Congratulations. After months of planning, writing content, designing and developing, your website is finally live. Now what? Here are five things you need to do after you launch your website.
1. Install two things: Google Analytics and a heat-tracking software.
Google Analytics will show you how your website is performing including:
- Number of visitors
- Pages they’re looking at
- How long they're spending on each page
With this information, you'll better understand which topics and pages your visitors are the most interested in. And later, as we’ll describe, you can optimize it.
A heat-tracking software—we suggest something like Crazy Egg or Hotjar—will show you what specific things people are doing on a page:
- What are they clicking on
- Where their mouse is moving on the page
- How far down they're scrolling.
Result? You can optimize the page by making easier for people to find things, eliminate things people are not interested in, and improve the design to make it easier to read.
2. Get with your sales team and create educational content.
This content will be used for both search engine optimization and the sales process.
Your website isn't just a brochure—it’s an integral part of your sales team's process because with these articles, they can relay information to prospects. The content will benefit both you and your sales team.
If you’re not sure what to write about, ask your sales team what questions their prospects and customers ask. Why? Because your sales team:
- Are the boots on the ground
- Interface with your prospects and customers every day.
- Field questions from prospects and give answers.
You can bet that if prospects and customers ask these questions in person, they're asking the same ones on the internet.
You want to make sure that when someone Googles that question, your content pops up, drawing them to your website.
3. Write case studies
Again, talk with your sales team to figure out which customers and clients are the best ones to interview to create case studies.
The case studies don't need to be long. They don’t need to be a certain number of words.
You just need three basic elements: the client’s problem, your company’s solutions, and the results or benefits.
Why case studies? Because everyone wants proof.
Think of your own behavior when you're on Amazon and you want to buy something: you read reviews. You want feedback before you buy. That same consumer behavior applies to business-to-business behavior. Companies don’t want to be the guinea pig.
Like you, before they spend a significant amount of time, resources and money on your products and solutions, they want to see happy clients like themselves benefiting from your services and products.
4. Begin a traffic-generating campaign.
This one’s tricky—many companies jump to their traffic-generating campaign immediately after a website launch, but that’s a mistake.
When you start generating traffic, (email, ABM, pay per click, social media) you have to point them to content, you have to give them something to learn. If your traffic generating campaigns just lead to your homepage, that will be a waste of money. Why?
Unless the prospect immediately finds content they’re interested in, they’ll quickly go somewhere else.
Knowing what questions and keywords people search for online, your campaigns will be laser-targeted and you can point prospects not to your site in general, but to relevant, educational content.
Remember: only start generating traffic once you have good educational content that's directly tied to the sales process.
5. Measure results.
You can't control what you don't measure.
So remember step 1, installing Google Analytics and Hotjar? Now you can start using that data. Figure out which articles are the most popular and the most relevant, and double down on those articles. Ask yourself:
- What do the most popular articles have in common?
- What are those related topics?
- How can you group them logically?
You can also look at your heat mapping software. Ask these questions on the most popular pages:
- How far are people scrolling down on the page?
- Where is their mouse moving (There is a correlation between mouse movement and eye movement)
- What are the top three links clicked on the page?
Look at Google Analytics. If you're running a traffic generation campaign, look at which customer acquisition channels generate not just the most traffic, but also the most engagement.
Mini-case study:
We had one client that was spending a decent amount of money on LinkedIn campaigns, generating gobs of traffic. But the engagement time was well under one minute, which means when they dumped prospects to the page, people were not looking at it. They wasted money on their campaign because people got to the page, but didn’t engage with the website and quickly went somewhere else. So the client just paid for traffic, not to make a sale or to generate a lead.
By analyzing the data and measuring results, you can start making continual improvements to your website.
Final Thoughts
Creating a website is the FIRST step in making sure that marketing is contributing to the sales process.
Take a look at the data.
See what's working well and double down on that.
What's not working well? Dial it back or stop doing it.
Don't forget to experiment and try new ideas and campaigns.
And remember that your new website is the beginning of the process to make sure that you and your company get the most business value from all of your hard work!
