In our last post, we talked about how making your website the hub of your marketing will improve the effectiveness of your channel marketing efforts. Another area to improve the performance of your website and online marketing is through the use of landing pages. A landing page is built for a single purpose, usually to make an offer of some sort, or to provide a user a means of telling you they want to engage with you. An example being a page to download a white paper, the white paper is the offer in exchange for the user giving you their contact info. That’s the implicit transaction behind a landing page.
Usually this page is an orphan, meaning you can’t navigate to it from your website. A user is driven there directly by an email, ad, social media post, etc for the purpose of converting an unknown opportunity for a specific campaign into a known, marketing qualified lead.
The keys to a good landing page are:
- Keep your promise. When you do an ad, for example, and it says “click here to download this white paper”, they should see that exact phrase when they land there. It should be easy for them to see what they need to see and know the next step. You should never just link directly to your website, which may also have a link to download that white paper, and hope they find it.
- Don’t give them a chance to get lost. One page, one purpose. Don’t have your website menu at the top, don’t put a link to your website. Don’t even give them contact information. Just a form and a submit button.
- Keep the content minimal. They won’t read it if it’s too much. Capitalize on the impulse that led them there.
- Keep the form short. Resist the urge to get a ton of information. Your goal here is simply to get their contact information so you can continue to market to them, or have a sales rep contact them.
Here’s an example of a landing page that uses best practices.
The most common mistakes we see in the channel are:
- Not using landing pages
- Having multiple messages or offers on one page
- Too much copy, brevity is your friend
- Not having a form; asking the user to “email us” or “call us” to learn more
- Too many form fields
- Links that will take them off your page
Because the message and call to action are so narrow and specific, and because the landing page typically comes after multiple touch points have been received as part of the campaign, the leads will be much more qualified and have a specific expectation. It’s important you meet that expectation. If the landing page says completing the form will result in a white paper download, don’t call them.
Another benefit to landing pages is that the content on the pages will be indexed by search engine crawlers and help with getting better search engine results placement.
Using landing pages is a best practice that you should start immediately improving the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. It allows you to capitalize on a successful call to action and gives your prospects a clear way to engage with you. There are a number of different ways to accomplish this, including using your CMS, using a WordPress template like form Themeforest, an inbound marketing platform like Hubspot or a landing page only platform like Ion Interactive.
Each option has pros, cons, requirements, dependencies, and different budgets. But that’s a topic for another day. If you have an immediate need for some clarification on building landing pages, just hit me up.
If you’re ready for Landing Pages 201, we haven’t written about it yet so here’s a great article from Unbounce.
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