You’re about to launch a new website … congrats! You’ve put in months making sure your site will be intuitive, attractive and easy to navigate but now you need to get the word out.  It’s worth taking the time pre-launch to put a plan in place to make a bigger splash with your new site. Here are some basic ideas to work into your promotion plan.

1. Notify Your Customers and Prospects with an Email Announcement – Send an email announcing the new site to your email lists including current customers and leads. This is a big announcement with no hard sell so you may see higher open and click-thru rates. Use an email template that is consistent with the new look and feel of your site to help this email stand out! Highlight the most popular, visual and interactive pages so visitors will be encouraged to explore. Bonus: if the email announcement is a success, consider a second email with a slight variation to keep the buzz going.

2. Get Your Internal Team Excited – Develop an email to send internally to announce the new website launch to your entire team. Or better yet throw an ice cream social to take an afternoon to celebrate the hard work of the team and get people excited about the new company site.

3. Generate Social Media Buzz – Your Facebook and Twitter fans are already interested in your brand so they are the perfect audience for this exciting news. Build a posting schedule including a teaser post, a launch announcement and a series of posts highlighting popular new pages or features. Encourage your fans to share and interact so your post hits even more people.

4. Bonus – Increase Paid Spend to Compensate for Post-Launch Organic Dip – Launching a new website typically results in a temporary dip in organic ranking as Google and other search engines crawl the new content and site structure. In addition to recommended best SEO practices that will shorten the post-launch dip duration, consider a small increase in paid channels like AdWords or Facebook to make up for the temporary decrease in total website traffic.

With your website promotion plan, make sure to think through what content will have the biggest impact and be the most interesting to your audience. Do you have a new resource? A video gallery? A new white paper? Make sure to put your best asset forward to draw people in. Note it may be worth waiting a few days after launch to promote the site to the public to make sure all the kinks are worked out. After all the hard work that went into your website, make sure to do your part to promote it!