Your Landing Page is Part of the Message - Now Start Acting Like It

- Let's talk landing pages.
- Okay, but first, why have you no face?

The conversation may go something like this:

Marketing Manager: "I want a paid search advertising campaign to drive pogo stick sales in 2012. What can you do for me?"


Marketer: "Great! I'd love to help out with a custom paid search advertising program. First thing's first, what are your website's objectives? How do you measure success? Most importantly, where do you want paid search traffic to go when they click on an ad?"


Marketing Manager: "Our objectives are sales. I don't really know how we measure that, but I like it when my sales charts swing upwards. Where do we send the clicks? I don't know - can't we just send them to the website?"


Marketer: "...you mean the page with no calls to action, no clear button to purchase, no brand connection, and muddled messaging...?"


Marketing Manager: "Absolutely! It shouldn't matter, your paid search ads should drive sales no matter what the landing page is. Plus we just built a new website, so we don't need to do anything else and we don't have any more money."

And...scene.

The above conversation is a dramatized version of an issue that seems to come up again and again when it comes to inbound marketing.

Um, somebody ate half of the online marketing pie.

Too many companies launch online marketing campaigns without understanding that the launch of their digital campaign is only half the battle. 

The other 50%? Well, that's the landing page, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

Here's the issue: when a marketing manager gets his/her budget and tries to divvy it up amongst the most effective marketing mix based on the target audience, products, and campaign objectives, the landing page often becomes an afterthought. After all, the company already has a big website that they spent millions of dollars on and it's not really part of advertising and whose budget does the website fall under anyways?

Landing Page Nazi means business

And just like that, no online marketing landing page for you!

What marketers often fail to realize is the intimate relationship between online marketing success and the landing page. Let's put it this way: If they both went on match.com, they would find each other and fall in love instantly, immediately improving each others' lives (how's that for a terrible analogy?)

Why are landing pages so important?

1. They continue the "user scent". Landing pages, especially from paid search, are important factors in helping users determine, usually pretty quickly, whether or not they've come to the right place. If your landing page doesn't convey that message, the user may very well decide to leave before converting, even if your product is exactly what they are looking for.
2. They carry the brand message. Oftentimes a big company website loses or dilutes the brand, simply because of its "big-ness", dynamic content, depth of content, too many hands in the cookie jar, and so forth.
3. They can be succinct. The landing page doesn't have to do the heavy lifting that a website might have to do with cross navigation and reams of content. All the landing page has to do is give your audience what they are looking for. That's it. Because of this fact, landing pages can be simple and clear.
4. Landing pages can be easily tested. It is much easier to create a new page outside of the giant corporate website and test its effectiveness than to try and shoehorn your testing into an existing CMS or content that already exists. 

With all of that in mind, the main reason why a landing page is important is that it helps drive a higher conversion rate - and that's the whole point of online marketing, right?

As always, there are exceptions to the landing page rule. Amazon, for example, doesn't need unique landing pages because they should be sending searchers directly into the product pages (plus, they've done plenty of testing to ensure highest conversion from visits on those pages).

In most cases, however, if you are considering online marketing you must consider the landing page as an important piece of the strategy from the very beginning; not an afterthought, not something to be pushed aside, and certainly not something that is "already done" because of an existing website.

Ask these question first: "Where are we sending clicks? What is the strategy to optimize conversions once they get there?"

Ask these questions first and provide the resources to ensure that the landing page is part of the strategic planning, and you're finally marketing online, baby!