A “coming soon” page can be many things.
A way to promote your brand. A method of growing your loyal subscriber base. It could even be a way for you to show off some fancy design skills.
But there’s also a few things that your “coming soon” page shouldn’t be. Agencies, business owners, and all types of marketers in between make mistakes with these pages simply because they generally aren’t an area of focus for a marketing plan.
That’s a mistake on a broad level, but there are several specific missteps that you should avoid if you want your “coming soon” page to attain optimal success.
Not collecting information from visitors
Unless they’ve navigated there accidentally, people who are visiting your “coming soon” page are there for a reason. The odds are good that they want to learn something about your brand, your upcoming launch, or both.
So instead of having them browse away after they check out the information you have on your page, why not collect their details and stay in touch?
If you’ve done a good job at building interest in your organization and what it has to offer, most people won’t mind giving you their email address and receiving the occasional pre-launch email from you. In fact, collecting contact information is frequently listed as a critical ingredient for a viral launch page.
Just don’t overdo it: save the heavy email marketing guns for after your new site, company or offering is ready.
An example of the type of information you should be collecting from visitors to your “coming soon” page
Not providing enough information
This is a common one. How many times have you seen a cool abstract design on a “coming soon” page, accompanied by a vague message like one of these:
- “[Company] is coming. [Date].”
- “On [date], [product] will change the industry forever.”
- “The future of [industry] is here on [date].”
While these phrases may be mysterious and will certainly add a “cool” factor to your brand and upcoming offering, there’s one big problem with them: it doesn’t give your audience any concrete information about just what is coming!
It’s true: you want to have a certain degree of mystery leading up to your launch. It helps build curiosity, which keeps people interested in what you are offering.
But you shouldn’t be so mysterious that you completely forget to draw in your target audience. You don’t have to give away all the details of your new offering, product or service, but try to at least hint at it.
For example: launching a new accounting product? You could make reference to company numbers or reports. Creating a new fashion brand? Mention something about style or confidence. These indirect marketing messages are ambiguous enough to maintain your air of mystery, but they’ll do a better job of keeping your target audience interested.
Not providing additional content
A “coming soon” page is great: simply by having this type of website in place, you’re ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing.
But why stop there?
The perfect time to use content to engage with your audience is when they are already engaged with your “coming soon” page.
You can do this in a number of ways. If the layout of your “coming soon” page supports it, you might want to think about creating a blog with updates and information about your upcoming launch.
Marketing automation company HubSpot does a great job of this with their INBOUND marketing conference event. The blog for this upcoming event features information about the speakers, background information about the city of Boston, and other details that people who are interested in the conference might want to know.
If you’d prefer to keep a cleaner “coming soon” page, that’s okay too. But you should still link out to your existing website, a social media page, or some other destination where your audience can go to find out more about your upcoming product, service or business launch. The more content that you can provide your audience with, the more likely it is that they’ll remain interested until your launch, when there’s a good chance they’ll become some of your earliest customers.
A couple of ideas for this type of supporting content:
- Behind-the-scenes looks at your team working on your upcoming launch offering
- An in-depth look at a challenge or problem that your new product, brand or service will solve
- A picture of a component, ingredient or tool used to make your new product or offering
If you think creatively, ideas for content to support your “coming soon” page are nearly endless.
Not optimizing your page for search
This is a common mistake made by marketers. On the surface, the reasoning for this issue is a simple one. Why invest time and energy into optimizing a “coming soon” page? Wouldn’t your efforts be better spent making a better product, and then launching a significant search engine optimization campaign afterwards?
The fact is, if you really want to attain search engine optimization success, you have to do both.
You see, search engine optimization is not the type of marketing technique that can give you overnight success. There’s no one answer when it comes to how long an SEO campaign will take to bear results, but most experts agree that it usually takes at least 4 months, and sometimes a whole year, before the full results of search engine optimization are realized.
So why would you want to waste these months not optimizing your “coming soon” page for search engines?
You shouldn’t.
When you are building, editing and adding content to your “coming soon” page, make sure that you pay attention to titles, tags, meta descriptions and other important elements of search engine optimization for a “coming soon” page.
Yoast is one of the most popular WordPress plugins available today.
This will give you a huge advantage. By the time your product, service or new business is ready to be revealed, you will already be well on your way to ranking highly in relevant search results and acquiring more customers as a result.
Your “Coming Soon” Page is Not a Placeholder!
This is the most important thing to remember about your page. If you plan carefully, you can avoid mistakes like these and use a “coming soon” page to make serious progress building your audience base and gaining traction on search engines, setting you up for a highly successful launch.
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