"I'm a Post-Click Marketing Professional."

Everyone knows the the standard “meet and greet” conversation format. This can happen virtually anywhere, but the usual locations are at a bar, party, or some other form of  social gathering. The conversation generally is a variation of your given birth name, where you live now, with a quick reference of  “But I’m originally from…,” and then the age old question, “What do you do?”

This is the defining moment of the conversation, the portion that you must answer with complete confidence and a subdued brilliance. In this split second your conversation partner will size you up, and formulate an everlasting opinion.

Some people have it easy, a “no explanation needed” position, for example a doctor would answer, “I’m a doctor.” Pretty self-explanatory, and a lawyer would simply state, “Well, I am a lawyer.” Again, not much further explanation needed. Those answers may make you stand up a little straighter, but other than that, the conversation may continue with some back and forth banter for a few more minutes.

I have been searching for the perfect answer to this question, “What do you do?” I do a lot of things! How do you sum up days, months, and years of work into a one or two word response? Recently, I have been testing out “Well, I am a Post-Click Marketing Professional.” Once you have presented this as your answer, my studies show that the conversation will always continue.

Unless you are at the bar outside of the Conversion Conference, you are surely to get a response along the lines of, “Excuse me?” or “Come again?” This allows the conversation to continue, and you are automatically pinned as, “the most interesting person in the room.”

At this point of the conversation you need to decide where to start educating your partner on Post-Click Conversions. I find the best common ground is to begin with landing pages. The best thing to do is define a landing page, and explain to them upfront that it is not building a website for Jim’s Taco Shack down the street.

I recommend beginning with, “Well, a landing page is a web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.” Then continue to explain that, “landing pages are often linked to from social media, email campaigns, or search engine marketing campaigns, in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements.”

As your partner continues to listen, be sure to explain that, “the general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales leads. By analyzing activity generated by the linked URL, marketers can use click-through rates and conversion rate to determine the success of an advertisement.”

Give your partner a minute to digest this information, they will proceed to take an overextended sip of their desired beverage and continually shake their head in the “yes I understand” direction. I find that this gesture is a great segway to pronounce that, “we have the ability to increase your ROI, and in turn make you money!” 

The attention-grabber! Your partner will forever associate you as the go-to person for post-click conversions. You have now fully secured the title of “most interesting person at the event,” and everyone will soon want to know what a Post-Click Marketing Professional does.  

How to Turn Display Ad Clicks into Conversions

I recently came across an article from AdAge that suggests that marketers should move away from holding banner ads accountable for conversions and instead focus on branding metrics.  The basis for this comes from a study that found clicks aren’t an important metric for measuring the success of a banner ad.   The study was run on campaigns from 18 advertisers, and found almost no correlation between a click on a banner ad and a conversion.

I, respectfully, disagree. Display ads can drive conversions and the correlation between a click on an ad and a conversion can be greatly increased with message matched, ad-specific landing pages.

The problem that hurts the conversion rate of too many display ads is that they lead to generic, message mismatched landing pages. A click means that your ad worked; it got someone’s full attention. A ‘hover’ over your ad is good, but a click is a chance for you to take the clicker’s active interest and turn it into a conversion. What happens after that inital click on an ad – the landing page experience where those interested clickers are sent — is what makes the difference between a great conversion rate and the conclusion that display ads just aren’t conversion-accountable. A successful, conversion-accountable display ad strategy requires ad-specific landing pages that are tightly aligned with the ad message and imagery.

Still skeptical? Let me share with you one of our display ad campaigns. 

A couple of months ago we launched a banner campaign on eMarketer’s website. eMarketer’s content attracts the type of marketers that are within our target audience so we were excited to test out this traffic source.  

Each display ad offers a single content piece tailored to appeal to eMarketer’s visitors, like this:

And then each ad leads to a landing page with messaging and imagery that directly aligns with the ad, while also featuring a strong, value-enforcing call-to-action. 

Since launching this campaign in December, we’ve tested 6 pieces of content, 18 different banner ad variations, and 11 landing pages. We’re testing everything from the ad call-to-actions, landing page layouts and the actual content offerings (6 total) to which ad sizes and ad locations (on the eMarketer page) perform best. 

From December 1st though April 30th, our overall campaign conversion rate is 47.2%. We’re converting nearly half of our banner ad clicks.

LiveBall’s respondent funnel reporting gauge run at the campaign level

The conversion rate is awesome, but what’s even better is that these conversions are quality leads. Leads that have created serious opportunities for our sales team, and leads that have our sales team loving display ads too.

Don’t hate on display ads! With the right strategy and message matched landing pages, they can get serious, accountable results. 

4 Ways to Increase Conversions

You only have a few seconds to convince your visitor to stay on your landing page. These seconds are critical and your landing page needs to do everything it can to make a great first impression. If you are looking to increase your lead generation efforts through conversion optimization techniques, check your pages for these must-have elements that make a great first impression.

4 Ways to Get More Conversions

1. A strong call-to-action

If you don’t ask for it, you probably won’t get it. When your landing page visitors get to your page they want to first know that they are in the right place, and then they want to know what to do next. Conversion optimization efforts start with a strong call-to-action. Don’t just tell visitors what to do, remind them of what they are going to gain by taking your conversion action. 

2. Simple is better

While you definitely want to impress your landing page visitors, you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much information. You don’t need to discuss every award you’ve ever won, nor do your landing page visitors need to know every last detail about your business. Your landing page visitors just want to learn more about the offer in the ad that initially caught their attention. Limit the content on your landing page to only that which will help a visitor decide to take the next step and convert. Being able to edit your landing page down to only the most powerful, convincing elements is one thing that separates the best landing page programs from the rest. One big caveat: simple doesn’t mean boring or plain!

When you design your landing pages, be sure to keep it simple and look at these key areas:

• Landing page design – Keep it easily accessible and interesting so that it peaks interest.
• Keep the message consistent – Keep your brand messaging on target and don’t confuse your visitors.

2. Be trustworthy 

Let’s face it: people and even businesses buy more from those they trust. Visitors are not going to fill out a form and give you their personal information if they don’t trust your brand. To quickly improve your conversion optimization efforts, try building in some trust elements into your landing pages. Some examples of this, include: 

• Testimonials – Have some of your clients write a short testimonial. Even better, make videos of customer testimonials!
• Privacy statements - Adding a clear privacy statement to your lead generation forms goes along way to ensure visitors that their information will be kept safe.
• Social signals – Incorporating social widgets can help show that your brand is real and reachable.

3. Tie your offer to your unique selling proposition 

It’s marketing 101 to know why you stand apart from your competition; make sure your landing page visitors know it too. To add more value and reasoning to why a visitor should choose you, tie your offering to your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Instead of creating another free report or software demo that says the same thing as your competitors; make it unique and tie in what makes your product or company unique too.

4. A good strategy to increase conversions

A good conversion optimization strategy has a set focus: to convert as many visitors into leads. The first step in increasing conversions is making it easier for your visitors to convert. Each of the four tips we discussed are focused on providing visitors with the information and confidence they need to convert quickly, without distractions or hesitations. Next time you are thinking of testing ideas or designing a new landing page, try thinking first about what page elements could help your visitors convert quickly. 

To see how you can reduce the time it takes to improve your techniques, contact the conversion optimization experts about a demo of LiveBall. 

Which landing page doubled conversion rates for TEKsystems?

This Tuesday, we are featuring a tremendous success story from TEKsystems, a staffing company dedicated to placing IT candidates. This A/B + MVT test plan was strategized by the Anvil Media team and conducted in the LiveBall platform. 

 Can you guess which landing page doubled conversion rates?

 

Results: Did you guess version A? If so, congrats! Version A doubled conversion rates, and in doing so, decreased the cost-per-conversion by more than 50%! By focusing on ongoing A/B & MVT testing, TEKsystems ended up saving over $100,000 in media spend over the course of a year.

The process:

Initially, Anvil ran A/B tests on the overall landing page layout, design and navigation. Once a layout winner was found, additional multivariate experiments allowed Anvil to quickly test and deploy new copy and a winning call-to-action.

Use of dynamic content substitution in LiveBall template

Additionally, Anvil passed geolocation details in page headlines to create more targeted experiences. For instance, a visitor to the landing page from Florida is given a localized headline —“See IT Job Openings in Florida.” Instead of having to create separate landing pages for each state or region, Anvil created one page and took advantage of LiveBall’s dynamic content substitution capabilities. Advanced rules (conditional logic that can be applied either at the page level or to any clickable action) were used to automatically swap out content in the headline depending on a visitor’s geolocation.

Similarly, Anvil also tested dynamic search terms, which included keywords like “big data jobs” within the landing page copy.

Interested in hearing the full story? Read More.

How do you know if you need landing page management software?

There are many ways to make landing pages.  You can hand code static pages yourself, outsource the work to contractors or an agency, or you can even use certain tools like a website CMS, blogging platforms or modules of a marketing automation system to make pages.  So, how do you know when it’s time for a landing page management platform? 

It will feel like you’ve hit a wall.  It will seem as if there is just never enough time or resources to launch a new campaign, start testing, or even to just implement a content change.  Each of the methods mentioned above will certainly help you make pages, but they aren’t designed to help you manage, grow and optimize a large, sophisticated landing page program.

Here are a couple red flags signaling that it’s time to change the way you manage your landing page program:

1. Your pages are disorganized

Do your landing pages ‘live’ in different areas?  Perhaps some are in your website CMS, others are handled by an agency, and then more still are handled by a different regional team? When your content isn’t centralized and organized it’s almost impossible to scale your efforts, because you’ll constantly find yourself recreating the wheel. Landing page management platforms centralize and organize all of the content that goes into creating landing pages so that you can, for example, make a lead generation form once and then reuse it on several different pages.

2. Your analytics are opaque

Can you easily and confidently compare how well campaigns did compared to each other?  Opaque analytics go hand-in-hand with disorganized pages.  If you don’t have one central location for where your pages are stored then trying to analyze and compare metrics across campaigns is going to be very difficult. If your landing page and test analytics are managed seperately or by someone who isn’t part of the team guiding your online marketing strategy, then that’s also a sign that you should consider landing page management software. If your decision makers don’t have complete, easy access to real-time data, how will they be able to act in time to take advantage of what your tests and analytics are telling you?  

3. Your branding is inconsistent

Are your latest branding guidelines accurately reflected on every landing page or do some show old messaging or use an outdated look? If it’s difficult to update all of your pages with new branding guidelines or if you’re not even sure whether they are all up to date, then it’s time to change the way you manage your program.  By centralizing all of your content within one platform, a landing page management software will make it easier to implement mass changes and to enforce brand standards.

4. Changes are inefficient

Does a relatively simple content update take days to implement or does testing just seem like it would be impossible? If your current landing page creation process involves a lot of hand-off points from, for example, someone on your marketing staff to a writer then an agency or developer (or something along these lines), then your answer is probably yes. Since landing page management platforms eliminate the need for code or help from developers, you can let marketing take direct control of the strategy, implementation and management of your landing page program.  When it takes fewer resources and less time to both launch and test landing pages, all of the sudden the idea of launching a new campaign or localizing pages doesn’t seem the least bit daunting.

5. Testing is rare

When all of your resources are tied up into getting pages live, there’s often very little time left to start testing.  If you’re only running a few tests or not any running tests at all, then this is a major sign that it’s time to consider landing page management software.  Most platforms, like LiveBall, will help you create, launch and track several – if not hundreds– of A/B and multivariate tests without code or help from developers.  If you’re not testing, you’ll have no way of knowing if your landing pages could be doing better and if you could be getting higher conversion rates or improving your CPL.

If any of these scenarios sound too familiar, then check out our free 10 Point Landing Page Management Buying Guide.  Although we obviously hope that you choose LiveBall, this guide is completely objective – it will just walk your team through the key points you should consider before starting your search.