landing pages that stick - increasing traction for your inbound marketing
DESCRIPTION
Create landing pages that enhance the customer journey and optimize your inbound marketing and content marketing efforts to end in conversions.TRANSCRIPT
Landing Pages That Stick
Increasing Traction for Your Inbound Marketing
A lot of time and money is spent driving traffic to landing pages. Pages that often bounce traffic or
don’t convert the way we expected. What can we do to make our landing
pages continue the investment we’ve made?
Lets take a look…
What’s up with landing pages lately?
A lot of landing pages have become overly templated - lacking creativity or thoughtfulness.
We need to focus on landing pages that
enhance the visitor’s experience and begin a customer journey that
ends in conversions.
Create landing pages that stick using 5 W’s and an H
W Who
W
W
W
W
H
What
Where
When
Why
How
Who
Who is this landing page content for and do you already know them?
Are they:Existing customers
Sales leads Former users
Unknown prospects Referrals
Who
Take the time to research the topics, keywords, and phrases your audience is using to find you. Make sure
to include these keywords, topics, and phrases throughout your landing page content.
Tip: Your landing page can’t be everything to everyone. Target landing pages to specific audiences. The page you create should take into consideration
the mindset of the audience it is targeted to attract.
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Unsure where to start?We’ll walk you through it: [email protected]
WhoConsider grouping audience members into persona
groups, and grouping the content targeted to them, in your analytics platforms so that you can
segment data easily.
You’ll also be able to track the progress of your campaigns, audience, & subscriber growth more
effectively this way.
Whatever the content is, it should fulfill the promise you made that inspired
them to click in the first place.
If you offered them an ebook, whitepaper, free trial, coupon, etc. be sure to give it to them once they’ve
clicked. Asking them to jump through additional hoops will only cause
distrust between your brand and your audience.
What What content will keep my visitors on the page?
What
Focus on what your visitor is looking for at the time of the journey. Make sure that the offer matches where they are in their consideration process.
If you’re talking to someone for the first time:
Consider keeping it to a few key benefits and let
them choose to learn more. This is the time to build
trust.
If you’ve got a relationship with the audience member:
Think about offering deeper information with a strong call to action, like case
studies, white papers, or a demo.
Where
Where is the traffic to this landing page going to be coming from?
Email Social media
Event registrations Referrals
SEO Other website content
Where
Knowing where your traffic is coming from keeps your visitors moving along the journey you have designed for them.
The mindset of your visitor will vary depending on where they have already been in their journey to your product. The trick is to avoid bouncing
visitors because you have set up too many barriers to engagement.
Tip: If your visitor is coming from an email send, you already have their information - don’t ask for it again in a form. Instead, focus on collecting new
information or getting them to attend a webinar, download an asset, etc.
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*Where
When you drive traffic from a number of places, be sure to account for how the customer journey will be experienced from each starting point, such as:
Organic search Social networking
Advertising Email marketing
Other content from your site Contributed content Native advertising
Partner websites / referrals
Account for what information was already shared at each starting point so the experience feels seamless.
Consider having a separate journey or page for items that are forwarded to a colleague or friend - as trying to drop a new audience member directly into the middle of a
journey may not create the best conversion opportunity.
When
When should I use gated content?
Getting email addresses from people wanting to access your gated content is fine, as long as there is a payoff for giving
up the information. This means a payoff the audience
feels is worth it, not something you think they like - so
do your research.
When
If you’re having a tough time convincing users to give up their info, try to build trust using the following:
• Create a preview of a few pages of an ebook - maybe the first chapter doesn’t require any gated information.
• Provide a synopsis of what they’ll be gaining, including at least two key, useful things they’ll learn / gain by signing up.
• Offer to send the next piece of collateral automatically, and tell them what it is so they’ll know it’s also something of value.
Why
Why are visitors coming to your page?
It is vital to know why someone chose your content. This means knowing what’s working about the channels that are driving them to the
landing page so that the landing page can mirror that need.
Why
To better understand why people are choosing your content, take a look at the following:
• Matching the keywords that drive traffic to the content they’re ranking for - this will tell you specifically for each piece of content, what keywords are resonating with your audience.
• Understanding top performing content by audience segment - consider setting up content groups so that you can see which content resonates with each type of persona you’re working on.
HowHow do I design a good landing page?
If you’re sticking to a template - ask yourself if the template does at least one (hopefull all) of the following:
✓Enhances the visitor’s experience
✓Increases conversions
✓Furthers the relationship
How
Enhance the visitor’s experience by making the landing page free of clutter, visually appealing, and easy to navigate.
Think about whether or not you’d want to spend time on the landing page. Is there a place for
your eyes to rest? Does the color palette complement the message?
HowIncrease conversions by including for
only one call to action and fulfilling the promise
of why they came in the first place.
Imagine seeing a car ad, showing up at the dealership, and there are no cars. Or being told
about the cars, then sent to another location to see the cars, and a different location to test drive.
Frustrating, right?
How
Understand which CTAs your audiences are clicking on most frequently when they convert.
Button, inline text, bottom right corner? Experiment with CTA types and placement on the page, as well as wording.
Are the highest performing CTAs different for different audience personas? Some audiences respond better to a
value expressive CTA such as “Learn More Here” while others are more likely to click on a direct “Go Now” button.
