One of my favourite marketing features of website design has to be the announcement banner. It’s versatile and sits at the top of your website so it’s one of the first things your audience sees when landing on your beautiful site. Adding an announcement banner to your site is a sure fire way to grab the attention of your audience to highlight an important message. It appears on every single page apart from Cover Pages.

Not only that but on Squarespace they are customisable. You can easily edit the text, destination link and even the style of your announcement bar to seamlessly work within your site. Perfect!

So, how do you set it up? For Squarespace 7.0 and 7.1, follow these instructions:

1. From the home, head to Marketing > Announcement Bar

2. Select ‘Enable Announcement Bar’ from the dropdown

3. Change the destination link

4. Edit the text featured on it

5. To edit the look of it, head to the Style Editor

Super straight forward, right?

But what do you put in your catchy banner and get the most from it? Here are 8 creative ways to use the announcement bar, market your business and make the most of your audience online.

1. Announce something

I know, I know. Hardly groundbreaking. But this is where the announcement bar can really come into it’s own. If you’re away on holiday and orders will be delayed as a result, this will be ‘announced’ to your site visitor on each page. This means that they are well informed and won’t be disappointed when your order comes in later than usual.

2. Promote your product, tickets or service

Create a buzz around a product, service or maybe even tickets to your latest event by advertising it in your announcement bar. It’ll get customers excited to take a closer look at it, getting more clicks and sales in the process. This is great for highlighting beautiful new products too.

3. Offer a discovery call

If you’re a service based business, getting your potential clients on a discovery call is going to transform your sales process. And how do we encourage people to book a call in the first place? We add it in to our announcement bar of course.

4. Promote your newsletter or freebie

If you’ve got an email list (which I completely recommend) and are getting serious about growing it, then this is a great idea. The announcement banner is the perfect place to advertise why your website audience should join your email list. Just type out the benefit, whether it’s useful tips or a juicy freebie and link the bar to your newsletter sign up form.

A freebie is a great way to grow your list quickly. If you’re short of ideas, take a look at this post for some inspiration.

5. Promote an offer or discount

Perhaps you’re running an exclusive offer or enticing discount such as free shipping on orders. The announcement bar is a great place to promote this, increasing sales and order values in turn.

You can get as detailed as you would like, adding times the offer is running or maybe even an exclusive discount code. Don’t forget to link to the product(s) or service(s) that you have the offer running on to optimise sales.

6. Announce a sale

Sales can have a HUGE impact on income if you sell products or services online. But if your visitors are landing on your site, it might not be immediately obvious that you’ve got one on. Add a sentence to your announcement bar and link to the sales page to increase the visibility of your sale.

7. Share your availability

Open for booking? Use your announcement bar to share when you’re available to take on new projects. It informs your audience of your availability whilst also nudging them in the direction of booking in onto a new project.

8. Promote your latest video or blog post

So you’ve dedicated a lot of time and effort into your latest piece of content. Give it the spotlight it deserves by adding a promotion into your announcement banner. For extra oomph, you could update your announcement bar with the title of your latest blog or video each time you upload a new one.

How are you planning to use your announcement bar?