Over 550 companies around the world have applied and had delegated their .brand new gTLD, 36 of them in Germany, behind only the United States and Japan. The German .brand gTLDs account for more than a third of all .brand domain name registrations and make Germany an early leader in .brand registrations and usage.
Some of those in Germany to have their own .brand new gTLD are Audi, Linde, DHL, Bosch and BMW. There are 4,130 domain names registered in these German .brand gTLDs. Audi, for example, is using its .audi in a wide variety of ways for geo-targeted marketing, campaign and promotional pages.
So for businesses thinking about getting online with their .brand gTLD, Neustar, one of the leading providers of registry services and who also have their own gTLD .neustar, have released a launch guide - a step-by-step outline of how they got their .brand gTLD to launch.
Moving to .neustar was in part about a leading provider of registry services for new generic top level domains promoting their services. But if they’re going to be encouraging businesses to get their own gTLD, then it was important to walk the walk themselves and get their own branded gTLD online. And learn from their experiences.
As Neustar explain, “there is no stronger statement for a product or service than using it yourself, and we’re incredibly excited to be among the pioneers in this space.”
The Launch Guide provides important tips, hints and suggestions based on their own experiences so other .brand launches go as smoothly as possible and provide other .brands with the know-how and resources to launch their own gTLDs.
The move to .neustar included a number of actions, the main ones being:
1. Rebuilding their new website using home.neustar
2. Building dedicated sites for each business unit
3. Building their own Neustar search engine
4. Moving staff emails to .neustar addresses
5. Moving to a new, branded URL shortener for social media
6. Creating additional pathways to content via vanity URL redirects
7. Conducting an SEO analysis
8. Integrating the TLD with existing systems
9. Building an analytics framework
10. Creating a thorough communications plan
11. Making additional updates to reflect the change in address.
The benefits included:
From the guide, it seems the most detailed step, and one with the most potential problems, was moving email addresses to .neustar. Once it was believed email was ready, a small group of 20 tested the new setup to identify any bugs, then an organisational unit of 50 and then a regional rollout.
The 30-page launch guide is available to download for free.
