5 Easy Ways to Promote Your Newly Launched Website—Part 1: the Basics

Here are some very basic website promotion tactics for B2B professional service businesses that are relatively easy to implement but easily overlooked.

Email Signature

Like a mini billboard for your business, your email signature gives everyone you correspond with by email easy access to your most important contact information including website address. I don’t know about you, but I more often check someone’s email signature for current details about their contact information than I do my contact list.

Two options for creating your email signature:

• The basic option—your current email application. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook or Mac Mail , you can set up a plain text email signature directly in your email application. You’ll have somewhat limited design and layout flexibility. But don’t get hung up on the visuals. Plain text and judicious use of text formatting can be more than enough to capture your recipient’s attention. This is a good option for pretty much everyone, especially if you have little information to include in your email signature.
• The premium option—an email signature template. Using a service like WiseStamp will give your email signature a more designed look. It’s a popular cloud-based service that, because it’s cloud-based and serves your email signature outside of the limitations of your email application, gives you the flexibility to include graphic elements that are difficult to style and control in regular email. This means visuals like your headshot and logo, a full lineup of clickable social media icons, and even banner ads and animations are fair game.

  Because WiseStamp has done a great job of designing email signature layouts, this is a great option for anyone who absolutely must include more content in their email signature or just craves a more polished look.

  WiseStamp offers a free version and a Pro version. The free version has two different layout choices but includes their branding. For less than $6/mo, the Pro version offers ten layout choices and allows you to remove their branding.

Whichever route you decide to take, here are some ideas and tips on what you can include in your email signature.

Email Signature Tips

According to WiseStamp, a good email signature includes these five elements:

1. Your full name
2. Business name
3. Job title
4. Business phone
5. Website address

To add extra marketing punch, you can also include one or more of these additional elements:

• your tagline
• value proposition
• social media links
• a recently won award
• link to a recent project
• a call-to-action
• a bit of visual branding

Be careful though. You don’t want add too many details and risk confusing people.

For example, include just one email address and one phone number. Don’t make people figure out what the best way is to reach you. Keep it super simple.

Ultimately, how you set up your signature has to make sense for your business and industry.

What elements will you include?

Business Card

Even though, lately, a lot of our interactions are happening virtually, it’s still a good idea to have a tangible, high-quality business card. Face-to-face meetings and conferences are coming back.

Having a clean, high-quality, well-designed business card increases credibility and trust because it shows you’ve taken the time and effort to present yourself and your business professionally to prospective clients and partners. That gesture alone speaks volumes about your brand.

Some tips for what to include on your professional services business card:

• Full name
• Business name
• Phone number
• Business email address
• Website address
• Your logo
• Your business address

Consider including one extra promotional element on your business card like a tagline or a CTA (call-to-action). For example, your CTA could offer an extra bonus when initial complimentary consultations are booked directly on your website. Just be careful here. Freebies in certain professional industries—like law, for example—can cause prospects to perceive your firm as one that competes on price. And that may not be the primary position you want to take. In any case, you want to keep any extra details short and simple.

Small and large teams alike should use the same business card template design across the company.

If you have branded fonts already, great. If not, choose a font that complements your visual brand.

Get your new cards printed professionally on a beautiful, heavy-weight card stock. My favorite business card printer and paper: Moo Super Business Cards in Soft Touch. Like fonts and colors, paper quality is part of your brand. So choose accordingly.

vCard

In my opinion, a very under-utilized piece of marketing collateral is the humble vCard—an electronic business card that, while uncommon among the general population, is still popular among some professional service businesses, especially law firms. Popular address book applications including Mac Contacts, Google Contacts and Outlook Contacts allow you to import and export .vcf files or vCards.

Export your own contact information to share with others. And import their vCard into your address book, automatically populating fields with whatever basic contact information is included in the file. Because vCards limit the content that can be included in them, the guidelines for creating a vCard are basically the same as the ones for creating your email signature in your email application. As always, keep it simple.

VoiceMail Greeting or LinkedIn Audio

An often overlooked promotional opportunity, your recorded voicemail message gives callers the chance to learn a little bit more about your business while they’re waiting to leave you a message. Share the news that you’ve recently relaunched your website and share your website address. Encourage callers to visit the site if they haven’t recently. If your website address doesn’t translate well without a visual, spell it out.

• As part of your voicemail greeting or LinkedIn audio branding, invite callers to visit your new website for more information about your business. Write some notes for yourself on what you want to say in your voicemail. Then practice it a few times before hitting the record button.
• Make sure your environment is quiet.
• Speak clearly and enunciate! We are so used to hearing our own names that many of us speed through saying them. The same goes for our business names. You want people to hear you clearly to help them remember who you are.
• Keep your recorded message short and simple—you don’t want to discourage anyone from leaving a message because they got frustrated waiting for your message to end. LinkedIn gives you 10 seconds to record your announcement. Try to keep your voicemail greeting similarly brief. Consider cuing callers at the beginning of your voicemail recording how to bypass your message if it’s a bit longer.

Letterhead

Like everything else in marketing, letterhead tends to be digital these days. Even so, be sure to add your website address to your letterhead whether it’s printed or electronic. Google Docs, Mac Pages and MS Word all allow you to setup your letterhead using either or both the footer and header of the document so it repeats on each page.

If you choose to design a graphic of your letterhead that you upload to a word processing app, make sure all of the type is legible after you upload it. Also print out a copy to see how it looks on paper.

Conclusion

While many if not all of these ideas may seem obvious, you might be surprised how often these easy website promotion ideas get overlooked.

In Part 2, we’ll look at the next level of traffic-driving website promotion tactics.