Content marketing strategies demand multiple mediums and multiple outlets in order to be effective. Too many content marketers rely on a traditional, basic structure, writing blog post after blog post in the same format and syndicating them on social media. This strategy is effective, since it will gradually build your brand reputation, earn you more direct traffic, and improve your rankings in search engines, but for a full-fledged content marketing campaign, it should only serve as the foundation.
Adding a landing page, a dedicated page under your domain to house incoming traffic can be a viable strategy to improve your conversion rates and funnel your traffic. While it will take some extra work and maintenance to keep up, the return on investment (ROI) makes it all worth it.
Consider these seven reasons why landing pages can improve your campaign:
First and foremost, a landing page can improve your conversion rates. Rather than relying on customers eventually finding their way to your contact page (or anywhere else you seek to convert them), your users will be immediately confronted with the opportunity to convert.
There are several ways you can approach this. For example, you could set up a landing page as a kind of barrier to your content, presenting a link to a downloadable whitepaper in exchange for some information about the user. In this case, retrieving the whitepaper becomes your target conversion, and you can use your blogs and social channels to increase traffic and the likelihood of eventually converting.If you’re more interested in selling one of your products, you can set up a specific landing page for one. Use social media or other content-based channels to attract traffic, then use the landing page as their immediate destination.
Landing pages can also be used to funnel your traffic into more specific areas. This is particularly useful for companies with a wide range of products or services. For example, if you sell bikes and rollerblades, you can segment your traffic appropriately through separate landing pages. Rather than sending all of your traffic to your main site, or individual product pages, you can easily split your users into appropriate categories.
Let’s say you blog about bikes and rollerblades individually. People interested in buying rollerblades will respond more to posts about rollerblades, and the same is true for bikes. When you’re communicating with a large pool of followers, however, it’s difficult to distinguish which followers are interested in which. Rather than resorting to general messaging, drawing users into different landing pages will allow you to speak more specifically to each portion of your audience, and give you the chance to collect and store their information for future use.
Sometimes, it’s difficult to show off the best characteristics of your brand while working in the confines of a blog post or social media schedule. Content marketing is designed to show off your expertise passively, giving users a valuable experience while hoping they associate that experience with your brand. Calling out your brand specifically or openly bragging can actually turn people away from your content strategy.
Using landing pages gives you more freedom to show off what makes your brand great. You’ll be able to create a design that obviously shows off your brand elements, and you’ll have the space to show off your brand’s greatness with testimonials or other statistics. By using your content to funnel users into a specific landing page, you’ll get the opportunity to get your brand squarely in your users’ faces without alienating them in the process.
Content marketing programs sometimes suffer from a lack of direction. Instead of focusing in on a specific user goal, they’re designed to communicate generally with an audience, and gradually build a reputation. That might be useful for generating lots of traffic to your site, but if that traffic never converts or doesn’t know where to go, that traffic is essentially useless.
Landing pages provide a quick fix for that problem. Instead of worrying about where your users are going after they read your material, or crossing your fingers and hoping for the best, you can use your landing page to ensure your traffic gets to a worthwhile destination.
Some content marketers grow frustrated because of how difficult it is to measure the success of a campaign. Since one of the primary goals of content marketing is to increase brand familiarity and brand loyalty, two very subjective qualities, it can be hard to put a dollar amount on your content marketing results.
Landing pages make the process much more objective. By using sales metrics, you can easily determine how much value each conversion brings you, and by using goal metrics (which you can set up in Google Analytics), you can easily determine the number of conversions your content is bringing in. With those two metrics, you should be able to accurately project an objective estimate of how much value your content marketing strategy is bringing.
Landing pages are also great because they allow you to perform A/B tests. If you have two competing products and you aren’t sure which one to spend more time promoting, you can set up two individual landing pages under the same conditions and see which one generates the greatest number of conversions.
Alternatively, if you’re toying around with your branding and advertising strategy, you can easily use an “A” version and a “B” version of your landing page to gain valuable insights on your design and copy. You can then take this information and use it in your broader marketing and advertising campaign.
Like A/B testing, user behavior testing is to determine the most valuable parts of your landing pages. For example, by using heat maps, you can track exactly where your users are looking and interacting with your landing page. If they tend to congregate around the testimonials and you’re enjoying a high conversion rate, you better start using those testimonials on other applications. If your users focus on a bulleted list of product benefits and your conversion rate is low, you know you need to spend time refining how you market your product. Setting up a landing page with some kind of user behavior tracking is key to gaining insights about your audience.
Unfortunately, just setting up a landing page isn’t enough. You also need to pay close attention to the design, placement, and written copy of your landing page to maximize your chances of conversion. Landing pages demand a different set of standards than traditional web pages, so prioritize the following qualities:
If you can design a landing page with these qualities and integrate it smoothly into your content marketing campaign, you’ll start seeing the benefits as soon as it goes live.
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