How Landing Pages Can Uplift Your Online Presence
Online marketing is a business owner’s best friend. When you take your business online, you want to be sure that you have a powerful online marketing strategy that captures your branding message perfectly and integrates several techniques for promoting that message. Today we will look closely into one of the most effective online marketing techniques – landing pages.
Small business owners sometimes assume that after they create a website, landing pages are no longer relevant to their online marketing efforts. This perception is based on a false understanding of what landing pages are. Don’t think of landing pages as another site that promotes your business, but rather as a piece of online “real estate” that can push more traffic into your site, create more leads for sales and refine your branding.
Let’s delve a little deeper into how landing pages work and how they can empower your online presence.
Introduction to landing pages
It’s important to understand the main difference between a full website and a landing page: landing pages are built to promote a defined goal. While your business site can simultaneously perform several tasks, like provide background information, allow direct purchase of products or give visitors an option to communicate with you, landing pages focus on a single aspect and encourage visitors to take a specific action.
When you build a landing page, you need to have a clear goal in mind. Are you interested in gathering contact information for leads? Are you offering a unique sale? Are you collecting RSVPs for an event? Focusing on this aim will help you create a more effective landing page.
In technical terms, it’s useful to distinguish between two types of landing pages:
The bridge page: Used to grab your visitors’ attention, promote a specific piece of content and then lead them further into your full website. The goal of this page is to get your clients (and potential clients) excited about a new cool product, a special deal, your recent blog post or other breaking news.
The form page: Used to collect information about your audience that you can later convert into leads. This page typically includes a form where visitors can add their contact information, allowing you to follow-up over email and strengthen your relationship with them. You can offer visitors some benefit in exchange for providing their contact info, like a coupon code or exclusive content via newsletter.
Best practices for creating a landing page
Moving on to the meat and potatoes, let’s discuss how you actually make a landing page. Here are a few points to keep in mind:
A landing page is exactly that – one single page. No need for a navigation menu because your visitors won’t have anywhere to navigate to.
To achieve the one goal that you set out for the page, your landing page needs to stay simple and focused. Write texts that are clear, brief and precise. Don’t distract visitors with unrelated information. What they see is what they get.
Three words: Call to Action. This is the button or link that prompts visitors to complete the task that your landing page is prepping them for. The entire page should be designed to make the Call to Action stand out so that visitors perform the action with ease. These tips will help you create a Call to Action that works.
First impressions are key when it comes to landing pages. You need to grab your visitors’ attention immediately with a stunning look, beautiful visuals and a vibrant design. The landing page has a function, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.
Make sure your landing page looks great on mobile devices. A good portion of your traffic will come from mobile browsing, and mobile visitors are not going to stick around if the page looks clunky on their screen.
How to pump Traffic into Your Landing Page
Now for the fun part – getting visitors to your landing page, so that they can fall in love with your brand, your organization or your service. There are four important avenues for bringing in traffic that we recommend you explore.
Social Media
As the leading channel for unmitigated communications with your target audience, social media is the first place to start promoting your landing pages. Whether it’s on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest or any other social network that you find valuable for your online presence, posting the link to your landing page – accompanied by a killer image and a knockout text, of course – will bring in quality organic traffic that is already positively inclined towards your brand.
The advantages of social media for this type of online promotion are many. To start with, social media posts that aren’t paid for (we’ll get to that type later) register as genuine content. Even though your post will be “marketing” something, it does not work like an advertisement but rather as an eye-level engagement.
An additional advantage lies in the very format of social media. Once your followers encounter your content, they can like, retweet, comment and interact with your post in various ways. This, of course, increases your landing page’s reach to new circles and get a foothold with potential followers who may be unfamiliar with your work.
Another great strength of social media is that it allows you to tap into a conversation or an interest niche, which helps you fine-tune who you are promoting your landing page to. There are many ways to refine your content’s targeting on social networks: you can add hashtags, post in public or private groups or join existing discussion threads. Just make sure that you respect the rules of the conversation. Appearing too pushy or spammy isn’t helping you at all.
Email Marketing
Reaching out to your audience directly through their email inbox remains one of the most effective methods for attracting site traffic. Once your landing page is ready to go online, it’s time you start working on the superb email campaign that you will send out to your contact list.
If you nail the the subject line, the visuals, the layout and the copywriting, your landing page will get a noticeable boost of incoming visits. Not sure where to start? We suggest you check out these 10 tips for mastering email marketing.
Blogging
Want people to know about your awesome brand or your fantastic projects? Blog about it! And while you’re at it, add a link to your landing page, where they can learn more, strengthen their connection with you and hopefully become fans for life. A powerful blog post can create the perfect conditions for increased clicks and conversions.
Written content serves as a great source of traffic when it is descriptive, informative and persuasive. Your blog posts will only generate visits if they really provide an added value to readers, and if they successfully link that added value with clicking to move onwards, to the landing page.
Blogging to promote your landing page can take place in two arenas. You can set up your own blog on your website and use it to share news, tips, reflections, as well as special deals and sales. That’s not the only reasons for adding a blog to your website. Improving your site’s ranking with search engines is just one additional benefit you get from running a blog, so it’s definitely worthwhile to consider. It’s a one stone, several birds type of thing :)
If writing comes natural to you, try expanding your reach with guest-blogging on other popular sites that are related to your industry or field. Start by researching blogs that you enjoy reading and that have a good following. Then contact the editors and offer to contribute a guest blog. Try to suggest a number of topics that you feel confident writing about, and that you know can tie up nicely with the landing page that you wish to promote. It’s not a bad idea to offer them the opportunity to promote their content on your site in exchange.
Cross-Platform Advertising
The methods we listed so far all proposed free ways to gain traffic. If you manage to bring in a growing stream of visitors using these free methods only, congratulations – you’re a marketing rockstar :) If you see your traffic stats staggering and think you could use a boost, it’s time to consider paid advertisements.
Small business owners, freelancers, individual service providers and anyone who doesn’t have access to a hefty marketing budget often shy away from paid ads. Many don’t realize that they can set up a small online advertising budget, stick to their financial limits and still see good results. As our blog article on PPC ads for beginners shows, even a modest ad campaign has lots of potential.
Before you start running your campaign, get to know the various types of ads available and plan your spending strategy. These three are most commonly used by small businesses:
Search results ads: Based on keywords that you define, search engines like Google match your ads with specific terms that people search for.
Social ads: Social networks like Facebook promote your social posts to people who match the profile of your target audience.
Ad placements: Advertising tools place your ads or banners on websites that are relevant to your target audience.
Based on your campaign goals, you may choose to diversify your advertising efforts or to focus on just one of these platforms. Whichever you decide on, be sure to keep your finger on the pulse of the campaign by analyzing stats frequently. You need to note which ads are performing well and which could use some tweaking.
