The best way to miss online marketing opportunities is to send traffic from email, social media and advertising campaigns to your home page. The best way to boost online marketing ROI is to send that traffic to unique landing pages, instead.
What are landing pages and why do you need them?
A landing page is a website page with a form to capture contact information. A good landing page is created as a destination for a targeted stream of web traffic.
Visitors who arrive at your website in response to an offer you”™ve made are coming to complete a call to action ”“ download a free fact sheet or white paper, or sign up for a webinar, for example.
If they can complete the action easily, visitors will type their email addresses and possibly other contact information into your form in exchange for the content offer. This simple exchange is what converts a visitor to a lead.
A home page has too much going on to encourage this conversion. A unique landing page has conversion as its only purpose.
What should a landing page have ”“ and not have?
The answer is: as little as possible that is not directly related to lead conversion. Here are a few facts and best practices:
- Keep copy to a minimum ”“ just enough to reinforce the value of your offer, why it”™s a must-have for the visitor and how to get it.
- Remove navigation. Why tempt visitors to go elsewhere on your site when your goal is for them to fill out your form?
- Enable sharing. The offer is valuable to your visitor. If you include social media sharing buttons on the page chances are he or she will share it with friends and colleagues.
- Create a form appropriate to the offer. In inbound marketing we view the sales process as a funnel. Traffic comes in at the wide top and converts to leads. A top of funnel offer may warrant only an email address. As they engage with your company you can nurture leads in the middle of the funnel with more sophisticated content for which you can request and receive additional information. Asking for too much too soon can inhibit relationship-building.
- Test your landing pages. There is no exact science to what makes a particular offer or landing page successfully convert web traffic to leads. If a landing page is getting traffic, but no one is filling out the form, something”™s wrong. Try changing the copy to re-state the importance of your offer to the visitor. Move your form or call-to-action button to a different, more visible location. Change the color/shape of the button and/or your call-to-action copy, for instance, ”˜Build Your ROI”™ rather than ”˜Download a Free eBook”™. See what happens.
Of course, it helps to be able to easily add pages to your website. This is why we suggest considering a website update to a platform that gives you content management control. In a real-time marketing environment, it”™s more important than ever.
Ellie Becker is president of E.R. Becker Company Inc. in Norwalk, a public relations and inbound marketing consultancy. She is an inbound marketing certified professional. Reach her at ellie@erbeckercompany.com or read her blog at www.erbeckercompany.com.
Bernadette Nelson is principal of Studio B/Visual Communication in Norwalk. She has more than 20 years of experience in graphic and web design. Reach her at b@studiob-ct.com or www.studiob-ct.com.
