Digital Marketing Tips: Why You Need a Successful Landing Page and How to Create One When it comes to digital marketing, you may be running the most amazing social media ads in the world, but what happens when users click on the link? Where do they go? Whatever link you specify for them to land on is called the “landing page,” and if it’s not effective, your digital marketing strategy is bound to fail. Why You Need Landing Pages In Your Digital Marketing Strategy Landing pages are often used in digital marketing advertising campaigns like those run on social media sites like Facebook or Pinterest, although any page visitors “land” on first is a landing page. For a successful digital marketing strategy, it’s important you recognize each and every landing page as an opportunity to capture a potential client’s interest. What’s the point of your landing page? Copyblogger shares five purposes yours can have: Get a visitor to click to go to another page Get a visitor to buy Get a visitor to give permission for you to follow up by email, phone, etc. Get a visitor to tell a friend Get a visitor to comment or give you some sort of feedback As you can see, the whole point is to drive visitors to take action. How to Create Landing Pages That Will Drive a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy A successful landing page, like this one, includes 10 elements for digital marketing success. The Focus Remains on the Visitor Is your landing page designed to target your digital marketing strategy’s target consumers? Just as your target audience needs to be the focus of your digital marketing strategy, your visitor needs to remain the focus of your landing page. Everything on the page needs to be created with the goal of resonating with them. As MailMunch explains, “It’s very easy (and common) to sit down and write copy for a landing page without ever really thinking about the customer. The copy is all about them.
The features, practical outcomes, and tangible elements of the offer. Your copy needs to help prospects understand why they should care.” A Single Call to Action / Digital Marketing Goal What’s your digital marketing goal? When visitors come to your landing page, what you do you want them to do? That’s your call to action. Communicate it clearly throughout the page. It may seem counterintuitive – after all, many people like options – but by taking away potential distractions they’ll easily move onto the next step you’d like them to take. In fact, one study found that removing a navigation menu altogether increased conversions by 100 percent! Research also shows that landing pages with multiple offers get 266 percent fewer leads than those with a single offer. Also think about a potential offer you can extend to visitors. For example, if you’re asking visitors to join your email list, maybe you can offer some sort of helpful industry research or guide to provide incentive. Another offer could be a discount on your products or services, or entry into a giveaway. Regardless of what you choose, keep your customer front of mind and make sure it ties seamlessly into your call to action. It’s also important to place your call to action strategically. It needs to be at the top of the page, visible without the visitor needing to scroll. Depending on the page’s length, repeat your call to action so consumers are reminded of it as they scroll down. Consistent Branding Your landing page should fit into your digital marketing strategy seamlessly. Consistent branding will ensure your landing page fits in naturally with the rest of your digital marketing strategy. Your landing page needs to fit within your overall branding theme through similar fonts, colors, language and visuals; it should be a natural extension of your other digital marketing elements.
Your landing page should also be a natural next step in your digital marketing strategy. If they click on a social media ad, banner ad or email newsletter link and end up on your landing page, it should be a seamless fit with the prompt they saw. As WordStream explains, “If a user clicks an ad about sleeping bags, don’t drop them in the camping section – you want to bring them to their exact desired destination. Match the user’s need as closely as possible – that’s where the conversions happen!” Short and Sweet Text Your landing page’s text should be concise, with a low word count, strategic formatting, compelling headlines and simple, specific language. As this infographic explains, you have about 5 seconds to capture a visitor’s attention. Make it count by using bullet points, numbered lists and bold (selectively and strategically). Your copy should highlight just the most important points of your product or service. Recommended for You Webcast, March 7th: NXT Stage Playbook: Finding the Winning Formula for Your Growing Brand This infographic also shows the correlation between the number of words on a page versus the conversion rate. For example, those in the service sector with fewer than 100 words convert 50 percent better than those with more than 500 words. As you review your landing page copy, consider these digital marketing tactics: Speak to the heart first, then the head. MailMunch explains, “As consumers, we make decisions with our hearts and justify those decisions with practical data and functionality.” You can use headlines to capture attention that speaks to visitors’ emotional desires, then use the text that follows it to provide practical, articulate backup of your initial point. Tie features and benefits together. You can lay out all the features in the world, but if you don’t explain how they benefit the consumer they’re pointless. MailMuch puts it another way: “Features by themselves may appear dull or boring, but when they are tied to benefits, they become compelling and interesting.”Engaging Visuals Your landing page should feature compelling visuals that complement your digital marketing strategy.
You can have the most amazing digital marketing text in the world, but without compelling, engaging visuals, consumers are going to see a wall of text and move on. Images and videos can break up the text and capture visitors’ interest more effectively. MailMunch suggests: GIFS to illustrate the offer Text formatting such as bold text, italics, headers and different color fonts Images of people, products or abstract scenery You may also want to consider using videos. Research shows having them on landing pages increases conversions by 86 percent. Neil Patel also explains elements of a tidy visual digital marketing design, considering the look of the page as a whole. A clean, simple design with plenty of white space keeps people trained on your call to action. Big font makes it easy and compelling for them to read and understand what your site is all about. Bullets make big blocks of copy easy to scan. Videos pack a big impact into a small space and can increase conversions. Images and graphics that are relevant to your product and related to your audience support your message instead of diverting attention. Remember that less is more. Choose your images and videos carefully. Strategic Formatting There’s more formatting strategy than the headlines, bullet points and bold as recommended above. Research shows the eye naturally looks in an F or Z pattern. Take this into account as you decide where to put which information on your landing page. A lot of successful landing pages also include form fields for visitors to fill out. Keep these short, only requiring the necessary information; studies show that decreasing the number of fields from 11 to 4 increased conversions by 120 percent. Established Credibility Social proof can carry a lot of weight in a digital marketing campaign.
How can you show visitors they can trust you? Neil Patel explains, “As social creatures, humans tend to place greater value on things that other people have already approved. That is why most sites will tend to display evidence of such social validation.” This digital marketing concept is also known as “social proof.” The idea is that a third party reinforces your main points, proving that you’re trustworthy. Research from Nielsen backs this up, showing that 83 percent of consumers trust recommendations from their peers over advertising. While not every landing page visitor will have friends that can endorse you, you can provide social proof by including: A list of your customers Testimonials from clients Press mentions Usage statistics Case studies Reviews and ratingsMobile-Friendly Design Studies show consumers are spending more time browsing on their phones rather than their computers. In just one year alone, from 2016 to 2017, the number of website visits from mobile devices grew from 57 percent to 63 percent, and the percentage of website time spent on mobile devices from 40 percent to 49 percent. For digital marketing success, you need to make sure your landing pages are visually appealing, easy to navigate and responsive on users’ mobile devices. Before promoting your page, make sure you and your team test them on your own phones and tablets, ideally with as wide a variety of browsers and operating systems as possible. Quick Page Load Speed If your landing pages take too long to load, it will negatively impact your digital marketing success. How long does it take for your landing page to load? Studies show 40 percent of consumers abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, and if an e-commerce website
is making $100,000 a day, a 1-second page delay could cost them $2.5 million in lost sales every year! You can reduce your page load time by removing unnecessary text and graphics. When you test the page on different mobile devices (as well as your desktop), pay attention to how long it takes to load. Split Testing The last, but certainly not least important digital marketing guideline, is to split test, or A/B test, your landing page! How do you know if it’s effective if you don’t test it? Make a few different versions of the page and then run them against each other. Watch the results to see which performs better, then test another element. Test as much as possible – page layout, wording, images, etc. – so you can end up with the most effective landing pages for your digital marketing strategy.
Author: Emily Sidley With a strong background in writing, organization and creativity, Emily loves getting the word out about small and mid-sized businesses! She enjoys helping owners and entrepreneurs publicize their companies, and is happy to share her expertise with those managing marketing themselves. In addition to overseeing and running social media and blog… View full profile ›
02 Digital Transformation: Why should marketing take the lead? This was a sponsored post by Domo under the Master Report series. Marketing and data have been intertwined since the days of old, when marketers held customer interviews or focus groups with the sole purpose of gleaning data. The advent of the internet radically transformed this process – suddenly, marketers had terabytes of
customer data, generated from consumer devices, social media, websites and various business data points at their fingertips. This data enables today’s marketers to dream up campaigns that hit the right spots in the hearts and minds of their customers – something their predecessors could only hope to do. This level of data literacy also gives most modern marketing teams a head start in digital transformation – marketers often must rely on solid data to verify their assumptions, build their case and justify the marketing dollars they spend. This makes digital transformation for marketing necessary, as the velocity and volume of today’s customer data can only be processed, analysed and prepared with the right digital tools or platforms. But, perhaps most compellingly, marketing’s digital data-readiness potentially allows it to become a test bed of sorts – proving viability and aiding in the formation of processes or best practices that birth a new culture – one that places data at the centre of all decision-making throughout an organisation. Or, in other words, marketing’s digital transformation can become the stepping stone to a wider, more decisive, business-wide transformation that compels both leaders and employees to regard data as the single, indisputable source of truth. This is increasingly important, as 84% of all digital transformation efforts go awry – and marketing’s expertise will allow it to better lead the organisation from the front and help leadership confidently forge a new direction in this age of digital change. Marketing’s role in business transformation The best marketers often dive deep into customer needs, habits and behaviours – and use that knowledge to drive sales or growth numbers. Hence, in most circumstances, marketing has a wide and variable net to capture data from, and can quickly churn out customer insights by linking and analysing data obtained from customer touch-points with the right data tools or platforms. It can then seamlessly test these customer insights against hypotheses, assumptions or beliefs from within the business – validating truths or proving errors with greater flexibility and speed than other departments. Or it can form ideas and campaigns around these
insights, and use them to quickly spur engagement – adding or reiterating along the way, based on the new data they have obtained. This allows marketing to adopt a more “agile” approach to its work, generating a virtuous cycle of feedback based on data – which, over time, allows it to dynamically fine-tune the accuracy of its selling points or customer messages. And by measuring the right data metrics, marketers can better gauge customer behaviour or identify the most popular product features, revealing even more angles or perspectives to work with. This allows marketing to deploy multiple mini campaigns with customer-specific messages based on finely filtered demographics – all of which will address customer desires or pain points with greater accuracy and effectiveness than any broad marketing campaign can achieve. Marketing’s agile approach gives it a constant stream of customer data that can then be shared with product, customer support or UX to further develop core features or identify areas for improvement. This level of collaboration is only possible once marketing can match the constantly advancing timelines of these departments – and an agile, incremental approach based on “burst” experimentation and informed reiteration will certainly aid in this endeavour. Data tools or platforms that act as the single window of truth for the entire organisation will also help – but more important is the way these technologies are used to transform the business. And here, marketing can help leaders see the full truth – that digital transformation isn’t just about introducing new technologies, but also determining how the technology can be used to grow a more agile, data-centric and collaborative culture. Data as the common ground While cultivating a data-rich culture is important, being able to share and disseminate the same data sets across the entire organisation is equally – if not more – essential to ensure agility, coherence and accuracy for business-wide, data-driven decisions. And most marketers are already well-versed in sharing their data – after all, collaborations with other departments underscores most of their interactions within a business. This tendency for mutual collaboration means that – over time – most marketers will gravitate towards digital tools that enable better data transparency, accessibility and connectivity with their fellow workers.
As the saying goes, what gets measured, gets done, and as more leaders or employees see the value and effectiveness in the data that marketing brings, they will be more inclined to use or seek their own data to drive their future initiatives. Championing the right digital tools at the beginning of a business’ shift to digital allows marketing to position itself as the primary drivers of meaningful change – and continue playing that role as the culture matures and begins optimising itself for greater results. Integrated data platforms such as Domo allow marketers and their fellow peers to connect and access data and systems in one place, ensuring the democratisation of data and the creation of an agile, more collaborative organisation. And this will benefit marketing immensely – information and feedback can be shared faster when everyone is on the same page, meaning marketers can get the right campaigns and messages off the ground, with greater speed and less friction. But, perhaps most importantly, marketing will need to ensure its data-driven results are substantial enough to justify digital transformation and provide value to the leaders of their organisations. This means continually taking the time and effort to reconcile marketing metrics such as conversion rates, downloads or cost-per-clicks with management ones such as sales figures, inventory levels and product bottom-lines. This creates a valuable cause-and-effect connection between customers and the business – allowing business leaders to better align their business’ vision with the needs and desires of their customers.
As the data becomes increasingly valuable to leaders, marketing will even find itself playing a bigger and more decisive role at the management table – particularly when it comes to strategic decisions. Again, the right data tools and platforms are essential for this endeavour, and the more data points these tools can connect to – up to 500 for the Domo platform – the richer and more correlations marketing can make, and the greater its argument to leadership on the necessity for digital transformation throughout the business. Of course, marketing can choose to ignore business transformation entirely – or contain it only within its own department – but both hinders effective collaboration with other departments and reduces the opportunity for marketing to have a say in the future of their organisation. Indeed, as the world continues to digitise and move at a faster pace, more business leaders are beginning to take digital seriously – and marketing’s expertise in this field can prove to be an invaluable asset to management. Being at the forefront of transformation will require marketers to go beyond their comfort zones and job roles, but the end result – a business unified and centralised around data – justifies the effort. Yes, it will allow them to do their jobs more efficiently and better corroborate results with fellow employees. But importantly, it will solidify their reputations as game-changers and envelope-pushers that strive to prepare their organisations for the digital challenges ahead. Read also: The Master Report: Digital transformation – easier said than done Digital Transformation: Case Study: Cisco’s marketing team transforms its business with Domo
03 Power Digital Marketing Appoints John Taumoepeau as Chief Operating Officer No result found, try new keyword!SAN DIEGO, Feb. 27, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -Power Digital Marketing, Inc. ("Power Digital") a technology-enabled digital marketing agency that helps brands launch and scale digital revenues, announ...