Making an appearance in almost every digital marketing campaign, the landing page is a high conversion tool that your business needs to include in your digital marketing strategy. Whether for lead gen, sales or as an entry point for an AdWords campaign, landing pages are valuable for almost every type of business.

 

What are landing pages and why are they special?

Conversions are the goal of every digital marketing campaign, and if you’ve experienced working on a digital campaign before, you might be lucky to look at conversion numbers around 5%. Actually, depending on the campaign and how you’re measuring a conversion, 5% could be a far distant dream.

So why is such a low conversion rate the norm?

The struggle that all digital marketers face is turning website visitors into calls or purchases, and while your site could be bringing in thousands of people a month in traffic, you inevitably end up losing visitors along the way as they move through your site.

Consider an e-commerce site that gets 1000 visitors in a week to the home page. Let’s assume buying something or signing up to a mailing list are our two conversions being measured, neither of these can be done from our imaginary site’s home page. That means we lose at least 50% of visitors because they go no further into our site.

Maybe 20% of our original 1000 go to the blog, 50% of those visitors don’t find a blog they want to read. The remainder click through and have a read. 90% of those people will go no further into the site. That leaves us 10 people who might convert from the blog, either as sales or as mailing list signups.

The other 30% of our original 1000 visitors click through to category pages, or maybe directly to featured products. Again 90% of these visitors disappear along the way, unable to find a product they like, or finding your products to expensive. That gives us 30 people who buy from the online store.

40 conversions from 1000 visitors…

A 4% conversion doesn’t sound all that great, but for a lot of businesses these are actually good numbers.

As a visitor enters your site, you lose them to lack of interest, usability, competition and a number of other factors. This is where landing pages come in.

Landing pages are entry pages for your website. They are designed simply and usually have only one choice for exiting the page, whether that’s buying a product, downloading a gated document, or going through to a category page.

Unlike the home page of your site, there’s only one clear path for a visitor to go down, and by creating a range of different landing pages for specific entry points, you can direct traffic and increase conversion.

 

How landing pages work with AdWords

Landing pages are most prominently featured as a conversion tool in AdWords campaigns. Google AdWords allows you to appear at the top of highly targeted keyword searches… you also decide where that ad sends the traffic that clicks through.

By segmenting your potential website customers into their interest areas, you can ensure the first thing they see when they land on your website is highly relevant information which gives you the best chance of turning them into a customer.

Let’s consider a plumber in Melbourne. They are running an AdWords campaign targeting emergency plumbing Melbourne. By creating a simple and attractive landing page for the campaign, they could drastically increase calls for this service. An optimized landing page would include a simple call to action the pushes the visitor to call them, as well as highly targeted and concise emergency plumbing information. This, when ran well, could push the conversion rate well above 10%.

 

Lead capture and landing pages

Part of an integrated content marketing strategy will usually be the generation of leads. Depending on the business, this can be done by downloadable e-books, free consultation requests, check boxes during purchase and blog list sign ups.

The most effective way to increase a lead gen campaign’s conversion rate is through carefully directing targeted traffic to a landing page.

We ran a lead generation campaign to an e-book I wrote on content marketing. By creating a simple to use landing page, with a clear call to action and a limited request for data, we had a conversion rate of over 20%. That means more than 1 in 5 of the visitors we directed there from our social advertising downloaded the e-book, and in exchange we got their details.

If you want to see our landing page, just click here.

The success of a campaign like this, and by extension the landing page, comes down to customer identification and directing the right people to the right landing pages.

 

Customers, data and landing pages

The four pillars of digital marketing tend to work the best when used in concert, and landing pages are a tool the spans all four. The key to getting your landing page working, no matter where you’re using it in your sales journey, is data and customer identification.

If you’ve correctly identified your customer segments, by creating customer avatars or by using another tool, you’ll be able to ensure the right pages are created for the right audience and products.

For example, let’s consider a small tax agency. Their two main streams of business are personal tax returns and the preparation of Business Activity Statements (BAS). Coming up to tax time the business wants to run a Google AdWords campaign to drive new business from both these customer segments. The business needs to create two separate landing pages for the search campaign, one for personal tax return keywords and another for BAS preparation. A month out from tax time the campaigns kick off, and as the conversion data starts to come through, clear patterns emerge in demographics and genders for each ad group. To further retarget these higher converting groups, the business creates a set of display ads segmented by the converting demographics.

In this example, by advertising to the right business segments, then using data to further re-target the right audience, the conversion levels of the landing pages will increase and deliver a higher ROI on the marketing campaign.

This sort of data is also very useful for creating email marketing campaigns, which also show a high ROI when directing customers to landing pages for sales and downloads.

So, in summary, you should be using landing pages. When planning a digital marketing campaign, it’s important to maximise the conversion rate as much as possible, and the best way to do that is through landing pages. Contact myself, or that team at WME, to discuss implementing landing pages into your digital marketing strategy.