Landing Pages – Your Online Sales Agent

A great advantage of the online marketing medium is its ability to act as a persuasive sales agent. Web-visitors clicking on online pay per click advertisements (such as Google Adwords) or specific search engine results are often taken to a specially designed web page with a sales pitch and call to action linked to the original web content (PPC advertisement/search engine result) called landing pages. For example if the PPC advertisement is a tourism advertisement

 

On the Australian Open Championship, the landing page linked to it could talk about the various ticket options, their payment modes and any promotional offer linked to the ticket purchase. Landing pages maybe part of a website or even a separate webpage hosted on web solutions partner website. A landing page also helps marketers analyse consumer behaviour by studying web-visitor actions on the landing page. Thus a well designed landing page boosts conversion rates of marketing initiatives and its marketing analytics helps devise more predictive/adaptive marketing strategies. A well designed landing page is today an important marketing strategy for both B2C and B2B marketers. As it leverages the power of simplified 24X7 accessibility of the web medium, a landing page is a useful ‘anytime-anywhere’ sales agent that can be programmed to serve multilingual webpages based on the IP address of the web visitor. It’s like having sales office around the world without spending a penny on office or retail space. 

 

The advantage of landing pages
As competition increases, every aspect of marketing and branding has to deliver dollars and not just a ‘positioning statement’ for a future benefit. A landing page is a proven web-marketing innovation that increases returns while automating marketing initiative (a great ‘marketing-self-service’). Sustained sales returns through increased sales conversions of the web visitors on a landing page offset all the incremental costs of landing page creation. While a website maybe a purely branding tool, a well planned landing page strategy embedded into the website linked to an online /offline marketing campaign brings in dollars by successfully persuading web visitors to buy in to the advertised sales proposition. If the landing page is built according to well researched SEO principles and evolving customer behaviour, it may also attract more web visitors through word of mouth / viral marketing efforts as people tend to share the webpage URL with their friends (you could also provide a facility of e-mailing the webpage link to referrals).

Landing page Optimisation
This is the process of enhancing a web-visitor's perception of a particular webpage/landing page by optimising its content, layout and overall appearance. This can be achieved through a series of well researched activities in order to make them more appealing to the identified target audiences, as per the agreed target goals such as conversion rates. Some of the proven landing page optimisation measures are:

1.Passive content targeting- this measure is a rules based targeting wherein the content is modified as per the keywords that are popular with the changing needs of web visitors. The content cues come from such search criteria as geography, search word source (affiliates), consumer need segmentation etc.

2.Active content targeting – this tactic involves changing the content proactively according to the changing consumer needs/perceptions e.g. competitive offers on other sites/landing pages, evolving purchasing behaviour because of certain buying patterns/seasonality e.g. certain types of clothes appeal in specific seasons of the year. Thus the change in content could also be according to anticipated consumer behaviour patterns (freebies on offer as part of off season sale).

3. Social content targeting – in this methodology, you change the content according to such publicly available content tags like cultural orientation/sensitivity, legal compulsions, customer ratings and web page critique etc.
A well planned mix of the above three measures is the best way forward in making the landing page optimisation work for you. A successful landing page is a live marketing tool, hence it requires passive content to ensure its popularity right from the start, while active content targeting ensures that it is able to sustain the reader interest and finally social content targeting ensures the viability of the overall effort.

Very few Australian companies have made the step towards investing in landing pages to improve online sales lead conversion. ROI.com.au recommends that your business makes the investment, plus commits resources to the ongoing market testing of different landing page configurations to maximise your online marketing efforts. An average online sales lead conversion rate is between 2-3%, 5% is good and 10% is an achievable goal that indicates your offer is performing well and your campaign is reaching the right target market.

The team at ROI.com.au are experts and landing page creation and online ROI analysis. So if you’re looking to improve the returns from your PPC advertisements its worth having a chat to our friendly team