"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.  

5 Ways to Improve Online Lead Generation

Many B2B marketers live by single a measurement: the number of quality leads generated for the sales team. This is why it’s crucial for B2B marketers to make sure landing pages are optimized for maximum online lead generation potential.

To get more sizzle in your efforts, consider these five options for converting more landing page visitors into leads:

Five Ways to Improve Online Lead Generation

1. Forms come first

When it comes to improving online lead generation, start with your forms. Finding a balance between the information you need to get from your visitors and how much information they’ll be ready to trust you with at this point is the key. Don’t ask for too much information from your visitor — only what you truly need to know at first in order for them to move into the next step of your online experience or lead nurturing program. Ask your team whether each additional field is worth a lower conversion rate. Save the rest of your questions for later on when you can take advantage of progressive profiling to gradually learn more and more about your leads.   

2. Pre-qualify with segmentation

Segmentation is a way to provide your visitors with a more targeted landing page experience while also learning more about them. In order for segmentation to work, visitors have to get the sense that by selecting one of your segmentation choices they are going to get something more specific to them and therefore more valuable. Well-designed segmentation options not only provide your visitors with a better experience, but they get your visitors into qualitative groups that are strategically better or worse for your organization.

3. Use a strong, exciting pitch

Too many B2B marketing pages have stiff and unexciting messaging. This not only kills your conversion rate, it can turn off your visitors from coming back. Instead, try some more creative and exciting ways to convey your marketing messages. Make your visitors excited about you and what you can do for them!  Business buyers are human and to increase your online lead generation efforts, appeal to their emotions by making a connection and sparking their interest. 

4. Think beyond the landing page

Get of the landing page rut and expand your definition of what a conversion-oriented experience can be. Not all conversion-oriented experiences need to be a simple, single landing page. Try using segmentation paths, conversion paths and even microsites too! Think about which experience helps to best meet the needs of your visitors, because that will ultimately help you the most with your online lead generation.  For instance, if your visitors are facing a big decision then perhaps a microsite is needed in order to offer all of the content they will need. Whereas, if visitors just want to get a white paper then a simple, single landing page with a form is probably preferrable. Test your assumptions about what type of experience makes the most sense — it’s the only way to know what your visitors really want.

5. Test and test again

The only way to know if a new landing page layout or idea will result in more leads is through testing. Test everything from your content, to adding interactive content like image rotators to incorporating social widgets. By continually testing, you will learn what works to bring in more leads and boost your online lead generation efforts.

To learn more ways to boost your online lead generation results, check out our webinar Advanced Landing Page Strategies for Lead Generation.

Dell's Award-Winning A/B Form Test

This Tuesday, we are featuring Dell’s A/B lead generation form test, which was awarded a Gold ribbon in Which Test Won’s 2012 Online Testing Awards. 

It is important to mention that this is the second half of a two-part test conducted by Dell in LiveBall. The first A/B test (not shown) determined that a 2-step form outperformed a single, longer form.

The second part of the test focused on optimizing the 2-step form with step indicators — numbers (and words) above the form that help set expectations for time involvement and commitment.

Do you think step indicators improved lead conversion rates?

 

If you said “yes,” you are correct! 

Adding step indicators to Dell’s 2-step form improved lead conversions by 8%. 

This test may seem like a no-brainer, and honestly, it is — very little resource investment is needed to create two form images to help drive conversions.

But, the smartest part is hidden in the form…

Dell asks an easy entry question “how can we help you?” followed by a required email address. Even if the user drops off on the second form, Dell has still captured email address for nurture and remarketing. Smart!

Have you tested step indicators or progress bars on your multi-step forms? We’d love to hear your about your findings!

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. 

8 High-Converting Landing Page Designs

Stuck in a landing page design rut? Need some inspiration for a new A/B test? Here are 8 landing page design examples to help ignite your conversion-focused creativity.

1. Capture as many leads as possible with a strong benefit and short form, like MarketingProfs did on this landing page.

2. Seduce your clicks into leads by including a very strong benefit with a simple design, such as the one we included here. (Who doesn’t want to graduate faster?)

3. Is your audience creative and passionate? Engage them with a sexy design, such as the one we developed for eMusic. 

 

4. This page we designed for Anthem Blue Cross features a multi-step form and social proof. Multi-step forms are an excellent way to increase engagement and conversions.

5. Want to segment your audience and learn more about them? Try a conversion path like this one we created for Citrix Systems.

 

6. Are you driving mobile traffic? Capture as many mobile clicks as possible with a simple, mobile-optimized layout, such as this one we developed for Intuit GoPayment.

 

7. Want to pitch each of your segments the unique benefits of your offering? Segment them like we did on this multi-step conversion path for the New England Journalism of Medicine.

The first step: 

The second step:

8. Get conversions on the spot by engaging visitors with video.

Let us know if any of these high-converting page have inspired you change your landing page design!