With over ten years experience in digital marketing consulting, several books and volumes of lectures on the subject, I thought I should do the only civil thing with some of that digital marketing knowledge–write one big-ass blog post.
Digital marketing isn’t free. The biggest “cost” is the time that it takes to find all of the dead ends and a few of the throughways. I hope you find this post helpful, if for no other reason, than to avoid a few roadblocks.
I want to pull back and look at the digital building blocks to success. Of course, it is impossible to cover all aspects of digital marketing in a single post, but I wanted to share the basic elements of success with a few links to other resources.
Although I list 5 steps below, I believe there are really 3 critical steps to digital marketing success: Tell somebody, Make a promise, and Follow through. Applying those steps consistently will lead to massive success.
So, without further ado, here are the 5 steps. (I embedded a lecture that I recently made at the end of this post)
1. Drive Traffic to a Landing Page
Regardless whether you are trying to get more Facebook likes, sell your widgets, or grow your email list, you must drive traffic. I believe you have to start with the destination before you start with the means to get there. Done correctly, driving traffic to a landing page is a service to your visitors and delivers better results.
So what’s a Landing Page?
I’ll be glad to debate this with anyone, but I believe there are two basic blocks of digital marketing: landing pages and email.
Landing pages are “websites” in the traditional sense, they are different than other web pages on your site for three reasons:
- User visits this page as a destination from some other offer or Call to Action (“CTAâ€)
- Landing page will have a measurable action
- Landing page typically has limited navigation (sometimes called a “squeeze page”)
Pro tip: Landing pages aren’t exclusively on their own websites, creating a tab on a Facebook page is a landing page as well. Watch the video at the bottom of the post for an explanation of OfferPop and Rafflecopter.
A landing page should have the following elements:
- Header – Depending on how the visitor arrives at the landing page, they don’t know what to expect. It is critical to establish trust and credibility the moment they arrive on the page. Use the header section to include your logo. Some landing pages include the BBB logo or “seals†from other organizations in the header.
- Headline – This headline is your Unique Selling Proposition. Keep it short, strong and clear. The headline should also be related to the anchor text or offer from the referring source to keep the user from bouncing.
- Secondary Headline – The secondary headline compliments the primary headline and may specifically address the audience, the source, the offer or lead into the the benefit.
- Benefits – Your customers are not buying a product. They are on your landing page because something about your USP attracts them. When Steve Jobs said, “1,000 songs in your pocket,†he was not selling the features of the iPod–he was selling the benefits of access to a library of music, a person’s creative expression, in the smallest form factor. This portion of the landing page is also a great place to include multimedia elements of your offer. Prezi does a great job of using a short video to demonstrate the benefits of using their software to make powerful presentations.
- CTA – The Call to Action must present a solution to the customers need or pain point and offer them value (here, value is defined as the difference between the perceived cost of the action they are being asked to perform subtracted from the perceived benefit they will receive by performing the action). For example, consider a potential customer giving their contact information in return for free trial software versus being added to a mailing list. Obviously, if the potential customer is on the page looking for software, then a free trial will be more appealing. The CTA must present some urgency to the potential customer to act now. Once they leave your site there is a good chance that they will never return. Of course, “for a limited time†and “for the first 100 customers†harken to the days of high-pressure infomercials, but discover a compelling reason for the customer to act while they are on your page. See the section on the dreaded bounce rate.
- Testimonial – If your customers or clients have stories about your company then share them. Drawing potential customers into the story behind your company is a powerful conversion factor. Merely, throwing up contrived quotes like, “Love the product!†is thinly veiled marketing and your customers will see through it.
- Brag a Little – If you have some well known clients or customers, put their logos on your landing page. Here again, if this is the first interaction that this person has had with your organization, you need to build their trust. If you don’t have logos to use in this space, include some awards or certifications that your organization has earned. As a final option, share links to your social media networks; as noted, you should limit the number of outbound links on this page.
Pro tip: You don’t have to build a landing page from scratch, take a look at services like instapage, unbounce, and leadsquared. Also, here are some compelling landing pages.
Methods to drive Traffic to a Landing Page
- Paid: (Traditional media Google AdWords, Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn ads). Aaron Wall a respected authority on search engine marketing has a nice roundup of basic to intermediate explanation of Google Adwords and AdSense.
- Earned Traffic: (Facebook, Twitter, Word of Mouth) Check out Rand Fishkin’s take on earning traffic.
- Referred: (Built from base of loyalty)Â see step 5.
2. Compel the Visitor to Act
Don’t be the dog that caught the car. If you’ve spent the time and energy to get your visitor to the website, make sure they know exactly what you want them to do. While that sounds like it is all about you, it is actually all about them. You don’t want confused visitors clearly directed sites make it easy to say “yes” or “no.”
Give the visitor a reason to act – Typically you would want to compel one of the following actions on a landing page: Fill out a form, Buy now, Subscribe to a list, or Key Page View.
Here are a few ways to compel action on your site:
- Prominently display an email subscription form. Your customers get enough spam so be creative about what the value proposition is for them. “Subscribe to my Newsletter†likely will not generate a large number of subscribers, but “Get My Monthly Market Analysis†may provide a value proposition for people to subscribe.
- Include “premium content†on your website that is only available to registered members.
- Create an e-book that provides information about your service or product that customers are sent via email once they fill out a short form.
- Create a quiz or calculator that will provide the user some meaningful information. Once they complete the exercise, provide them the option to receive the results by email.
- Create compelling CTA: limited time offer for free service, free phone consultation, free on-site estimation or quote.
- Make a “10-point Checklist†available for download.
- Offer a white paper, case study or report available for download for filling out a form.
- Offer detailed product specifications PDF download if the user provides email address. This list can be used in email marketing efforts.
- Offer a coupon for the current purchase by subscribing to the sales email newsletter.
- Register for a giveaway by submitting a form on your website.
- Award points and rewards to community members that solve issues in your support community.
Pro tip: Be sure to create some type of conversion tracking on the landing page. You’re driving all of that traffic, you better know what works.
Lead Collection
If you have your visitor’s attention, this is your opportunity to truly begin the conversation with someone. Be sure to collect the information in something more than an Excel files.
I’m a huge fan of MailChimp. Not only is the email program one of the simplest of all the competition (in my humble opinion), the lead management and automation is best in class. One warning about MailChimp, don’t spam. Their spam policies are very strict, and your account will be canceled for abuse, quickly.
Generating forms to use on your site is simple.
Depending on how you are using the information you are collecting on the website, you may want to enter them into a “database.” Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) programs such as Zoho and Salesforce make this approachable to people at all levels.
Improving the Performance of the Landing Page with A/B Testing
Once you are receiving data about the success of your conversions on the website, you can begin to fine tune the settings on the site to improve performance. A-B split testing is one of the easiest and most common methods to fine tune your website or landing page. Say, for example, that you wanted to increase the number of downloads on a landing page, you would create two versions of the same page: (A) the control page and (B) the challenging or testing page. On the landing page, you would change one variable like the color of the download button. Then the software that you are using to perform the test serves “random assignment of new visitors to the version of the page that they see.â€
Factors to consider when A/B Testing:
- Test one variable at a time. (creating more than one variable may lead to misunderstanding which variable attributed to success or failure)
- Serve pages simultaneously. The software used to conduct the test should serve an equal number of the control and test pages.
- You may test multiple versions (A-B-C-D) testing the same variable. For example, you may test four different headlines on a landing page.
- Don’t test indefinitely. Test your pages for a set period of time, and then make the changes to your pages.
- A-B tests work especially well on landing pages with Pay Per Click traffic because the conditions of the visitors are similar.
- Optimizely.com offers a robust platform for A/B testing.
- Google Analytics also offers A/B testing within the Content > Experiments section.
3. Fulfill Your Promise(s)
Follow through with your promises. It’s pretty simple.
If you promised on the landing page to send out a white paper, then do it. Someone on the other end of the interwebs has taken time to visit your site and give you permission to contact them. Even greater, they have given you their contact information. Follow through with your promises and don’t abuse them.
Love Your Peeps
Once you have someone’s permission to contact them, be generous to them. After you’ve fulfilled their immediate needs send them useful content. How do I define useful? It needs to hurt you a little. For example, this post isn’t the easiest content to share. I’ve worked hard for years to collect much of the information on this page, but I’m giving it to you because I love that you are spending some time with me online.
- Share great content on your blog
- Videos – From instructional to fun and quirky, create content that is interesting, but keep it short
- Whitepapers
- eBook that collects all of your great blog posts into a larger explanation of a certain topic
- Checklists
- Give away some of your product (even if that’s knowledge)
- How-to articles / videos
- Hold an OnAir Google Hangout with your contacts about a specific topic. Then share the video with all your subscribers
- Industry insight articles
Pro tip: Write well. Here are a few tips to writing consumable content for the modern mind.
4. Ask for The Share
If you’ve done a kick ass job in the first three steps, then you should have confidence in asking your customers/readers/friends for a referral. My friend John Jantsch says that you should ask for the referral first and set the expectation for you and the person that you must deliver a referral worthy performance.
Of course, people sharing on social networks help drive traffic, but (despite some technical arguments) inbound links will help your SEO.
5. Overall Measurements
Here are a few overall measurements that you should consider when implementing these tactics.
- Campaign Budget – How much did the entire campaign cost (including time)?
- Cost Per Click (CPC) – How much did you spend per click?
- Click Through Rate (CTR) – How many clicks were there in relation to the total number of impressions?
- Cost Per Acquisition – Divide the total spend by the number of customers.
- Page views – How many times was the page viewed?
- Email opens (depending on list size try to beat 20%)
- Click through (aim for 30% of opens) Try using Bit.ly to track your clicks for greater accuracy and tracking per channel.
Pro tip: Use Google Analytics and Woopra for a powerful suite of tracking tools.
Keep it coming…
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Talkin’ it Through
Here is a lecture that I gave to my MBA Digital Marketing Class on October 2, 2013. I spend an inordinate amount of time talking about landing pages and actions to serve success, but you might find it helpful to see this video.
What did I miss? No ego here. If I’ve missed something that you believe I should have included let me know.
