Why Landing Pages Outperform Your Website for Ads
You’ve worked hard to get visitors to your website. Now, you need to convert them into leads.
One of the best ways to do this is with a landing page: a dedicated web page customized for a specific marketing or advertising campaign.
Sounds simple enough, right? But even today, many businesses are still sending traffic to their home page instead of landing pages. Either they’re too worried about the investment to design an effective landing page or are (more likely) just too busy to do it right.
But with a little help you can learn what to look for in an effective landing page and know why your company cannot afford to ignore them when it comes to lead generation.
What’s the Difference Between a Landing Page and the Rest of My Website?
A landing page is a standalone web page specifically created for a marketing or advertising campaign.
It’s where a visitor ‘lands’ after they click on a link, like in an email, a search ad from Google and Bing, or a social post from YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms.
Now, you might be wondering “why do I need a landing page when I have a perfectly functioning website already?”
Why not just send people to your Home page, your Contact Us page, or one of your product/service pages?
Here’s why:
- Most of the pages on your website offer general information about your business. You’re the focus, not your customers. And these pages are all linked together, with a menu that lets people jump around unfocused and unmotivated.
- On the other hand, landing pages are solely dedicated to getting people to take action on one specific offer. It’s all about generating leads or sales. No links, no distractions. Just a single, simple offer.
That singular focus makes landing pages extremely effective when converting leads ‒ and research backs this up. Studies prove that landing pages with just one call to action will get you more conversions than pages with two or more.
And not only does a landing page get you more leads than a home page, but it also:
- delivers a higher ROI and gives you valuable information about your prospects.
- generates leads that you can segment, nurture, or distribute to your sales team with ease.
- lets you track the marketing performance of your offers and how visitors become leads over time.
To put it simply, sending people to a landing page instead of your home page is one of the most effective ways to increase sales, leads, and revenue from all your digital advertising and email campaigns. A successful landing page asks prospects to take a single action, whether it’s making a purchase or signing up for a quote, consultation, or lead magnet.
10 Critical Elements of an Effective Landing Page
So now that you know why your business should use landing pages, what should you do to create a high converting and effective one?
Below are some of the most critical elements of a landing page that every business should be incorporating.
- Don’t Underestimate the Power of a Great Headline
Your headline is the first thing people will read when they land on your landing page. It should sum up exactly what you’re offering and how people will benefit in a few words. - Write Concise and Compelling Copy
Tell a concise yet compelling story that makes an irresistible offer and nudges people to convert. Focus on the reader, not on yourself. Use short sentences and paragraphs. - Use Strategic and Natural Keywords
Using commonly searched keywords throughout your landing page (in the headers, body text, and page title) will help to optimize the page for Google search and ads relevancy. Avoid the temptation to keyword stuff. - Embrace a Mobile First Mindset
Over half of all website traffic is now from mobile devices. Make sure your landing page loads quickly, is responsive and looks good on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. - Seal the Exits and Hide Navigation
By hiding the top and side navigation, you reduce distractions, minimize friction, and lower bounce rates on your landing page. This means more visitors stay, stay longer and convert more often. - Use a Lead Capture Mechanism
A landing page isn’t complete without a lead capture mechanism, such as a form. In general, a shorter form will generate more conversions, but from leads of lower quality. Inversely, a longer form will generate fewer conversions, but from leads of higher quality. - Add Some Social Proof
Fear of missing out is a powerful tool to use when building social proof behind your landing pages. Testimonials and reviews add credibility to your product or service. This demonstrates that customers trust you and that business is in demand. - Help Explain It with Images
Using images that relate to the copy on the landing page allows people to visualize what it is that you are trying to say about your business, products, and services. If a picture is worth a thousand words, an image is surely worth a few hundred characters of copy. - Don’t Forget the Thank-you Page
After the visitor has put their information into the lead capture mechanism a thank-you page should pop up to confirm with the visitor that their information was received properly. If the page includes a specific deal, the visitor should receive a message that guides them to their next steps and prepares them to be contacted by the business. - Follow-Up with an Email Autoresponder
Many thank-you pages are accompanied by email autoresponders. These emails offer more information on what’s next for the visitor after converting on the landing page. Email autoresponders serve as a type of ‘receipt’ for the lead capture mechanism to confirm opt-in consent with the visitor. It also acts as a prompt for your sales team to check-in with your new lead.
Get More Leads at a Lower Cost with Landing Pages
Setting up landing pages is time well spent, and the results from conversion to leads will be all the proof that you need.
Guiding your website visitors to focus on your current business offer will steer them towards action and turn them into customers.
If you’d like to learn more about landing pages and how they can benefit your business, or if you’d like advice from an industry professional about the next steps reach out to us to chat.
What Is Data-Driven Lead Generation?
A recent survey shows that up to 30% of a typical company’s revenue is generated through marketing.
Yet turning leads into sales remains one of the single most difficult parts of getting your business to grow.
Fact is, most leads who enter your marketing funnel – even many so-called qualified leads – do not end up buying your product or service.
This, right here, is a massive bottleneck for many companies trying to climb the leader.
And all too often, these struggling companies think this can all be fixed with a bigger marketing budget – without setting a useful strategy in place.
The #1 Mistake You’re Making In Marketing Right Now
Leads don’t pay the bills…conversions do.
But whether it’s hitting the “Buy” button, making the phone call, or lining up to check-out, most of your prospective customers just aren’t taking that final step.
You might feel so close to making the sale. Like something somewhere is missing, and all your customers need is one final “push” towards conversion.
This is where many, many companies make a big mistake.
Instead of taking a forensic look at their broken marketing funnel and analyzing where, exactly, their leads are dropping off…
These companies pull out their credit card and expand the campaign, as-is, to an even wider audience.
They fall prey to the all-too-common misconception that you should be marketing your service or product to as many people as you can.
However, this “scattershot” marketing approach won’t bear any fruit if 99% of the people coming across your product or service aren’t buying!
Sure – you’ll be reaching more potential customers overall. It stands to reason that your conversions should increase accordingly.
But that doesn’t actually solve the problem you had in the first place: that too small a portion of your leads were actually buying.
Your conversion rate is still low. You’re still spending too much money per lead.
Put simply, you’re not getting your money’s worth.
What You Should Do Instead: Quality Over Quantity
This is exactly where data driven lead generation is so important.
Rather than focusing on reaching more people, this methodology helps focusing on the right kind of people. Your target market.
Data-driven lead generation focuses on leveraging sales and marketing data to focus on the quality of leads over quantity. This is an extremely important concept.
Data-driven lead generation doesn’t necessarily focus on getting as many leads as possible. Rather, it integrates sales into the mix and focuses on pushing the leads to actually buy a product.
This approach can further amplify the success of any marketing strategy, and constant iterations can serve to work out that strategy’s pains and shortcomings.
Lead Generation & Data Analytics
In order to build the right models for your business that can provide you with the most usable data, it is crucial to gather accurate, relevant marketing and sales data.
This data can then help generate insights and prove or disprove your hypothesis of whether a specific strategy could work.
With data analytics, you can focus on understanding the different attributes of your target market and develop detailed insights – the kind that you can use to produce powerful marketing messages.
Furthermore, this can allow you to find connections between different attributes and data sets that aren’t possible through traditional biased thinking.
For this to happen, you need reliable data which can help drive your analysis.
Good Data Is Unbiased Data
Here’s the real beauty of data driven lead generation:
Data is always unbiased.
The pre-set notions and theories that are followed in “traditional” marketing (some of which are literally over a hundred years old!) are not always relevant in this ever-changing technological environment of ours.
It is important to get unbiased data to help drive analysis and to get results.
Having unbiased data will help you generate those high-quality leads that have a significant chance of turning into a sale.
In order to find reliable, unbiased data, you have to develop an understanding of who you’re targeting and identify the best acquisition channels to collect the most valid data. These can include techniques such as tracking anonymous users visiting your website, gathering feedback from your customers, monitoring trends of loyal customers or using social logins to access a prospect’s profile.
Often, your company’s history is its biggest asset. Using historic behaviour and historic data from older clients can help narrow down your target market and really allow you to focus on generating quality leads. In order to narrow your target market, you need DATA!
Here are some of the key metrics to focus on in your quest to building a data driven strategy:
- How much of your revenue comes from marketing channels such as email, social, PPC, and others?
- How many leads are you generating in a specific time period?
- How many customers actually buy a product or book a service from your website?
- To date, how much actual revenue has your marketing strategy generated (and how does this compare to what you forecasted?)
- How much money have you generated from each lead source?
- How many leads have become opportunities for each of your marketing channels?
Start Putting Data To Work For You Now
To be honest, this only really begins to scratch the surface of what data-driven lead generation strategy can do for your business…but it’s a solid place to start.
And the very best time to start is now.
With all the uncertainty in the world right now, no business can afford to take a “scattershot” approach to its marketing budget.
This is the time to stand out or stand back and get left behind.
Reach out to us when you’re ready to start turning more leads into paying customers.
What Are Realistic Goals for Your Lead Generation Campaign?
Let’s get right into it. The key word I want you to focus on from the title of this blog is realistic.
Of course you want your business to grow. That’s a given. And a strategic, focused lead generation campaign is the most consistent, reliable way to get new customers through the door.
But “skyrocket my business” isn’t exactly a specific, measurable goal. You need to dig deeper.
Goals give your company something to work towards, but reaching for something unrealistic will knock you off the path to success.
Once you’ve done the research and crunched the numbers, you’ll land on that perfectly balanced goal. From there, your lead generation will improve drastically.
This notion is a universal truth for all businesses. Having a clearly defined objective gives you the focus to achieve what you’re aiming for.
Why Are Realistic Goals Integral to Your Success?
First and foremost, studies show that – out of 3,000-plus marketers – there is a 376% likelier chance for success for those who set goals.
Giving yourself realistic benchmarks lets you plan and budget time and money around those expectations.
You won’t over-commit and experience a catastrophic outcome that sinks you financially. Plus, you invested a reasonable amount of time that hasn’t taken away from the rest of your business.
Whereas an unrealistic goal might act as a financial sinkhole that takes your focus off what brought you to the dance: providing quality services.
Metrics That Will Help You Set Realistic Goals
It’s tricky to improve upon what you can’t measure.
However, what you’re measuring should provide valuable insights that help you generate more leads.
What are some examples of meaningful metrics for lead generation?
- Marketing Qualified Leads: leads that have shown interest in your services but aren’t ready to make a purchase. These individuals have performed an action such as filling out a contact form or clicking on an ad.If you nurture an MQL, they’ll be likelier to convert into a customer or client.
- Conversions Through the Sales Funnel: tracks how leads travel the marketing funnel towards being a customer. If customers are moving down this path successfully, it’s an indication that your methods are working.
- Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): a metric that becomes meaningful deep into the buyer’s journey. A wealth of SQLs means that you’ve performed well in cultivating relationships with MQLs and keeping them interested in your services.
4 Critical Factors to Weigh In Setting Realistic Goals
1. Average Deal Size
- Smaller transactions make it more challenging to get a decent return on your investment.
- If your focus is on smaller deals, you’ll have to convert at a high volume.
- Your deal size dictates the preferred size of your prospect or lead database. If you have a more significantly sized deal size, you don’t need to work with as many leads.
2. Average Sales Cycle
- Knowing how long it takes to convert a lead into a buyer gives you a clearer picture of your potential return on investment (ROI). Plus, it helps you grasp the various steps in your pipeline.
- You must adjust accordingly to these timeframes for the most realistic projections of your ROI.
3. Complexity of Sale
- You need to consider how complicated your message is and how many people will be involved in crafting your goals.
- These factors often dictate the number of call attempts and the number of contacts per account for callers.
- Complex sales bring in more value per deal and often justify a lower response and conversion rates because of the money being brought in.
4. Quality of Data
- If you’re receiving quality data about leads, you’ll be spending your time trying to convert people who are more likely to purchase your products.
Defining and achieving your lead goals could mean exciting things for you and your company: higher profit margins, faster growth, and freedom to try new things. Reach out to us to learn how to start generating more leads online now.
7 Questions to Ask When Developing Your Lead Generation Strategy
Are you throwing away hundreds if not thousands of dollars a month on online advertising with little to no results?
Still can’t figure out how to attract more of your ideal customers cost-effectively?
You might’ve been told that pay-per-click advertising is the answer – but like most things in business (and in life) it’s not as simple as the ‘experts’ make it out to be.
As you’ve probably noticed, there are literally hundreds of step-by-step guides out there claiming to hold the secrets to lead generation success. Thousands of so-called marketing gurus who say they’ve developed a foolproof method to get your business – any business – more leads than you can handle.
And that is mistake number one.
Now, we can’t speak to your situation specifically…but from our experience, this is one of the biggest reasons why so many advertising dollars go to waste: a generic, paint-by-numbers marketing strategy that doesn’t account for foundational facts about your business.
Why You Need to Stop, Think, Ask and Answer
We know you’re eager to hit the ground running. You need new customers, and you want to start acquiring them as soon and as efficiently as possible.
It can be tempting to believe you can skip ahead to the ‘execution’ phase (aka, the fun part).
But it pays – literally – to put in the work and ask the right questions early on, because the result is a powerful lead generation strategy that puts the right messages in front of your ideal customers and turns them into real leads.
These aren’t necessarily easy questions. Developing a lead generation strategy isn’t like a personality quiz. They are, however, crucially important and well worth your time to answer.
We can’t take you through all these questions right here and now, but we would like to introduce you to 7 of the most fundamental questions you must ask when developing any lead generation strategy:
- What is your lead acquisition cost and average order value?
- What is your marketing funnel?
- What is Happening in Your Market?
- What Are Your Business Goals and Are They SMART?
- Does Your Current Strategy Measure Up to Your Goals?
- Is Your Copywriting Converting Prospects to Customers?
- How are You Qualifying and Nurturing Leads?
1. What is Your Lead Acquisition Cost and Average Order Value?
Developing a smart and cost-effective marketing strategy to scale your business is no easy task, especially if you are unaware of the costs associated with lead acquisition (cost per lead) and average order value.
But first, let’s start with defining what a lead is. A lead is any person who indicates interest in a company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form.
Now, let’s define what Lead Acquisition Cost and Average Order Value are and what they mean to your business.
Lead Acquisition Cost (LAC) are all costs associated with getting one lead, i.e., getting a potential customer.
Average Order Value AOV) tracks the average dollar amount spent each time a customer places an order on a website or mobile app. To calculate your company’s average order value, simply divide total revenue by the number of orders.
Wrapping your head around these important metrics can change the way you perceive your business, and how you approach a new cost-effective marketing strategy. Without these numbers factored into your strategy, you could find your business spending substantial amounts of marketing dollars on the wrong initiatives and not producing favourable results.
The good news is that Lead Acquisition Cost and Average Order Value can actually be pinned down to the cent, and TrafficSoda can help, so you don’t have to feel around in the dark for these numbers.
2. What Does Your Marketing Funnel Look Like?
The buying process has multiple stages.
Most people are not ready to buy the moment they see your ad, and for that reason, it is important to warm your customer up so they can go from being unaware and uninterested in your business to engaged and ready to buy.
At TrafficSoda, we specialize in determining the shortest pathway from your advertising dollar to your sales funnel. To do so, we first start by researching our clients thoroughly in what we call the discovery process. By understanding all aspects of your customer audience, market perception, competitors and sales process and marketing – we can develop a hypothesis, test and refine.
3. What is Happening in Your Market?
Creating a strategic lead generation strategy starts with taking a close and honest look at who you are as a business.
What do you do that provides unique value for your customers?
Have you investigated the full scope of your business and have insight into your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?
Researching what is happening in your market, what customers are saying about your business and competitors, and the actions your top competitors are taking to stand out, and better align with customers, is a great place to start.
With this information at hand, you can then produce the right market messaging that resonates with your target audience.
4. What Are Your Business Goals and Are They SMART?
Goal setting is an important component when crafting a new marketing strategy.
What are your current sales like?
How much would you like to scale as a business?
What are your timelines for achieving this growth potential?
By mapping out a clear picture of your ideal business situation and your plans to support this growth internally, you and your team will know exactly what you are working towards. Setting goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-bound (SMART) can help you set marketing goals that align with your overall business goals.
5. Does Your Current Strategy Measure Up to Your Goals?
This is a loaded question, so we at TrafficSoda like to focus first on the current number and quality of leads your business is interacting with.
From here we like to look at overall lead generation strategy, and how it’s managed, monitored, optimized AND nurtured.
Quality lead generation does not mean you can have a “set it and forget it” mentality. Regular monitoring and tweaking of your marketing is essential to its performance and overall impact.
What types of data are you collecting and how are you using it to make data driven decisions and improve your overall strategy?
6. Is Your Copywriting Converting Prospects to Customers?
Is your copywriting aligned with customer needs or is it more ‘You’ focused as a business?
Copy can almost always be refined to better communicate your unique value proposition to the customer.
We cannot stress the importance of good copywriting enough when it comes to marketing strategy! Without it, all the time and money associated with your marketing will prove ineffective in converting prospects to leads and leads to paying customers.
7. How are You Qualifying and Nurturing Leads?
How do you nurture leads?
Do you currently have any nurture campaigns?
In the customer buying process, also known as the buying decision process, the customer journeys through multiple stages before making the decision to purchase your product or service.
Customers online are interested in conducting thorough research, weighing their options and taking their time before making a purchase. This means that you have a unique opportunity to entice, connect, build trust, educate and promote the value of your business. Through constant communication with your audience and helpful email automation.
It is important to evaluate where your customers are in their decision making and understand the potential objections or setbacks to why a customer may not invest in your business – and address them honestly while providing value.
Lead nurturing is essential, and in many instances your own sales representatives need to take an active role to ensure that warm leads don’t go cold mid-funnel. It can actually take between 7 and 12 points of contact before getting a sale, so as a business you really want to deliver as much value as you can in advance so there is little to no doubt in a customer’s mind that you are the obvious choice.
An automated email path is a great way to nurture your leads, build a relationship and humanize your company and brand. If a customer is no longer engaging with and opening your emails after a couple of weeks, it is safe to say that they are no longer a ‘warm’ lead and can be removed from future email marketing.
Start Building an Effective Lead Generation Strategy NOW
Ready to attract more of your ideal customers?
We want to help you produce the maximum number of sales from your marketing strategy. Contact TrafficSoda to build a powerful lead generation strategy that fills your funnel with quality leads and helps your business scale.
Landing Page Optimization: How to Create a Landing Page that Converts
Driving traffic is only half the battle. Once people have landed on your website, it’s time to turn those curious web users into clients or customers. That’s where landing page optimization comes in.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is the first page people see after arriving to your site from a web ad, social media post, or search engine results page. But unlike your home page, which gives a general overview of your products or services, a landing page is tailor-made to motivate visitors into acting on a specific call to action, like:
- Signing up
- Making a purchase
- Downloading a software trial
- Filling out a form
- Sharing your content on social media
…And so on.
A landing page can serve one-time events, like weekly promotions, or “evergreen” offers designed to generate ongoing leads, like a newsletters or email lists.
In either case, the landing page is optimized to achieve a single conversion goal.
While the term ‘landing page’ may be new to you, chances are you’ve seen one before. For a visual reference, check out this landing page round-up by Hubspot — this will help you along as we cover the ins and outs of landing page optimization.
Why Create a Landing Page?
Landing pages are designed to respond to nudge curious visitors towards becoming paying clients or customers. The power of landing pages is their versatility: different landing pages can be crafted and optimized to cater to buyers at all different stages of the marketing funnel or buyer journey.
Take cold prospects who are only just learning of your business for the first time. Instead of pitching your products or services outright, you could optimize a landing page to encourage those prospects to sign up for your email newsletter; later, you can direct that person to another landing page designed to nurture warmer leads.
Beyond lead generation, landing pages can be used to gain tons of useful information about your prospective customers:
- By analyzing the performance of your landing pages, you can learn more about the types of offers most interest your customers.
- You can create separate landing pages for the same campaign and audience to A/B test different offers, images and copy.
- With a Facebook Pixel, you can retarget landing page visitors with highly relevant Facebook ad campaigns.
Landing pages are also a valuable part of the search engine optimization equation.
Relationship Between Landing Pages and SEO
Each landing page is another opportunity for your site to rank for relevant, desirable keywords. Although they may be somewhat separate from your main site, search engine crawlers will pore through landing pages the same as any other page on your site, and they have an impact on your search engine ranking.
The relationship between landing pages and SEO is another reason why it’s important to optimize your landing pages to convert; if visitors who land there are quickly closing the window or bouncing back to the search engine results page, it reflects poorly on your site as a whole.
So, how do you convince people to share, sign up, download, or buy?
Using Lead Magnets
One of the most tried-and-true landing page tactics is the lead magnet: a freebie offered to landing page visitors in exchange for their contact information. You can then utilize that contact information to build an effective, highly-targeted email marketing list.
In the words of digital marketing geek Russ Henneberry, lead magnets are designed to be an “irresistible bribe.” It’s something that makes prospective customers feel like they are getting the better end of the bargain.
What makes a lead magnet irresistible? The specifics will depend on your industry and your customers, but in most cases, successful lead magnets are:
- Highly relevant and specific, answering a specific customer need and tailored to a specific buyer persona.
- Polished, effective, and well worth giving up one’s contact information.
- Immediately useful or gratifying.
Popular items given away as lead magnets include eBooks, reports, case studies, templates, checklists, and coupons.
Landing Page Optimization: What Makes a Great Landing Page?
The purpose of landing page is to entice visitors to complete a specific conversion goal, like signing up for an email list. One of the best ways to do this is to offer something in exchange for that action. An effective landing pages are concisely and fine-tuned towards achieving that goal, with:
- Clear, action-based headline that tells visitors exactly what you want them to do.
- Subheadings that provide a bit more information to generate further interest.
- Eye-catching but minimal visual elements, like a single gorgeous photo or catchy graphic.
- Concise but keyword-rich copy that explains the lead magnet, answers potential questions and tears down any barriers that might stop customers from converting.
- Prominent, impossible-to-miss action button that completes the exchange between you and the customer.
Creating Landing Pages That Convert
There are a lot of ingredients that go into creating a landing page that works: copywriting, coding, graphic design, advertising, and more. But when it all comes together and leads start coming in, it is well worth the effort it took to plan and execute. Don’t leave landing pages as an afterthought — a well-designed and optimized landing page is an essential part of a winning digital marketing strategy.
Contact TrafficSoda to Help Optimize Your Landing Page!
Image: alfaphoto