Where Do Your Customers Land When They Jump?

Marketing

To do search marketing right, it’s best to send potential customers who click on your search-engine-generated links to a “jump” or landing page. This page is the gateway to your site, and should promote further action from your prospective clicker, be it to make a purchase or leave a name and number. So, how do you get the most out of a jump page? What’s the secret to getting jumpers to click? Here are a few tips:

  • Catch the reader’s attention with a big, bold headline that’s relevant to his or her search. Test multiple jump pages at once to see which prove to be the most effective landing pages.
  • Use visuals. Print a bunch of text, and you’ve lost their attention. Remember: pictures that tell a great story really are worth 1,000 words.
  • Include testimonials. People like to buy based on other people’s recommendations.
  • Provide something for free in exchange for a name and email address, or a bonus gift with purchase.
  • Create a sense of urgency with an offer only valid for a short time, or only available to a limited number of new registrants.
  • Give users multiple options for how they pay, from credit cards to PayPal. Also, include a toll-free number for any questions.
  • Be sure to test your control page in an effort to improve conversions each time.

Our Po!nt: Jump to it! Use these tips to optimize your landing pages—to respond to and reward searchers who take the time to click.

Is It Time For A Website Makeover?

Marketing

Shrinking sales. Fewer prospects. Tightening budgets. All the classic signs of a recession are here. So, what’s the next logical step for a B2B company to take? Website makeover!

OK, that idea may sound absurd at first. But according to Bill Gadless, there’s no time like a recession to revamp your Web presence. He offers three good reasons why:

In a downturn, smart companies seek to grow market share. “It turns out that down economies are the cheapest time to improve your market share,” Gadless reports, “because so many companies—probably including at least some of your competitors—will retrench.” Investing now in a makeover will put your company in a much stronger position coming out of the downturn.

Your prospects won’t stop buying, but they’ll think about it longer. According to Gadless: “[W]hile many of your prospects will still buy, they’ll spend more time than ever researching alternatives … on the Web.” All the more reason to revamp.

You can’t find prospects any more cost-effectively than via Web marketing. Regardless of the economic situation, this fact apparently holds true. “Study after study has shown that online marketing is the highest-ROI, most cost-effective marketing you can do,” he says. Investing in your Web site, therefore, is simply never a bad idea.

Our Po!nt: Keep your Web presence up even in a downturn. “To help recession-proof your company, your Web site and lead-generation process should be performing optimally,” Gadless advises.

Source: B2B Website Strategy. Read the full blogpost here.

Help Me Grow My Online Leads

Design Marketing

According to a recent white paper from Pontiflex, generating online leads grew 71% in the 2006-2007 time frame, more than twice as fast as the online ad market. But conducting a good campaign can present “publishers, advertisers and advertising agencies with serious difficulties,” says Zephrin Lasker. He offers four tips to “make online lead generation simple and efficient”:

Simplify your campaign set-up. Your lead-gen solution should enable all partners to “set up their profile only once, and be able to communicate [easily] with each other,” Lasker says. Tip: make sure data flows smoothly through each partner’s deployed standards.

Simplify and secure the lead-data transfer process. Lasker suggests following the Internet Advertising Bureau’s lead-generation guidelines. Example: they encourage publishers, advertisers and agencies to adhere to a common set of data-transfer field-naming conventions.

Implement solutions to facilitate timely reporting and follow-up marketing. The ideal solution is “one that enables real-time transmission of lead data and reports between the publisher and the advertiser/agency,” Lasker says.

Improve campaign transparency. Again, solid guidelines will help. Sample tips for advertisers: always know where your offers are running; avoid forced selections (pre-checked boxes that users have to un-check).

Our Po!nt: Consult industry guidelines to optimize your online leads campaigns. Knowing the roadblocks up front—and how to avoid them—will help boost results.

Source: Pontiflex. Download the white paper here.

More Words Are Now The Key

Our Blog

It appears that a new trend is rapidly gaining ground in search methods being used by people conducting product research via the search engines.  Hitwise has revealed recently  that search queries on all major search engines are starting to use more and more words. In a recent study, the measurement firm found that when people type in words to search they are typing four or more words at an increasing rate to find what they’re looking for.  Hitwise found that searches using five words are up 6 percent, while those using eight or more words have risen by 22 percent. Overall, longer search queries are gaining traction to the point that they have increased 10 percent over the past year of tracking.

It appears that using one- and two-word search queries is dropping in popularity. Two-word queries are down 5 percent, while one-word searches dropped 3 percent. Searches using three words have stayed the same in terms of frequency.

“This is an interesting trend, and it could be interpreted in a variety of ways,” writes Frederic Lardinois in a ReadWriteWeb post. “This could mean that a growing number of users [are] finding less value in the search results they get from relatively unspecific, short queries. It could also indicate that users are becoming more sophisticated in how they structure their queries when they are looking for very specific answers.”

You need to take note of this since those that use four or more words to define their search are looking for a specific product or service to solve their problems.  Be sure that you use three, four and five word phrases as part of your SEO strategy so those that are qualified and ready to do business can find you.  The real advantage is that your comp[etition will not be using this technique!

As always we welcome your thoughts and comments on keywords and boosting SEO.

Great Landing Page Design: Part 2

Design Marketing

Here are the Top 10 Landing Page Design Best Practices:

Create an information scent trail. A scientific theory, called Optimal Foraging Theory, says that our minds have evolved to forage for information in a certain way. We follow sameness and likeness as we search out new data. So if we want prospects to respond to our banners, emails and pay-per-clicks, we need to think about the messaging process as if we’re laying out a train of bread crumbs to draw in prospects. We can use web messaging to create the equivalent of a “scent trail” that can be followed. Commonality of message makes it easy for prospects to follow along till they get to where you want them, which places a premium on reinforcing the exact messaging in the search, in the hit, and on the landing pages.

Design for Web-induced Attention Deficit Disorder. Information glut is common on the web, so make it easy to follow the data flow. Keep the message above the fold on the landing page, use bulleted text, with crisp, clean language. Make your offer obvious on the page, with no scrolling needed to find it or follow it. Netflix is a perfect example of how well this can be done. Don’t have other navigation. It’s a very common mistake to place navigation to other products or offers on a landing page. The thinking is that, “We’ve got them here. We should show them all our great products, and tell them all the great messages we have to tell.” But, there are several reasons to repress that tendency. First, the vast majority of people will bail from a landing page in eight seconds or so. Therefore, if you want to have an impact, don’t dilute or distract from the key message. Once a prospect has been led to your landing page, reinforce the scent trail.

Second, it is easier to measure the impact of your offer, messages and page design when there are fewer distractions like other navigation. Without other navigation, reasons for failure can be limited to a) the offer wasn’t good, b) the design wasn’t good, or, c) too many questions were asked. With other navigation on the page, customers may leave for any of those reasons, plus they may have clicked to go somewhere else. If you keep the page focused, then you maximize your ability to test the page’s effectiveness. Stay with the idea of simplicity and resist the urge to have additional features. When other features are added, then the page becomes a microsite, which is really designed for browsing and awareness. A landing page is geared for conversion.

Limit your survey questions. In the movie, the 40-Year-Old Virgin, the main character goes to a meeting where potential dates are introduced every few minutes. If he wanted to know anything about them, he had to ask in a hurry and not leave anything out. But the dynamics behind landing pages is not similar. This is not speed dating; this is consultative selling, where an extended exchange of information is likely going to be necessary to generate a sale.

For the first survey questions, ask for only the essentials like name and email address, and carefully limit any other questions. Then, give your prospects a benefit for providing that data: Offer to send them information on events in their areas or offer to send a whitepaper. In both cases, you’ll get valid emails from interested prospects. It may also be possible to pre-populate their profile from information already in your sales or marketing database.

As the interaction goes on, incrementally ask more questions. For example, if they request a whitepaper, ask for first and last name, email, and phone. If they sign up for a webinar, ask for the same information, plus the size of the company and BANT questions. At Marketbright, the process is called dialogue marketing, and it seeks to get the information and build a relationship through two-way interaction.

As an additional step, establish greater trust by saying that you won’t spam or sell their email on the landing page itself. That reassurance provides comfort in an age of identity theft and privacy violations.

Make your offer compelling. When customers come to the landing page, their focus on your message needs to be reinforced quickly. Make the information on the page easy and quick to consume. Devices like a headline with a number in it—Top 10 Reasons or Three Key Steps—simplify the information flow, which can tip the scales toward conversion. Also, put in claims, such as “Ranked #1 by XYZ Benchmark Report”, which boost credibility.

Make sure it is the right offer for the right audience. Recently, a company offered to give a free Starbucks card to those who signed up for its webinar. They were getting about 1,500 signups an hour because a free coupon site picked up their offer, and thousands of teens enrolled. It was an appealing offer, but its distribution went to a far larger group than its target audience. Keep the offer focused to your target audience by making it pertinent primarily to their needs, not the world’s.

Test Your ideas: The technology behind landing pages allows marketers to test concepts in a way that hasn’t been feasible in the past. It was difficult to gauge the precise impact of print ads in mass marketing, much less focus on the effectiveness of any individual element, because of the time delay of responses and the vagueness of the information. When constructing landing pages, consider engaging in basic A/B testing.
Test which graphic works best, which survey works best, which button works best.

Test your channels. Today, direct marketing is more a real-time activity, where is it easy to see where the dollars are going and what returns are coming in from different channels. Test placements, direct mail vs. email, Banner ads vs. pay-per-click, Google vs. Yahoo vs. Ask.com vs. MSN.

Think new ideas. Because of today’s information glut, it is becoming increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter with a fresh message. While some traditional devices like whitepapers continue to remain solid attractions, the sheer number of them on the web now diminishes their effectiveness. Consider using updated channels like video, podcasts and quickly read, bulleted Top 10 lists that are easily absorbed. Elaborate intro pages are being replaced with simple, fast-loading HTML to focus attention on the scent trail. In addition, “thank you” pages are being replaced with recommendation engines, similar to those found on Amazon. (“Others who liked this book/CD, also purchased these.”) Recommendation engines, which use an algorithmic process known as householding, have been used on retail sites for years and are now migrating to B2B sites. In addition, the proliferation of touch points – direct mail, banner ads, texting – enable marketers to reinforce their basic messages through multiple channels, all driving back to a single campaign.

Take advantage of “thank you” page. If a potential customer has stayed to that point, there is no harm in giving them more options. The site will have benefited from the click-through, and it will have collected their information. So at this point, it is fine to use regular navigation, promote other offers, make the call-to-action link obvious and central, and send the offer via email to ensure valid email. Consider adding a recommendation engine, though, to ensure that the prospect sees they are being offered more than an extended sales pitch.

What optimized landing pages can achieve
Because of increasing information glut on the web, companies are using a wide array of online marketing tools, including email blasts, banner ads, pay-per-click and landing pages. On landing pages, optimizations can increase the percentage of conversions as much as one percent on B2C sites. On B2B sites, it doesn’t take much of an increase to improve the ROI.

Optimizing landing pages is just one step in the sales cycle. The next step is to introduce lead qualification, or scoring, to ensure that valid leads are either placed into a nurturing program or sent directly to Sales. By optimizing the results of lead generation, companies can increase their viable leads while reducing their marketing spend.

The Bra!nstorm:  We can not stress enough that you take the time to make sure your landing page is not only well designed but make sure you are tracking it’s results.  By taking the time to track, measure and tweak each part of your landing page your results will start increasing right away.

As always we well come your comments and thoghts on this topic.