Great Landing Page Design: Part 1
Wikipedia defines a landing page as a lead capture page that appears when a potential customer clicks
on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, which is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search.
In Business to Business (B2B) contacts, landing pages are often the first interaction a company has with a sales lead. As a result, companies are placing greater importance on deploying a great landing page design to improve their conversion rates.
While landing pages are used both in both Business to Consumer (B2C) and B2B interactions, there are significant differences in their application.
In B2C, the page is designed to identify the lead and make the sale in that one, transactional visit. One person is generally the decision maker, and the product is typically a consumer product, such as a brokerage account. The goal is to identify the lead, convert them, and make the sale all on that one page.
In B2B, the sale is more consultative, with a team of people likely being the decision maker. In B2B, the original contact may not even be part of the team, but simply an information gatherer. The decision to buy is more critical, for example it could be about a system to run the financials of a brokerage company.
Why are landing pages important?
The question is sometimes asked: Why create a landing page? Why not just send potential customers to the
homepage? Most marketers will say that a landing page is for testing and optimization of design and content. Customers will be coming in through different avenues, so why not refine the message and the offer based on where the ad was placed? By contrast, sending a customer to a homepage is like sending them on a whole new level of search. In a way, sending them to the homepage is a waste of click dollars.
Specifically, a landing page allows for greater testing, enabling you to:
• Refine message and offer based on where the ad is being placed.
• Understand what works and what doesn’t work
• Maximize conversion rates
Testing in turn creates greater opportunity to optimize the page, which will again maximize conversion rates and decrease marketing spend.
And Because Google Said So
Google has recently introduced a new web crawler, AdBot-Google, which checks to see if your keywords and
landing pages are relevant to each other. That information is used to determine your ad quality score. Ads with a high quality score can rank higher, even if the ad buyer is paying less than others for the ad. Google has also indicated that refusal to allow AdBot scanning could result in lower scores.
Beyond Google’s ranking system, there are other metrics that show the advantages of directing prospects to
optimized landing pages as opposed to the home page.
• Average conversion rates for lead generation for the home page from search engine marketing or pay-perclick fall between 5 percent to 6 percent.
• Landing pages that match the theme of the keyword search have an average conversion closer to 10
percent.
• Landing pages that match the keyword exactly have a conversion rate closer to 12 percent.
What’s OUT:
• Boring Whitepapers
• Flash jump/intro pages
• Individual landing pages
• Boring “thank you” pages
• Web only campaigns
What’s IN:
• Video, Top 10 lists
• Simple fast-loading HTML
• Company landing pages
• Recommendation engines
• Multi-channel touch points (direct mail, banner, text message, pay-per-click)
The Bra!nStorm: With any marketing campaign that includes the Internet make sure that you take the time to develop a great landing page for you website visitor. In Part II we will go into more of details in design a great landing page that produces results. As always we welcome your thoughts and comments.
Design