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Online Marketing: Choosing Landing Pages Effectively
by Matthew Capala
Published on EMarketingInaBox.com, EZineArticles.com and GoArticles.com (Jan. 2008)
The key to choose your landing pages effectively is to understand the ‘consumer buying cycle’ on the
Web, and then make intelligent decisions about how to interact with your Web site visitors – that is,
decide which pages on your Web site you choose to send your prospects to after their click on your
online ads in order to convert them into buyers or make them perform a specific action. Note that it
doesn’t have to be your home page…actually often it shouldn’t be your home page.
Way too often, I have seen online businesses spending significant time and money driving people to
their sites, but spending next to no time thinking about which pages are most effective to send their
customers to. Also, many e-marketers do not take the time to modify and test their landing pages in
order to make sure that they are using the right words, offers, images, and page structures that most
effectively turn visitors into cash.
This is one of the most important aspects of effective marketing online – and sadly, it is most often
overlooked. If you don’t seriously look into your landing page optimization before you start spending
online marketing dollars, you are missing out on huge opportunities. Slight modifications in your pages
might prove to increase your conversion rate by huge amounts.
Keep in mind that it is not often effective to send a person to your site’s homepage unless that is where
you initiate the action that you want them to perform. The most desired action might be for them to
make a purchase, sign up for an email newsletter or any other actionable and measurable objective of
your Internet marketing campaign. Therefore, make sure you are not sending them to your homepage
when another page in your site is more appropriate to be the landing page.
When choosing your landing pages effectively you ought to classify your prospects based on different
stages of the ‘consumer buying cycle’ they are in. There are essentially six stages: awareness, interest,
consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. As a web marketer, you need to group all the pages
on your website that add value and classify them based on how they correspond to each stage in the
buying cycle; then, sort them by conversion ability and assign them to targeted keywords.
To illustrate, if a prospect is building her/his awareness about a product, she/he is not ready to buy from
you. So you as a marketer should send this prospect to a Web page on your site where you provide
information that she/he is looking for. Conversely, if your prospect is at the purchase stage, you need to
send her/him right to the shopping cart page.
For example, if you sell digital cameras on the Web and you buy search media traffic, such as
keywords on search engines, and a searcher typed ‘digital camera’ into a search box you want this
prospect to ‘land’ on the area of your site where you provide digital camera reviews and related articles.
Simply, this searcher is not ready to buy from you at this time. You need to build a relationship first,
position yourself as an expert, offer free advice and links to e-commerce areas on your Web site related
to the cameras you are recommending. Only then you have a shot at converting this prospect into a
buyer. Likewise, if a searcher typed “sony camera model 123,” you should use an ecommerce area on
your site as a landing page where you sell that particular model. The latter has already made up her/his
mind about what type of digital camera to buy and is looking for a good price and quick / easy check-out.
It might be helpful to think of your online marketing campaigns in two parts. First, you are
pitching to your prospects with the actual marketing activities, reaching out to people in order to pull
them into your site. But once you get them there, you need to capture and captivate them to do
business with you or else they’ll slip through your fingers and end up on somebody else’s site, doing
business with them.
So, landing page optimization is the practice of preparing your site to receive and convert your
prospects most effectively. If you have a large online marketing budget you may invest in landing page
optimization software. Such tools perform a variety of essential activities ranging from helping you design
an effective landing page; writing powerful copy; creating effective thank-you pages; testing appropriately;
and modifying your landing pages based on the feedback from your testing. But for starters common
sense and understanding of “consumer buying cycle” should make a huge difference and boost your
conversion rates incrementally.
Matthew Capala
Matthew Capala is the Co-Founder and Editor of EMarketingInaBox.com. You may contact Matthew at
Matthew@EMarketingInaBox.com
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