Relaunch insights: 5 learnings from the relaunch conference

1. Define goals in advance

"Why do I have a website and when is it a success?" Besides content, clear goals are essential for a relaunch. To measure success of your website, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) should be defined in advance, explains Thomas Witt, also from Infopark AG. With a relaunch, you shouldn't pursue only a rebrush or responsiveness. Rather, you should have an economic goal in mind and your KPIs should be oriented towards these starting questions:

• What do I need the website for?

• What do I want to achieve? (Interactions? Leads? Sales?)

• How many interactions, leads or sales count as success?

Only once these questions have been clarified in advance and performance data is measured after the relaunch can you make reliable statements about the relaunch's success or failure.

2. Relaunch budget: 50% for content 

How much value you should place on content during a relaunch is then made clear by Bernd Völcker, also from Infopark AG. At least 50% of the planned relaunch budget should go towards content, i.e. content strategy, content creation and seeding.

On the way to conversion, the possibility of direct communication with users is of great importance. Alongside content, communication channels are therefore of great significance. Völcker assumes that you and your company should be active on the relevant social media channels. Only once that is the case can you additionally consider integrating a chat on your website.

3. Central bundling of all topics in the newsroom

Klaus Cloppenburg, managing director of interactive tools, also addresses the importance of high-quality content. Whether website, social media channels or magazine articles: creating high-quality content for companies is essential today.

To achieve this, it's necessary to overcome the knowledge and departmental silos within your company and set up a newsroom where all communication channels are managed centrally. The colleagues working there come from the various departments of your company and jointly take on marketing. All departments feed their information on products, services and events to the newsroom.

The newsroom then processes this information for specific target groups and channels and integrates it into your company's content strategy. This way, the content is centrally distributed across all relevant channels – and it should also be continually updated and reused. Regularly updating content and creating longer, more holistic texts are measures that improve your website's ranking and are viewed positively by Google.

4. SEO is a process - not a project

Generating good, current and holistic content is one thing. Having it also appear well placed near the top of Google search results is another.

The breakdown of classic SEO rules and the rise of voice search aren't making life easier for SEO leads in companies. That's why SEO in companies should be understood not as a finished project but as an ongoing process, explains Jens Fauldrath of get:traction.

This process already begins with choosing the right content management system (CMS). Here, for example, you should look for full editing capabilities for the elements belonging to the content within the CMS: whether meta titles, descriptions, subheadings, alt attributes or image file names – all of them should be editable within the CMS.

More credibility, greater visibility and a personal bond with users and customers: that's what every company wants. Kerstin Hoffmann explains how to achieve it.

She sees brand ambassadors as the "guides through the flood of information", helping to position companies credibly and sustainably. Brand ambassadors need to be identified within the company, integrated into the content strategy, and their role continuously expanded.

As with influencer marketing, you need competent experts who are well connected and enjoy high standing in social networks. This also includes reflecting personal insights – such as team events – digitally, in order to build an emotional bond with customers.

We picked out five key topics from relaunch conference 2017 for you. What goals do we want achieve with our web project, and how do we define success? This question should stand at start of your planning. Size of content budgets, importance of SEO, building a newsroom, and significance of brand ambassadors — all further decisive factors for successful relaunch, presented and discussed at this year's event. Naturally many more important topics exist: "Mobile First" among the most important. Only a website consistently optimised for mobile score well in Google search results.

Relaunch = Continuous Relaunch

When we speak of a relaunch here, we don't mean the classic relaunch following the waterfall principle – but a continuous relaunch. A continuous relaunch is an ongoing process comprising many small optimisations and releases. This keeps your website always up to date. Trends and changes on the web no longer pose challenges for your company – instead, you can actively help shape them.