Coming Soon Page and Lead Generation Ideas to Hook your Audience Before Website Launch

Successful websites start attracting the audience before they are even launched. Contrary to what many may think, this doesn’t even have to depend on the uniqueness of the idea or product it is intended to promote or sell. On the contrary, it depends on a rather schematic set of steps that should be taken way before the actual website is live.

But, wait… How do you attract visitors to a website that doesn’t exist?

Actually, the process is rather straightforward – all you need is a creative coming soon page and some digital marketing techniques. This way, you can create an early buzz around your idea by encouraging your first-time visitors to complete a specific action on your page or simply share the page across their social networks. In fact, this single page can be quite a powerful lead generation tool when coupled with social media strategy and other forms of digital promotion.

Awesome stuff you can do with a coming soon page

The web is a hive where thousands of people, ideas and projects emerge every hour in an attempt to capture the attention of targeted audiences. In such a turbulent environment, standing out depends on both your creativity and the ability to make use of the available resources to present your idea to the world. One of these resources is a coming soon page whose main purpose is to help you stand out from the digital crowd even before you actually launch your product or service.

By replacing a generic “Under Construction” or “Man at Work” page with the one that offers relevant content and creates context for a website launch, website owners can start with an early promotion. This page then becomes more than a simple announcement; it is a starting point for a large-scale lead generation tactic because it allows website owners to:

–        Build email lists and attract early subscribers by inviting visitors to sign up for a notification about the website launch and potential “early bird” promo offers.

–        Gather a community of beta testers for an app or product by promoting the page among early adopters.

–        Create a social media buzz by inspiring people to share the story.

The anatomy of a coming soon page that rocks

When it comes to engaging the audience, a simple page with a timer that gives no real information about your future focus just won’t do. Just like any other landing page, a coming soon page should be designed in accordance with a specific goal and contain a set of elements that help turning average visitors into valuable leads. Some of the key features of a successful coming soon page are:

1.     Attractive – the aesthetic appeal of a web page helps you visitor form the first impression about your website. According to different studies, 75% of web users make judgments on a company’s credibility based on a website design only and most of them do so in as little as 50 milliseconds.

2.     Simple – given the limited time you have to make the first impression, you need to focus on simplicity in order to get the message across. A coming soon page should be more of a teaser than a saga, meaning that it should contain no more than several lines of text in form of a clear value proposition.

3.     Straightforward – depending on the actual goal, a coming soon page should have a clear layout that would motivate a visitor to apply for an invite, join your beta community or share the story.

4.     Memorable – at this stage, website owners have only few elements at their disposal to make their business memorable. One of these is definitely a domain name that should be simple, catchy and recognizable, as is the case with those that use a .ME domain extension.

5.     Optimized – although a coming soon page shouldn’t be stuffed with content, these few lines of text should definitely contain the most important keywords, which helps both Google and visitors better understand what your website is about.

Quick note: if you lack skills or resources to design a custom coming soon page and you run your website on WordPress, you can use one of the popular plugins such as Ultimate Coming Soon Page or Anticipate, to make a powerful first impression in an easy way.

3 lead generation ideas to consider

Once the design part is over and the page is live, you can start a lead generation campaign in order to attract new visitors and make them early brand evangelists.

Early bird offers. To encourage more people to sign up for your newsletter or a notification about the website/product launch, you can create a special offer for a limited number of people. This gives your visitors a real reason to engage and can be a much better conversion technique since it actually provides some value for them.

Encourage social sharing. If you browse BetaList or any other website where tomorrow’s startups promote their stories, you might be surprised to find that only few of them actually have social media buttons on their coming soon pages. This minimizes the chances of making your website launch a trending story on social networks and might costs you some valuable leads.

Creative explainer video. Explainer videos can help you at different stages of digital expansion and should definitely be included in your coming soon page too. According to B2B Demand Generation Benchmark 2014, 23% of marketers believe that B2B videos generate “very high” quantity of leads, while 43% reported they generate a “somewhat high” quantity. Therefore, if you get creative enough, you may attract more prospects that will later be willing to use your product/service.

Finally, it could be said that a website launch is a campaign itself, meaning that you don’t have to wait to load it with contents in order to start generating relevant leads. With a basic thing such as a coming soon page, you can do some great stuff that would soon start bringing value for your business.