Posted by Naylla Kassam on Fri, Mar 12, 2010
Not sure how landing pages has anything to do with speed dating? Let's review the rules of speed dating for those of you who are unfamiliar:
You are trying to get the attention of your audience
You have a limited time to capture your audience's attention
You have to be engaging enough to get what you want from your audience
You need to bring your best qualities to the table to avoid your audience being distracted
Before any of the rules above even come into play, most people already have a profile in mind. You don't show up at the event and then decide what you are looking for. You are prepared and know exactly what you want from a physical, emotional, and financial point of view.
The rules don't change from what you would look for in a partner and what you would look for in a potential client. Before you deliver any messaging out there around your company, products, or services, you should know exactly what you want in a prospect; from age all the way up to position in a company.
So when you are trying to capture the attention of your target audience to your landing pages, the same rules apply as speed dating.
You have a limited amount of time to get your prospect to fill out the form on the landing page.
You have 7 seconds to capture the attention of the prospect on to the form and not to other content on the page. So make your landing page about the form.
The landing page has to be engaging enough to captivate your audience - use graphics!
Avoid having your prospects getting distracted - remove the navigation bar and any other factors that don't relate to the form itself.
Remember, the reason why the prospect is on that landing page is because you have something they like and want and you want them to have what you are offering. Don't send a six foot blonde through the room when you are trying to get all the attention - unless you are the 6ft blonde!
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Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Mar 03, 2010
We have done the Inbound Marketing Strategy and the Linking Building Strategy so what do I do with all this new traffic. How can I convert my traffic into leads, no matter how much traffic you have if you can't convert them into customers, it is all pointless.
So what landing paging tips do we have to help you convert your valuable traffic?
Landing Page Tip 1, your home page is not your only landing page. While it might be the simplest idea try to avoid it. If you are promoting a particular service or product try to help your visitors by leading them straight to what they are looking for it.
Landing Page Tip 2, add something more. This is very important for email marketing campaigns. There is no point in repeating what you have just said in your email. Use the space wisely and if you can add more information to increase the conversion rate up!
Landing Page Tip 3, do not wear odd socks so match your landing page to your call do action. A call to action or email sets up an expectation that they are going to find more when they click through, so fulfil that expectation. For example we run free webinars and every webinar has its own landing page. We could use the same landing page but we find that it works best when they match.
Landing Page Tip 4, do not lose your traffic by defining a clear path. Try to think of this as a story with a clear defined start and end. Your call to action or email is the start so have a clear path to lead them to the end - your landing page.
Landing Page Tip 5, keep your traffic focused by minimal distractions. This is not a sweet shop so keep the distractions down to minimum. Once you have defined your clear path where possible remove anything that will stop them reaching your goal.
So there you have some quick landing page tips for your website. If you want to learn more we are running a webinar next week on how to make the most of your website by learning from the best and Googlize it! You can register here: How to Googlise your website.
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Feb 24, 2010
There seems to be a lot of talk these days about landing pages when people bring up Inbound Marketing and landing pages. If you are new to Inbound Marketing or landing pages, you could be wondering what these pages are. What sets them apart and makes them different from any other page on your site.
They are such an important part to your overall success and your Inbound Marketing Strategy.
A landing page is not what it is about but what it can do. Your landing pages should provide a customized sales pitch about your products or services for your visitors. The best thing about Inbound Marketing is we can consider where the person has come from (blog, social media or organic search), who they are and what are they looking for. By providing a good match between your landing page and your visitor, your chances of engaging with them increase, as should your conversion rate.
If you take to time create a well crafted landing page your conversion rates increase rather than simply sending people straight to your home page of your site. Think about it this way, rather than asking people find their own way around your site try to give your visitor exactly what they are looking for and you will have a more engaging audience. Try not to provide too many distractions in the form of links or navigation buttons, or you are likely to lose them before they read your entire message.
Once you have created your page, you need to monitor your conversion efficiency. Your landing page conversion efficiency is a measure of how your landing page converts visitors to achieve the outcome you expect from your landing page. What goes hand in hand with the conversion rate efficiency is the bounce rate. A Bounce rate is the percentage of the visitors that left your website straight away after landing on your site or landing page. A high bounce rate indicates that site or your landing is not relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.
Before you can consider what your landing page looks like, make sure that you can report on the performance of your page by looking at the bounce rate and conversion efficiency. So remember that Inbound Marketing and Landing pages should start and end with measurement. Over the next few blogs we will go further into landing pages and how to make the most of them.
Tomorrow we are running a webinar on "How to build your Brand with Social Media". Check out our landing page!
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Tue, Jan 12, 2010
In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.
Most blogs and articles cover top tips and best practices for landing paging to convert your visitor's into leads. But what if you do not want leads and look to have the lowest conversation rate as possible.
1 Make it Big
Slow loading pages can lose potential customers. Research shows that more than 80% of customers click away from a page that takes too long to display. Google says that page loading time will be considered in determining the "Quality Score". Keywords that lead to landing URLs that are slow loading pages will get lower quality score than those which load faster. This means the minimum bids for a keyword that leads to a slow loading page will be higher. The web page header has to be downloaded fully before any content is displayed to the user. Therefore, a page header that has to make too many calls to the server to download all the CSS and JS files will slow down the page loading considerably. So make sure it is big and as complicated as possible.
2 Ask for everything
Apparently no one likes to give away too much information when they want to download a free report, get a demo of your product or sign up for a free trial. If you want the visitors to try your product without any obligation, you should ask for as minimal information as possible. Initially, you may just take their name and email address for a way to contact them in future to build a relationship. Gradually over a period of time, you may slowly get more information & feedback from them. Every extra field in your landing page will reduce your conversion rate, so ask from as much details as possible. You never know when you might need their pet's name.
3 Confuse them
Plain and simple, consumers will not take the desired action on a website unless the information, instructions, and path to a conversion point are laid out neatly before them. For lower conversion rates try not to optimize landing pages by controlling the conversion path to achieve higher conversion rates and lower bounce rates. Providing users with too much information can delay conversion time and bog consumers down to where it might actually prevent a conversion. To avoid having that happen, keep in mind that people like to consume information in chunks. Utilizing bullet points that feature product details, testimonials, or contact info is an efficient way to communicate information. Keeping information short and to the point will allow for quick consumption, and not pull the consumer away from your conversion path.
What are you views, what other tips to do have?
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