How to launch a new website powerfully...

Brokers invest a tremendous amount of time and resources whenever they switch websites. Over the years, we have observed a variety of tactics that help launch the site powerfully in a way that attracts consumer attention, allows agents to understand the features of the website, and promotes the broker as a market leader.

There are some additional benefits to launching a website powerfully which include link backs from press releases, new indexing of your URL by search engines and other less sexy techie stuff like that.

Pre-Launch

Run the site in parallel with your old site before you launch. Use your agents and managers to test the site. The worse thing you can have happen is for the site to go live and the agents tear it apart for errors. If you make them part of the pre-launch testing, you can fix issues before the site goes live.

Let your office managers and agents use it. Best practice is to require them all to perform a search, save that search, and get new listing notifications for a few weeks.

Ask agents to look at their listings carefully – checking for accuracy and appreciating any new attributes that have been added like neighborhood information.

Require the agents to read their profiles carefully and update their photos and bios.

If you new site has links to the company twitter and facebook accounts, insist that the agents join those pages.

Launch Marketing

Buy advertising everywhere – newspapers, radio, real estate magazines, TV, etc. Focus the ads on consumer benefits and property search features.

Send a couple of direct mail pieces to past clients and business partners.

Host a launch party – invite the real estate community and the press. It is a great way to recruit.

Send out a press release.

Have agents send a note like this one to everyone in their address book –

As a valued member of both my personal and professional family, I wanted to take a few minutes to share with you the exciting news of the launch of our reimagined website, xxxxxxxxx.com ...an experience that reflects our company's transformation, unprecedented growth and continued evolution. Given this exciting inflection point in real estate, the time was right for our company to channel the positive momentum into a reinvention of our existing online property to better highlight some of our latest industry-leading client services. But most importantly, the completely revamped site is now a direct reflection of the truly differentiating aspects of Company Name: our people and real estate information.

With this tremendous growth in size and offerings comes our strong desire to continue to build on our reputation as a leading provider of real estate services in the region. As such, I hope you're able to share in our success by spending a few minutes exploring the new Company Name site. In addition, I'm hopeful you will keep us in mind when speaking with friends, colleagues and acquaintances who might benefit from being introduced to some of the brightest strategic minds in the business -we'd welcome the opportunity.