Approach for Using Social Media to Help Launch Our New Website:
What do you do when you have an event to promote? A countdown of course! Our plan of action was to start one month before with a vague and mysterious post about something BIG that’s coming. Then we would wait until two weeks before reminding followers that something BIG is on it’s way. One week before the BIG launch date, we would then start a daily countdown reminding followers how many days were left until the reveal. The goal was to keep it mysterious as to what was actually happening that way we could keep viewers intrigued and wanting to pay attention to find out the surprise.
For the creative aspect of these countdown posts, we decided to use videos and Boomerangs (short bursts of pictures looped together to look like a quick video). We chose this route because videos tend to catch more people’s attention and get more engagement. Besides keeping the actual surprise mysterious, we also wanted to make sure the videos were fun and exciting to engage the viewer. We also made sure to have some sort of subtle branding in the videos to help keep our brand in people’s mind.
Interested in viewing our countdown posts, scroll down to view the entire Website Launch Countdown campaign.
Social Media Marketing Works! Here’s our Proof:
Sometimes with social media, it’s hard to tell if all the effort is really paying off. When we first started our social media marketing campaign for our new website launch, we didn’t see a huge spike in our analytics. The video announcing a BIG surprise on June 19th performed well, but other than that we really didn’t see a whole lot of change in analytics until the day of our launch. However, a few days before the launch, multiple people in the office had someone ask them what the mysterious “BIG surprise” was going to be. So we were starting to notice an interest and awareness in our social media marketing efforts.
Where we really saw the payoff was the day we launched. On June 19th, the day we launched our website, we had a huge increase on Facebook page traffic & a spike in post engagement just by posting one video. Usually our Facebook page only has a couple page views every couple of days, but on the website launch day, we had over 20 page views. Engagement and reach on the video post announcing the website TRIPLED our normal engagement and reach. The video had 250 views out of the 620 people the post reached (more than 40%) and 87 post & link clicks.
That’s not all! When we checked out our website analytics, we could really see how social media marketing helped drive people to our new website. On the day we launched, nearly 25% of the visitors of our website were referred to it by one of our social media accounts. Our email blast even helped by bringing in about 11% of the visitors that landed on our site that day. We even saw another huge spike in our website analytics when we posted the GIF below a few days after the launch. The post had just as many link clicks as the post announcing our website did.
Social Media Campaign for Launching our Website:
For the one month before post, we chose to do a “Jurassic Park” inspired video letting everyone know that we had something in the works.
Two weeks before, we posted a Boomerang of Anne’s website layout sketches to give a small hint to everyone, without giving away the mystery of what was coming.
One week before the launch, we started our daily countdown. We used a mixture of videos & Boomerangs that incorporated the number of days left until the launch and some sort of Thunderstruck Design branding.
Then came the most important post of them all, the website launch announcement! For this we decided to do a short, attention grabbing video. We made sure to keep it around 10-15 seconds so viewers would be more likely to watch the entire thing.