In the movie business, previews are a huge deal. Remember the last time you saw a trailer for a movie you wanted to see? How did you feel?
If you’re like most, previews give you one feeling in particular: anticipation. After watching that two-minute highlight, you can’t wait to check out the entire movie!
Coming soon pages can be just as effective when it comes to building anticipation. If you use your coming soon page correctly, you can get your audience just as excited as they would be about a thrilling movie trailer.
But you have to achieve it in a specific way.
These tips will help you build excitement with your coming soon page so that you have an eager audience waiting for your product or service once it launches.
Give away bits of information at a time
The French philosopher Voltaire once said, “The secret to being a bore is to tell everything.”
Voltaire wasn’t talking about landing pages, but this advice from a couple hundred years back still applies to building a coming soon page that is an effective marketing tool. It’s true that you want to get people excited by telling them all about the great stuff that your upcoming product or service can do, but if you give away everything before it comes out, even people who are interested in the offering don’t have a reason to stay engaged with it.
Their interest will wane, which means you will fade from their mind.
A better approach is to give away a small bit of information at a time. Start with a sentence or two that provides a description of your upcoming offering. From there, if you want to amplify this tactic, you can continue offering information using a series of blog posts or an email newsletter that sends messages out every few weeks.
One great example of this can be found on the coming soon page for Fixers, a travel company specializing in adventurous, unorthodox activities. Although their site is now live, check out their coming soon page below:
There are a few ways that this website applies the idea of giving away tidbits at a time to draw attention:
1. Compelling visuals
Check out the smiling man and woman on the tandem bike. They look like they are having a great time. But we still don’t know what kind of trip they are on or where they are going. All the visitor knows is that they have a cool tandem bike and are having a blast! Now you’re starting to think that this might be how you feel if you get a holiday from Fixer, right?
2. Great headlines
What is an ordinary holiday anyway? The visitor is now wondering if maybe their holidays have been too ordinary. They start to feel a need to learn about what makes a holiday extraordinary.
3. An excellent call to action
The holiday you never thought you could have? What could that be? Notice how they didn’t come out and say what these holidays are, or give any examples of them.
4. A hashtag
If there’s a hashtag, the reader immediately thinks there must be people talking about the company. But what are they saying? There’s no “Latest tweets” window or even any direction about how to use the hashtag. It’s just there, which prompts the reader to go out and find out for themselves!
If this one coming soon page can use the principle of only giving away bits of information at a time in four different ways, imagine what you could do with your site. The possibilities are endless!
Collect their information
This might seem like an obvious one, but you would be surprised at how many coming soon pages fail to do this. Some marketers might assume that just because they have a sweet landing page and are working on a killer product that people will be drawn to their site immediately.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. You want to always stay at the top of your prospects’ minds. People who are willing to give you their email info are providing you with an invitation to do just that.
But don’t squander it! There are plenty of other resources on the web that go in-depth into the subject of email marketing, so we won’t do it here. Just remember that above everything, strive to add value to the lives of your visitors in a unique way.
Promote other things
If you’re an established company that has been around for a while and are simply launching a new product or service, this one is easy. You’ve got a main company website, or maybe some other websites that discuss a product or service that complements the one you are launching soon.
You could also invite visitors to connect with you through social media. There’s a plethora of cool-looking social media icons floating around the web: pick ones that complement your color scheme and slap them up there!
If you are a brand-spanking-new company that has been around for a few days, there are still other things you can promote. Even the newest startups usually have a main web site, Facebook, or Twitter page in place that people can use to connect.
If all else fails and you really can’t think of anything else to promote, then give people a place where they can contact you: you can use a mail icon to persuade people to get in touch with you, or even share your Facebook or LinkedIn page. Whatever else you decide to promote, the goal is to make it easy for visitors to find more information about your company and what it does.
Use great visual elements
Visual marketing is a critical element of your brand’s web presence, especially on a coming soon page where there isn’t a lot of text or other elements to distract page visitors.
If you already have some visual branding in place, make sure that you carry it over to your coming soon page so that you can reinforce your brand in the minds of your visitors. In our recent blog post on maintenance pages, we discussed how the brain processes a logo that it is familiar with.
The big difference with a coming soon page is that you aren’t only trying to reinforce familiarity. You also want to grab the visitor’s attention and capture their imagination with an exciting image that helps convey a part of what your upcoming product or service will do for your customers.
Check out this coming soon page by Arché Travel, a Mediterranean travel agency:
What do you notice immediately? That’s right: the picturesque scenery. White clouds dancing over the mountains in the distance, the gentle ripple of the water. You can almost feel yourself there, can’t you? That’s the power of great visual branding on a coming soon page. It gives your visitors a taste of what they can expect to experience when your product or service is released.
Build Excitement and Relationships
Your coming soon page can be much more powerful than you might think. With a good visual design, elements that excite, and a smart plan for outreach, you can give your upcoming product or service a huge leg up in the marketing realm before it even launches.
The post How to Use Your Coming Soon Page as a Marketing Tool appeared first on SeedProd.