An undeniably effective digital marketing campaign involves getting word out about your business or your project as much and as early as possible.
Picture this: You’ve got the best business idea laid down. You did not cut corners while in the planning stage. You spent time hyping your product up in order to pique your target demographic’s interest, encouraging just the right amount of anticipation to get them excited. You’ve got almost everything in place.
Well, almost.
There’s still a few more things left to polish, and you’re not yet quite ready to open the curtains to one of the most important elements of your business: your website.
If you did everything right and worked on building a website even as you were only getting everything started, you’re most likely looking at a page with its core components in, but with so many of its key features missing—things like your product pictures, your product pricing, or just about anything you haven’t finalized the details for.
As people are naturally curious, with enough word out, many of them will take the time to check out your website even when it’s not 100% ready.
And that’s okay! If people are that interested to check you out as early as now, then that should be a good sign, right? But surely you can’t have them coming to a messy or a blank website with links leading to nowhere. What should you do?
Build a flimsy website in a rush just for the sake of it? Absolutely not.
Very much like starting a company, building a good website is not something you can (or should) finish in a day. This is where a coming soon page can help.
Coming soon pages are as literal as they go. To be extra clear, a coming soon page is simply a landing page for a website under construction. It’s obviously great for many reasons, but here are the most important factors that should get you started on thinking up coming soon website ideas:
- Establishing Your Image: Even if the truth is that your website isn’t ready yet, people don’t need to know that. It’s not about being dishonest, it’s simply knowing which angle to best show your audience.
If visitors see an empty or generic website that can pass for a draft page at any given time, they could get turned off with nothing substantial to make them want to come back. You wouldn’t want to drive people away before you’ve even launched, now would you? Your company should be its best even during the preparation phases if you want to prop up a good image. That means employing the use of good website design, pre-launch.
A well-designed coming soon page will incite excitement, pulling visitors in and making them want to come back when the site is ready.
- Building Your Audience: A common feature of some of the best coming soon pages is newsletter signup forms. Since they’ve never been there before and don’t have prior experiences pushing them to go back, people visit your unfinished website out of a pure interest in whatever you have to offer.
Don’t disappoint them. Inviting them to sign up for a newsletter so they get notified of your launch and future offers will make them feel in on the excitement, regardless of the actual current status of your website.
On your end, it’s a gain for your lead generation—already building an audience before you’ve even gone live!
An important element that you should always include in your coming soon page design is a countdown timer. More than simply getting people pumped for your website going live, setting a definite launch date will tell your site visitors that you are realistic and motivated. Everything is probably going exactly the way you wanted if you’re that confident to promise a launch date.
Furthermore, actually following through on the specific date set will make you out as a trustworthy business. That’s one of the best qualities that most people look for in a brand.
- Getting Ahead in SEO Rankings: Don’t wait until you’ve finished your website to start climbing your way into Google’s top search results. Trends can change very quickly and if you only begin to take action on your SEO once your website is live (who knows how far into the future that is; most trends you know would have already come and gone by then), you’re essentially putting your website at the very end of what search engines deem to be relevant results.
This means that even with your website coming soon, you must already make use of the right and most relevant keywords to set your company’s place among already published websites.
How do you do this with a website that still has a ways to go, though? You need not overthink it. You can put up short write-ups describing the nature of your future site or business, maybe throw in some sufficiently captioned infographics or your brand hashtags, or tease visitors with the kind of content they can expect once the website is ready.
Again, anticipation is the key here so focus on that!
- Expanding Your Digital Reach: Social media is any business’s strongest weapon. You get to be at the very center of where everything happens and where everyone comes together. It’s a prime spot for making your brand known.
Though it can become oversaturated with all topics, interests, and ideas converging, the beauty of social media is that you have the option to tweak your preferences around in order to make sure you’re getting your message to the right people.
Use your existing social media profiles to forge a cheerful expectation in your audiences and drive them to your website even if you’re yet to launch it. Having an appropriately designed coming soon landing page ready for them will most likely double that excitement.
Likewise, linking your social media profiles in your coming soon page will expand your following, subsequently and consistently building your audiences on all platforms.
Many companies and businesses have come to see the charm of coming soon landing pages. Not so much because it looks good (although aesthetics still play a huge role), but more so because it works.
Still unsure about how to get started on designing your own coming soon page? Well, we’ve got you covered because in this article, we’re rounding up some of the best coming soon page examples to give you a spark of imagination or two!
- Johanna Kanzler
Image taken from Awwwards
Johanna Kanzler is a graphic and editorial designer, an illustrator, and an animator. In 2018, she went the witty route for her coming soon landing page. Aside from the unforced humor, the color palette and simplicity of the website truly reflected her artistry.
- Visage
Visage is a design tool for content marketers. In this coming soon landing page that Isaac Wooten created for the site, he went for a near-minimalist design, bringing each visitor’s attention right where it should: what the website is for. Oh, and that color scheme? Just the perfect choice for the brand!
- Designknots
Image taken from Designknots
Here’s yet another example of someone using a smart copy for their website. Designknots truly embodies the essence of their brand—that much is apparent in the perfect balance of detail and style in their coming soon landing page!
There you have it! We hope to have given you a coming soon landing page design inspiration with this little treat that we prepared. It can be a daunting task at first, but with the right tools at your disposal, it should be an easy feat to achieve!
With Strikingly, you won’t have to worry about not knowing where to start. You can create a free coming soon page using one of our many great templates, or have as much creative freedom as you want with the Make Your Own feature if you’re up for it, still free!
Here’s a quick step-by-step demo for making your own coming soon page with Strikingly:
- Start with picking any template from Strikingly’s template gallery.
Image taken from Strikingly’s Discover page
- Once inside the builder, you can then delete all the default pages that come with your unpublished Strikingly site at the beginning, leaving just one page that you can then use as your coming soon page.
- Customize the page with the elements that you want, like your brand name or taglines, and image that you want to set as your background. Strikingly has many in-site photos to choose from, but you also have the option to upload and use your own.
- Next, you can add your countdown timer where you want it. Click on the ‘+’ symbol, and hit the HTML option.
For this demo, we’re using a free countdown timer from POWr.io. After creating your countdown timer, take the HTML embed code and paste it on the HTML space provided and click Save.
- Finally, you can work on the last few details so your coming soon page is exactly the way you imagined. Here’s how our website looks now!
Wasn’t that fun and easy? Now you will never have to doubt the power of creating a prior buzz for your upcoming website because you can confidently lead people there, knowing you made easily the best coming soon page ever (yes, you did—you deserve it!).
There’s still so much you can do with Strikingly’s website builder. Sign up for a free account today and discover them for yourself!
