By way of example, I have one client who excels at landing page refinement. He constantly tests and refines, tests and refines. His landing page strategy is to marketing what the instructions “rinse, lather, repeat” are to increased shampoo usage. He’s even tested and proven which font colors work best.

If I seem to be gushing, it’s because I admire people who take advantage of the science of marketing. Sure, there’s an art to it, too. (I’m a creative, after all.) But when it comes to things like landing page conversion, you don’t have to guess. With a click of a mouse, the market will tell you whether it prefers Landing Page A to Landing Page B. All you have to do is ask.

Landing Pages Are Your Secret Conversion Weapon

There lots of ways to attract visitors to your web site, but the true measure of success is always conversion. When it comes to converting those visitors to subscribers, enrollments and buyers, one of the most effective tools is what is commonly referred to as a landing page.

A landing page is essentially the page someone lands on first after clicking a link in an ad or email newsletter. It can be any page really, but the idea is that it’s a page designed for a specific purpose. Internet marketers have used this tactic forever, but done correctly, it’s become a standard marketing practice for anyone attempting to increase conversion. I guess landing pages aren’t really that secret, but not enough small business marketers use the awesome power they bring.

Any page you create for a web site can be a landing page, including a specific blog post, but there are services, such as Unbounce and SiteTuners, that can help you automate, design, test and track your landing page campaigns and conversions. These specialized services may well be worth the cost when it comes to creating the most effective landing pages.

There’s a bit of art and science to what makes a landing page work, so testing and tweaking will always be required, but the following tips should be used to get started optimizing your landing pages.

Only one thing – Your landing page is to do one thing and one thing only – ie: get a subscriber, offer an ebook, or create an enrollment for an event. Use every bit of the real estate to sell that call to action. Don’t try to introduce other possible options or you will find your pages will simply confuse.

Test variations – You must test multiple variations of your page elements at all times. One of the easiest ways to do this is using Google’s Website Optimizer tool that offers simple A/B testing. If you are using Google AdWords, or any other online advertising platform, make sure you are tracking individual ad conversions as well.

Message and ad – It may prove to be a good idea to have specific landing pages for each ad you are running. It can really help conversions when the landing page copy specifically matches the ad copy that brought them there. Tweaking your ads is just another part of the testing too.

Use video – It’s been proven in many studies that video on landing pages increases conversion. This is do to the fact that your call to action can be explained, you build trust when the visitors sees and hears a real person, and video is simply more engaging and harder to ignore. (Make sure you test you videos too!)

Make it easy – Make sure that’s it is obvious what you want the visitor to do and even more obvious how to do it. (This is where the use of video, audio, arrows and buttons can be effective.) Limit any data collection to name and email or your conversions will drop unless what you are offering is so valuable people will give more information.

Offer sharing – These days you’ll want to make it easy for a visitor to tweet, share and forward your page and their actions on your page. Add as much social networking functionality as possible. This is where the landing page services can come in handy.

Make thank you pay – After your visitor takes the prescribed action you should direct them to a conversion or thank you page, but don’t waste that space, use it to create even more engagement by offering an unexpected freebie ebook or download of some sort.

For more info on this topic, here are three books to consider. Landing Page Optimization: Tim Ash, Always Be Testing: Bryan Eisenberg, and Web Analytics 2.0: Avinash Kaushik

Source: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

No related posts.

It’s not copywriting. Or art direction. Or social media, video, or SEO strategy. (Although all those things can help.)

Ready?

It’s the offer.

Offer something of value to your customers, something they really want, and they will buy it. Simple marketing strategy. Works every time.

Case in point.

I just helped Mountain Travel Sobek, a leading adventure travel client “get the phones ringing off the hook” with a good, old-fashioned offer.

Normally, this travel company mails one big, 200-page catalog of all their trips, once a year, along with a handful of smaller books. It’s an expensive proposition. Now, especially because of the economy, their business was down a significant percentage, as was the rest of the industry. And this was after continuing growth over the past few years. They were ripe for something new and ready to try it.

When they brought me in, they were planning to mail one of their regular mini-catalogs and thinking about testing different creative approaches—tone of voice and visual style. Despite the economy, there was a chance that it would bring in some business. After all, getting out there with some frequency can be better than not at all.

But times are tough right now. Travel is particularly down. And my client’s in the high-end. Their trips start in the $2,000 range, without air travel.

The better marketing strategy, I suggested to them, was to include a compelling offer.

If you know direct marketing, you’ve heard that a successful campaign is something like 40% offer, 40% list, and 20% creative.

They already had a plan to test a rented list against their own house list. And a good idea. Why not see if going out to some new names can bring in business if you can rent a good-quality list? (BTW, I know the person in charge of their list management and there’s no way it wasn’t going to be a good list. If you need list help, I’ll give you her info.)

So we talked long and hard about offers. Especially about what kind of offer wouldn’t diminish their brand, since they’re known for quality.

Fortunately, as it happens, they’re celebrating their 40th year in business. So I suggested an offer that’s easy to understand and had a lot of punch. 40th anniversary, 40 free trips. I mean, who doesn’t like to travel for free?

They decided to go for it. We structured the giveaway as a buy-one, get-one free. When you purchased one trip at the full price, you got a free companion ticket.

There was no social networking. No blogging. All promotion was done with direct mail via an 8-page catalog. Plus a restatement of the offer on their website, where a ticker counted down the number of trips remaining vs. the number of days left.

To meet their lead-time for July 1st bookings, we had to move fast. The catalog was at the printer just 10 business days after our first conversation, then out into the mail soon after.

We crossed our fingers.

Then, something amazing happened. After less than one week in people’s homes, the catalog was not only selling trips, it was selling A LOT of trips. In fact, they sold out of all 40 within two weeks of the mail drop.

How did this happen?

A great offer. One that’s easy to understand. One that people want to buy. That’s it. Simple marketing strategy.

Want more proof?

Take a look at Restaurant.com’s recent, ongoing promotions. Normally, they let you buy meals at participating restaurants for 50% off. So you pay $25 and get a certificate worth $50 at the restaurant.

For weeks, they’ve been sending me offers for 50%, 60%, even 70% off their certificates. So I was able to snag $25 certificates for my favorite restaurants for just $3 each. Which I did. And no doubt, other people did, too.

Restaurant.com has been sending me these offers every week for a month. In my experience, that may be a little too frequent. But if it’s working, why not? After all, the restaurant industry is also down. If this is getting people in the doors, do it.

Hopefully, Restaurant.com is doing the smart thing and tracking each of these offers. And even better, sending different ones out simultaneously to really test which work. That’s another key marketing strategy–always test your offers.

Intuit had a similar idea. On April 1st, they offered 50% off all their major QuickBooks and Quicken products, just for the day–and just in time for Tax Day, when accounting is top-of-mind. That’s a great deal, easy to understand, great timing. Did it work? Wish I could tell you. I can say, if it comes up again, we’ll have our answer. (They won’t do it again if it didn’t generate revenue. Or, at the very least, they’ll change the discount.)

So yes, the economy’s difficult. And yes, there are a lot of new tools for reaching people. Lots of new techniques to engage them. And lots of ways to track what they’re doing and where they’re going.

But the fact is, if you have customers, you already know you have something someone wants. The power to drive more business is in your hands. Give your customers and prospects a deal they can’t resist.

You can do it, no matter which industry you’re in, whether you’re B2B or B2C, or what size your business.

Email me and let’s talk about what you have to offer.

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Quick copywriter synopsis: Wales says, because everything online is very measurable, we measure everything. Impressions, click-through rates, conversions. But traditional brand advertising has to be measurable in other more traditional ways, like consumer awareness. Because we haven’t had a lot of that online, brand advertising online is extremely cheap. If you want to reach 40 million college students in the US, you can use Facebook and pay a lot less than advertising on TV.

My two cents is that marketers understand the direct marketing effect. We know when we send something out intentionally, under our own control, how to apply measurement. You send out an email, people click or don’t, you measure it.

But branding online is different. We can control the initial launch, but the ripple effect is harder to forecast or measure because once a brand campaign is online, it’s out of the advertiser’s hands. You have to be more sophisticated about measuring awareness that continues to grow organically. It’s worth doing, however, as well as applying more traditional branding measurements, as Wales suggests.

ad:tech SF ’09: Jimmy Wales Talks CGM, Branding and Wikipedia from Angela Natividad on Vimeo.

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For one, there’s certainly a lot of mythology about them. After all, do these creatures really exist?

The answer is yes, some of them do. Leviathan may have been a blue whale. The Kraken is what we now know as the giant squid. The Devil Fish came to be known as the manta ray.

Of course, it’s easy to mistake the myth for the real thing. You see a lot of commotion in the waters these days. Surely, like sea monsters, your leads are out there. But where? And how do you cast a net that pulls them in?

Studies show that advertising still motivates half of all purchasing decisions. Advertising is one of the best tactics for generating leads that you can deploy–even now, when the market is down. Because while it seems like there are fewer fish, there are also fewer competitors casting their nets.

Advertising can also get you word of mouth. You’ve probably seen ancient mariner maps with ominous drawings of sea monsters in the open ocean. Interestingly, ocean exploring began in earnest in the 15th century. A mere 100 years later, all marine maps depicted these terrifying sea creatures. That’s a short time for word of mouth to spread in a world without email. So imagine what advertising using today’s techniques, such as direct marketing, advertising, and social networking can do to generate leads for your business.

So, when you’re fishing for leads, here are a few tips for creating an advertising campaign that brings you a return on investment:

•Place ads in the most targeted publications that your target market reads.
•Consider inexpensive ads in email newsletters and web sites that your target market reads.
•Use direct response advertising techniques. ALWAYS ask the reader to respond for more information by phone, mail or via your website.
•Be proactive. Know your sales cycle and create a system of follow-up to get maximum results from your advertising dollar.
•Use compelling headlines that highlight the biggest benefit your product or service offers.
•Make them an offer that they can’t refuse so they’ll take the action you want them to take.

Good fishing. And if you see Nessie, let us know whether she’s a plesiosaur or a basking shark. Those are the two main contenders.

Need help casting your net? Email me and we’ll venture out onto the waves together.

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It goes something like this.

You’ve isolated the keywords your potential customers are most likely to use. You’ve put them in your meta tags, your copywriting, maybe even in the text wrapper around your videos. So when a prospect types in “mousetraps”, your extermination company ranks pretty well in Google.

Then one of a number of things goes wrong.

You take these potential customers to your home page, which talks about everything you do, including termite control, wasp nest removal, snail abatement, plus your green story, pictures of your trucks, and, and…

Or you give them a little bit of copywriting about your years in the extermination business, maybe a sentence or two about your mousetraps and then ask them for their email address.

Or you give them some decent copywriting about your mousetraps, show a few pictures, and the conversation stops.

See the problem?

The person who typed in “mousetraps”, in all likelihood, wants mousetraps. Now’s your chance to use a little basic marketing strategy to give them—wait for it—targeted copywriting about mousetraps. Stuff like the benefits of the mousetraps you use, your fast mousetrap delivery process, your cruelty-free catch-and-release traps that don’t harm Mr. Rodent, your money-back guarantee if your mousetraps don’t catch the little guy within 48 hours. Get the picture?

Now that your prospect is excited about you, that’s when you ask them to take the next step. Invite them to buy. Ask for their email address so you can follow up. Whatever the next logical step in your sales cycle is, this is the time.

This kind of marketing strategy holds true no matter what type of medium you’re using. Twitter. Social networking. Online video. Direct mail. Direct TV. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that you understand your sales process and think about where anyone coming into it is in that cycle.

This is why so many people writing about social networking talk about being relevant, friendly, “paying it forward” with useful tips and advice. This is, after all, networking. When you’re just putting your shingle out there, you’re trying to get noticed for being good at what you do and who you are. You’re casting a wide net with a view to the long term. That’s personal branding. The chances of getting a sale right away are much lower. They happen but not as often.

It’s also why your list and offer count so much when you’re sending a printed direct marketing piece. You’re relying entirely on the quality of the list (right people), your offer (right thing) and your timing (right time). The rest is up to them.

But when someone knocks on your Internet advertising door asking for mousetraps, they’re right there, asking for what you have. You’ve got a unique opportunity to guide them into a decision right there. But you still must guide them. Don’t distract them with everything else you sell. Don’t ask them to decide without paying off your promise.

One great way to do improve your sales cycle is to write it down where you can see it. Get a bird’s eye view by diagramming out all the possible places your suspects and prospects come to you. Then you can determine each point where you should take them. Look at the actual moments when a sale happens. Then look at your follow-up once they become customers. Once you’ve done that, you can compare your ideal sales cycle with your actual process and make refinements where needed.

Need help? Email me and together, we’ll build a better, er, you know the rest.

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Those of you who know me know that I spend my of my days dealing with in antiques and collectibles. I love feeling the history in my hands. This is in stark contrast to the way I sell these treasures… through the Internet. Nothing tangible, and I have to try to reach my audience amongst a sea of ‘noise.’

There was a time that I was spending a large part of my budget on Google Adwords to try to get people to find me. And yes, I was getting clicks, but the conversions were very, very low, which was both costly an ineffective. This is why I came up with a new plan. Here are the 7 ways I get people to find us without using Adwords. And guess what? It costs a heck of a lot less!

1.   Create a mini site. What is a mini site, you may ask? Well a mini site is an ugly little site with a niche-specific domain name that forces people to make a decision. My shining example of this is www.HummelsHumels.com. First of all, the name is very specific to the Hummel Figurine, which is highly important. The search engines find it easier than my main domain, ‘vintagerarestuff.com’. It has a lot of good words in the top bar above where people can type in a new web address, which also gets Google’s attention. But the most important thing is that it’s SIMPLE. It addresses the topic “Do you have a question about selling your Hummel collection?” and then it gives the person a place to fill in their name and email address to find out how. Very simple. One page. Ugly little site, but does wonders.

2.   Start building a list. Once you have a few mini sites out there with forms to contact you, make sure you save their info. I use mycontactform.com and contactology.com. This way, when you have a product of interest, you can send it directly to people who would actually want to know about it. Sending an email to 500 people who care about a subject is better than getting 1,000 clicks from people who are just ‘curious’ on Adwords.

3.   Have a presence on eBay. I know, eBay has become a bit of a pain in the you-know-what lately, but they are still the largest e-commerce site, period. Having a presence there gets you higher in Google searches by virtue of the fact that eBay gets higher on Google.

4.   Get an account on LinkedIn and join groups. There is a group for nearly anything you can think of on LinkedIn and it’s a vastly underused feature! Recently I posted in 4 collectibles groups “looking for people to interview on Collectibles Corner TV.” In 48 hours I had 5 responses. Do you know how long it used to take to find someone to interview? The same can be done for anything. You sell panini grills? Join the restaurant owner group and start a discussion about commercial grills, then casually mention that you sell them. The exposure is really targeted. Make sure to check the box to be emailed if someone replies so you’re able to follow up.

5.   Write a free guide in your niche. Distribute this in every form imaginable. Post it as a page on your web site, devote a mini site to it, sell it for 99 cents on eBay with free shipping in the niche you are catering to. Giving free information is one surefire way to get people to trust you, consider you an expert, and notice you.

6.   Write articles and go negative. You can write articles for free on a lot of different sites, and you can also write directly onto your own blog. But negativity often works better. In our panini grill example – a good title would be “Why you NEVER want to buy a 240 Volt Flat Grill made in China”. Then explain why and offer them a solution – something that you can provide

7.   Get video. This is the MOST superior alternative to Google Adwords. Search engines love good videos that are well tagged. It’s actually quite amazing. There are services out there that can do this for you for under $600 and will literally take care of everything from production to distribution. When you think about how quickly $500-$600 can go on Adwords, it’s a no-brainer.

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