Dramatically improving marketing conversion ROI with "social" landing pages
Posted by J-P De Clerck on Fri, Jul 30, 2010
Most companies still use conventional “landing pages” of one page, mostly with a form, to acquire leads. These landing pages are important. They are even a ‘must’, as is the correct technology to follow up on the ‘lead’ afterwards throughout the entire conversion process.
But no matter how good your landing page and no matter what kind of lead and conversion technology you use: there are new kinds of landing pages…
Let me start with a look at the average search engine advertising (SEA) or email marketing campaign. Traditionally, these ads lead to a single page where the person “landing” on it can complete an online form or perform another action you strive for.
As I wrote earlier today, a proper landing page is then a web page that further sets and develops the “tone”, promise and style of the call-to-action from the search engine ad or email hyperlink. And naturally it is also monitored and analyzed to ‘translate’ the behavior and actions of the visitor as much as possible into information that is useful for the company and follow-up campaigns.
But this immediate and rectilinear course of action from call-to-action to lead capturing and conversion via a landing page is no longer enough. Of course these landing pages and forms still work, but they should be supplemented with new methods in these social media times.
Below you can find four kinds of future landing pages. The reason why I believe in them? Because I successfully tested them and could see the impact.
1. The ‘blogpost’ landing page
These days, people often “find” your site, blog and company. Via organic search results, social bookmarks, links in social networks, tweets, etc. But blogposts, which are often more relevant for the Internet user if they are valuable and which appear most in social media messages and interactions such as tweets, are also crucial. Remember that even search engines are moving towards real-time and social media driven results.
Sending traffic to blog posts via traditional channels like Google AdWords has become very expensive and working with long tail keywords, although important, is quite a job.
But a good post is the ideal landing page in the social Web if you use other traffic and sharing techniques. You must of course have relevant content but most of all relevant links in these posts to the services, white papers and products that correspond with the content. It is conversion in the second degree, but much cheaper and more efficient. I have successfully been using this technique for a while now. It does take some time before you find the correct techniques to have the proper ROI.
In fact, it took me five months to fine-tune it so I will say no more. You can always contact us to find out how you can improve both SEO and cost-per-lead using these techniques.
2. The ‘peer review’ landing page
Many marketers still use product-centric landing pages in their campaigns. There are also often pages where people download relevant information like white pages for example. That is fine if these are valuable, but not if the information is too commercial. People also have much less faith in the information received by companies. So why not allow peer reviews on your site regarding your products and then use these as landing pages? I have seen that this works, often even with better conversion rates than traditional campaigns. But, again, you have to know how.
These are two examples of alternative landing pages that can improve conversion dramatically.
I have more such as the ‘third party page’ and the socialized microsite to mention just a few but allow me to have some secrets, I worked hard to test them and need to make a living as well :)
You know what to do when you want to know more.
Illustration: Hannah Gal
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