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Hello everyone, welcome to another Digitize Your Firm webinar. I’m back from vacation and better than ever – though was very honored to have Jay stand in for me. Last week we talked landing page creation, but today I’m going to give tips and tricks that will drive traffic to your new page.
For anyone joining us who is a landing page wizard or for those who are just starting out, I welcome all comments and questions, simply click the green speech bubble at the top of the screen to open the chat and either type out your comment or ask to speak. If you haven’t already, be sure to click the ‘phone’ icon next to it the chat icon to ensure your audio is connected.
As with all Digitize Your Firm webinars, this will be recorded for later playback in case you wanted extra time with a certain section or for listening on the go. If you haven’t already, please visit the Weekly Webinar Schedule on our Digitize Your Firm page to check out our past webinars.
Now, let’s go over today’s agenda.
We’ll dive right in with how you can drive potential prospects to your page, then talk promoting the page itself. From there, we’ll be listing all the reasons why you should test, test, test, before closing with our regular topic and teasing next week’s topic!
Sound good? Let’s go!
The best analogy I could think of to best reflect why you should not add a lot of links to a landing page is a menu at a restaurant.
If you have a meatloaf special that you really want to push, don’t put it on a page with 20 other choices. The meatloaf is what you want them to pick, so do your best to direct people to it.
The most effective landing pages are those that reflect the look and feel of your website, but do not allow for navigation to your actual homepage. If people really want to do that, they will figure it out on their own, but don’t make it easy.
If you have too many links on your landing page, prospects could quickly get distracted and click away from your landing page, preventing you from collecting information that is beneficial in crafting your sales messages.
It is more appropriate to place links in the “thank you content” on your landing page, so they are only accessible after the form is completed.
What To Remember:
Limit the number of CTAs (links) to 1-2 on short landing pages, and 3-4 on longer pages. Extraneous links on the page that don’t lead to the conversion action need to be removed. If you must have links, put them in the footer or on the Thank You page.
Feature Valuable Content
Content should entice visitors and then follow through. In order to keep visitors interested and your reputation as an industry expert intact, it is essential that you only use forms and landing pages to promote items of value to your target audience.
This means, don’t make people work to get nothing of value in the end.
When potential customers put forth that extra energy to fill out a form on your site, they should be provided with quality content. Don’t leave them feeling left disappointed.
It is also suggested that you leave some amount of content freely accessible on your site (as opposed to “locked down” with a form) in order to demonstrate the type of materials a prospect can expect. This can be done very easily on a blog or in a resources section. Remember, even if it’s a free download, if a user turned over their information, they want quality.
Another idea is to use landing pages to promote special offers, only accessible through your pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements or email blasts. This gives an air of exclusivity and tells your prospects to act quickly to cash in on this valuable offer. It will act as an instant reward for those who complete the form and reinforce the fact that you appreciate their interest in your product or service. With a landing page you can go big with your message that may not fit into your daily operations. This is also a great way to manage a big promotion or contest as everything is separated.
In order to attract a wider variety of potential clients, you should use landing pages and forms to provide a variety of different pieces of content, ranging from white papers to product trials to contact forms. This will help you collect information from prospects in all different stages of the buying process.
A good piece of advice when putting together your content: don’t clutter the page with text. Remember, visitors do not read website content, they scan. Use headings within the content to direct attention as well as lists and bullet points to summarize and highlight key information.
What To Remember:
For everyone who trusts you with their user information, provide value to them. Use landing pages to promote special offers that are exclusive to those viewing the form of marketing you use. Finally, offer content that is both free and that is only accessible through a web form.
Once you get them to complete the form, that is where tracking emails come in. What’s a tracking email? We’ll tell you everything tomorrow.
Now, you’ve gotten prospective leads and clients to fill out a form, but where do you go from there?
Keep track of your prospects after a form is completed.
Typically, landing pages act to provide some form of content to those who complete a form.
This can be done in a few ways:
Prospects can be redirected to the requested content.
The content can be loaded in the “thank you message” for a smoother transition.
The content can be sent to prospects as a link in a tracked email.
Of these options, the most advantageous in my opinion is to present the content in a tracked email. By using a program that monitors visitor activity on your site, you will be able to see if the prospect opened the email, clicked on the link, and how much time the prospect spent reviewing your content.
This also brings your prospects back to your website and gives you the opportunity to view what other activities they may perform while browsing.
Many form builders allow you to set up an automatic email, making it easy to send out instant, personalized emails containing tracked links to anyone who completes the form.
Sending an email also allows you to weed out prospects that may not be serious by determining if they provided a false email address.
What To Remember:
Using a tracked email to deliver content that users have signed up to get makes it easy to track every stage of the landing page process. It also eliminates those using fake addresses.
Take Advantage of Progressive Profiling
Once your prospects have completed the form embedded in your landing page, you are ready to help them navigate away from your page and deeper into your website. It is often effective to offer links to additional white papers or content that is similar to what they requested. This way you can keep them on your website. Include these on a thank you page or email.
Progressive profiling is simply a way of collecting additional data points from your prospects. When you create your form you designate secondary fields, called conditional fields, which will only appear if the prospect has completed your basic form. This allows you to obtain a few data points at a time without burdening your visitors with lengthy forms.
You can slowly build a customer profile as repeat visitors will receive new fields to complete on each return visit to your pages.
You set up the same form for all of your white papers and live demo requests, but you set them up to intelligently display only the fields that you are missing for a given prospect. Your marketing automation software identifies your prospects and remembers what information they have already given you.
What To Remember:
After the initial sign up, you will still want to collect more data points from your users. A good way to do this and still seem organic is to use progressive profiling. These are conditional fields on a form that show up when return visitors visit your landing pages. This makes sense when you will have many repeat visitors for fresh content.
Expand the reach of your offering with social media.
Social media has become normal to be incorporated into marketing efforts. This is no different when it comes to landingages. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook have a huge multiplier effect and have also become a validation criterion to how good an offer really is.
It will actually make your landing pages look less legitimate if you don’t have social links included. That is simply what web viewers expect now.
Make sharing easy by including popular social media share buttons above the fold and in the signup process. Also make sure you have customized your sharing buttons to share the landing page and not the content that people are signing up to get. Again, marketing automation can make this a breeze because it usually will involve a single click rather than having to code the page yourself.
Now before you start creating landing pages, there is one more best practice we need to cove
What is the one thing we’re always telling you to do with any digital tools? Test, test, test, test!
Test your Landing Pages and compare conversion rates to learn what works.
If there is one thing I preach over and over again, becoming a marketing expert is all about testing. Nobody is perfect, even if you think you are.
Testing is vital to successful landing pages as well, and not just for the usual reasons. With landing pages, testing is part of the actual process, as you want to learn what works best and optimize from there.
That is one great aspect about landing pages. You can always improve on them through testing.
If you are not getting much traffic, stick with A/B testing and examine two different designs. If you are getting a significant amount of visitors to your site, try multi-variate testing instead.
Assign an equal distribution of traffic to your variations, evaluate after a week or two, and pick the winner based on conversion rate. Do not stop when you have reached desirable numbers however. A landing page can always be made more effective and if you are not doing it, your competitors certainly are.
Not Sure What to Test?
Try a few of the following variables:
Headline – keep it short and compelling; the headline should describe an immediate benefit to the reader.
Offer – experiment with white papers, demos, free consultations, and more
Images & Design – try a shot of your white paper cover, an internal page, or a screenshot of your demo
Length of Form – though you always want to keep forms short, experiment to see how long is too long
Form Fields – try department vs. job title, making the phone number optional, and dropdowns vs. free text
It used to be that you would have to test all of these variables manually. That is a time-consuming process and difficult to do properly. Thankfully, many marketing automation solutions can make complex testing a breeze. This can include automatically assigning traffic to each of your page designs and reporting on the results. I highly recommend going this route as it saves time and provides highly accurate results.
What To Remember:
Testing and tweaking is key to ongoing improvement. Create matching landing pages with key differences and compare their conversion rates using automated marketing. You can test the use of a demo, multiple pages linked by tabs, number and length of bullet points, approaches to copy (salesy, helpful, long, short, etc.), dynamic content, etc. Measuring ROI will help you become more efficient and effective at driving down costs per acquired customer.
Sound good? If you’re starting to feel a little lost, don’t worry – we’ll be doing our weekly recap tomorrow.
1. When it comes to driving prospects to your page, remember to bring valuable content. Think of your favorite restaurant that’ll you go out of your way to go to – do you like it because the food is so-so, or because it tastes great? Probably because the food is amazing, right? The same thinking applies to landing pages.
Keep the content concise, refresh with a concentrated design look and no more than 1-2 CTAs on short pages, or 3-4 on long pages. You want them to get a taste and want the full meal. Don’t forget to offer a variety of CTAs for your client to select from – for some, signing up to receive more information will be enough. For others, they are going to want whitepapers, videos, imagines, infographics, and more before they even think of giving you their email.
2. When it comes to promoting your landing page, simply pasting a link to your website’s main page and sending out an email isn’t going to cut it. You need to be creative and aggressive. Instead of one email, launch a campaign directing traffic to the main page and include links and CTAs to the landing page in regular communications, such as emails. If you’re running a contest and want to get flashy, send a link to the landing page via SMS or splash the landing page across your social media pages. You could even include it in ‘thank you’ messages that you regularly send out.
3. Like we always say – test, test, test. Experiment with the headline of the page, form length, the content, the layout, the images, create two or three versions and shop them around. If you, or your colleagues, wouldn’t visit the page themselves – what is the likelihood of someone else? Don’t forget to also test and form and conversions themselves. Are the submissions being emailed to the right email address? Are following up and thank you emails being sent, properly formatted, mobile friendly, and grammatically correct?
Next week, Stephen will be back to tell you how to drive prospects to your page, what to do after they convert, and of course – the importance of testing.
