should also have an understanding on what’s the best way to reach out to them – specific audiences prefer specific communication channels.

Creating an announcement doesn’t have to be too expensive – an image and some text can be all you need. However, you might decide to boost its reach a bit, usually via a paid method, so blanketing every possible communication channel effectively can be prohibitively expensive. All the more reason to decide on the channels that matter to your audience the most and invest the bulk of resources into them.

Social media should be your go-to channel. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or a YouTube video, you can craft your message into their respective content formats inexpensively. Email is another incredibly useful channel, but it tends to work best if you already have a newsletter, or at least a well-developed email list.

Other channels to consider include press releases you can send out to various media outlets. Word-of-mouth can be incredibly effective if you can get it started – there’s no hype like the one shared by enthusiastic people. If you have an existing website, you should use it, too, to spread the message about the upcoming change. So pretty much any asset that’s effective and that you can afford can be used to announce your new website.

Crafting the Contents of the Announcement

The contents of the launch announcement can vary depending on the channel you’re using. A press release can’t look like an Instagram post and creating Instagram posts that look like regular press releases is a waste of Instagram’s support for visual storytelling. Keep in mind that a single platform can support multiple content formats, and again, it’s up to you, your budget, and your audience targeting to decide what you can and cannot use.

In general, you’ll want the tone of the announcement to match the channel as well as the branding. Some channels have stricter rules regarding tone and content than others – press releases tend to be the most stuck-up of the bunch. Social media might let you cut loose a bit, but only if that’s something that goes with the website you’re planning to launch. The announcement is probably the first communication of the website with the audience, and you know how important it is to be consistent.

As for the things you should include in the announcement, they again depend on the channel and your strategy. You can go the mysterious route and announce nothing except an address and a date. You can also provide a bit more context, especially if you’re aiming at an audience that’s not already familiar with who you are and what you want to achieve with the new website. The very least you should do is tell people where they should go and when, although giving them a reason could never hurt.

New Website Announcement Strategy

If you still need a couple of pointers beyond the ones we already mentioned, that’s perfectly fine. It takes some strategizing to create a good new website announcement. Here are a couple of additional tips you should consider following.

  • Start early: you don’t want to have a last-minute announcement, as it won’t do anything to create some buzz around your website launch. Give it some time to work its magic.
  • Stay late: once the website is online, the announcements should stay up for some while, maybe even a whole month. Keep the door open for those who are late to the party.
  • Provide incentive: you can’t go wrong by offering people a reason to ‘attend’ a website launch. If you’re organizing a giveaway or something like that, announce it.
  • Include a call-to-action: this might not be applicable for every launch, but if you can request an action people can do after reading the announcement, it could mobilize them well.
  • Don’t forget offline marketing: if you have a storefront or any physical place where you can interact with audiences or customers, use it as a channel for your announcement.

The list is not definitive, of course, and you should encourage yourself to come up with specific solutions for your situation. Look for inspiration among the things you’d usually do to promote your website, or even increase engagement.

Let’s Wrap It Up!

Crafting a good new website announcement doesn’t have to be that hard, but it’s still not a task you should take lightly. Plenty is hanging on it – not as much as there’s hanging on the site’s hosting or content, but still plenty. Approach creating the announcement seriously and with due diligence, and don’t forget to imbue the process and the announcement with a proper measure of fun.

We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!

Newsletter

WordPress perfection at your fingertips.

If you enjoyed this article, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter using the form below. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter and subscribe to our YouTube channel for WordPress video tutorials.

Leave a Reply