The success of your website promotion and marketing initiatives is dependent upon your goals and your carefully planned strategy.
An element of campaign success often overlooked is the landing page your targeted respondents will arrive at by following the link in your ad. You need to ask yourself where you want them to go and what will best address their needs.
Would it be best to send them to the home page of your corporate website? To a specific internal page of your website? Or to a highly focused, targeted landing page?
The home page of your website is typically designed as a general introduction to all that you offer. It functions as your beautiful lobby where visitors learn more about reaching the department that interests them. Hopefully you have presented your content to welcome and guide your different audience groups effectively; however, it is still a general introduction that may not be addressing the specific concern raised in your latest targeted email, AdWords or banner ad campaign.
An internal page of your website may contain the specific product or service information promised in your ad but does it speak directly to respondents in the same way that compelled them to click your ad’s link in the first place? Probably not.
It most likely provides a generic description of the product or service or addresses a typical need different from the one in your ad.
A targeted landing page offers you the ability to control, track and report on each element of your campaign. You are able to present a marketing message that takes advantage of information you already know as well as the information you will learn from the campaign over time.
For example, let’s say you are selling energy drinks. Currently you are targeting two user groups: athletes and college students. You strategically place your ads on various content sites specifically geared to the different target groups: maybe healthy living and exercise sites for the athletes and popular video and gaming sites for the college students.
You know that athletes are interested in physical endurance and performance while college students are interested in mental endurance and performance. In order to specifically address the differing needs and interests of the two groups, a targeted landing page is developed to receive each one separately. Highly focused content is developed for each of the landing pages that clearly confirms to the user the reason why he responded to the ad and clicked on the link in the first place. The landing page speaks directly to the specific pain identified in your ad that prompted the user to respond.
The content developed also takes into consideration the frame of mind of the person clicking on the link. The college student, for example, who wants to overcome his tiredness and do well on his exams, and not give up any time he spends playing games :), clicks on the ad for the energy drink that promises the solution. He arrives at a landing page that acknowledges how he feels, accepts his need to engage in these targeted activities, and demonstrates how the energy drink is the solution to his pain. As long as the offer is a good one and the “Call to Action” to take advantage of it is clear and easy to follow, this college student is most likely to convert because the message fulfilled his need.
Here are some questions to consider:
- Where is your respondent coming from? Health journal, popular video site, etc…
- What type of content was around him? Tips on healthy eating and exercise, information on performance enhancement supplements/vitamins, social networking, online video gaming, etc…
- What type of reader is he – interests, what motivates him to take action? Solution to enhance physical endurance, solution to enhance wakefulness or mental endurance, etc….
Use what you know now about your anticipated respondents, and what you learn throughout your campaign, to craft a targeted landing page that speaks directly to a specific group about why they clicked your link in the first place.
Targeted landing pages also allow you to conduct A/B testing to learn which ad creative and CTA’s (calls to action) are most effective. Although not impossible, it is more difficult to conduct this type of comparative testing on the home page or internal pages of your website, particularly where there are CTA’s not specifically related to your ad.
Another great benefit of targeted landing pages is the ability to track both user interaction and conversion using tools like Google Analytics. By tracking results on targeted landing pages (especially by setting up Goals in Google Analytics) the data you gather is specific to your campaign and not diluted in any way by visitor behavior outside of your campaign. This concentrated data can be used to make adjustments to improve your overall results and increase your ‘return on advertising spend’ (ROAS).
I will talk more about the benefits of Google Analytics in future posts.
