How do you know when a movie’s going to be good? Chances are, it was the trailer that sold you. You’d never hear a film team saying, “Well, we’re working hard on the movie, so we don’t need to make a trailer,” right? When it comes to marketing before a launch, anticipation is everything.
Similarly, just because you’re working on an amazing website doesn’t mean you don’t need a well-made coming soon page. These pages are a great way to get people interested as you fine-tune the details of your website behind the scenes.
For some of your early viewers, the coming soon page will be their first introduction to what you do. And you can make it a great one!
Put Your Visual Identity Out In the World
One of the biggest components of a company’s success is its branding, which often manifests as visual aesthetics. By choosing colors, fonts, and imagery for your coming soon page, you’re doing something significant: introducing the world to your visual identity.
Don’t worry if you feel like you haven’t made decisions on branding yet. You can always change things later. In fact, you can use the feedback from a coming soon page to see if your ‘look’ is working, or whether it needs a makeover before the real launch.
You might think that you should wait to post anything until you have the full website ready. But this could backfire, making it seem like your website doesn’t exist and turning away a potential starter audience.
A clean, professional-looking coming soon page is a perfect way to state your presence and reassure visitors without having to have everything together.
Getting It Done
One thing that might be holding you back from creating a coming soon page is that you don’t have the time or brainpower just yet.
You might not feel ready to create a visual identity because you’re still learning about the design that will work best for your project. After all, if you felt ready to create webpages, you could have a website by now, right?
Well, the great thing about a coming soon page is that you don’t have to do it yourself or even with the team that’s going to be doing the main design for your website. You could take a day or two off from your regular schedule to focus and create the page, but if that’s not where your mind is right now, you have options.
You can hire a professional company to make the coming soon page for you, choose from design templates, or hire a graphic designer for this one-time gig.
A Coming Soon Page Gets You Started on SEO
One of the biggest technical advantages of a coming soon page is that it’ll get you started on a good SEO, or search engine optimization, standing. Even if you don’t have a ‘real’ website yet, if you have relevant text on your landing page, you can give users something to search for.
This way, when you open up the rest of your website, you’re not starting from scratch. Having an already-established page will get you to higher spots on search rankings, and it means you can start building your viewer count before the actual launch.
Gauge Interest Early
Even though a coming soon page isn’t designed for major functionality, there is one thing you can add to the page if you want.
You can include a button or text box that allows users to sign up for news about your site’s opening.
This way, you can see how many people are engaged with your website and get started on building up your audience base.
Another way to get an audience from a coming soon page is to provide links to any other page that’s relevant to your business or idea. If you’ve got some social media accounts you can link to, this is a great way to build your follower count and make your website more engaging at the same time.
The brilliant thing about having a good coming soon page is that this also gives other people something to link to if they want to spread the word about your website. If you’re starting a new business that’s going to get written up in a newspaper or blog, you can provide a link to your coming soon page as a way to direct an interested audience to something concrete.
Build Anticipation
Your coming soon page doesn’t have to be the home page you’re stuck with forever. In fact, it probably should be different from your home page plans.
The aims of a coming soon page and a typical home page are different.
A home page is a welcoming spot to provide clarity and keep the user interested—a home base to come back to as the user navigates the rest of the website.
The coming soon page should still be interesting and engaging, but at this stage, you won’t have anything to direct the user to. And you might have anything to be clear about either. So, in contrast to a home page, a coming soon page can amp up the mystery and anticipation.
If you want, you can experiment with an intentional lack of clarity, like showing a countdown with some intriguing imagery and nothing more. Even if you don’t make it dramatic, though, a coming soon page is mysterious in nature anyway.
Don’t feel like you have to explain anything on this page. All you need to express to the user is that something interesting will come soon and that it will be worth the wait.
Show Viewers You’re Real
Let’s say you’re opening a new restaurant, and you have a website but no content to put on it yet. If someone hears from their friend that a new restaurant is opening up nearby, but they go to your page and hit an error message, they might have doubts about what they heard.
Was a restaurant really going to come? Maybe the friend was confused, or was talking about a different area? Or have plans changed, and it isn’t opening after all?
Word-of-mouth engagement is crucial in these early stages, and it’s important to show potential customers that you’ll be open for business soon. You want to nurture any budding interest, not throw it in doubt.
Coming Soon: Your Coming Soon Page!
When you’re trying to build your web presence and let your audience know that you’re out there, a coming soon page can help you before you even start. A beautiful page will attract users, gauge interest, and build anticipation.
And you don’t have to do it alone. Check out our options for themes and features we can build for you.
See you at your website’s launch—or sooner!
Published on September 14, 2020 under coming soon. Modified on September 15, 2020.
