Landing page optimization

There are five things that always exist on a successful landing page:

1)    Headline

2)    Demonstration (if you don’t have pictures or descriptions on what the visitor has to do on the page, they will leave)

3)    Value – there has to be a reason why they should choose you instead of your competitors

4)    Support

5)    Action – tell people what they need to do. There has to be a single call to action on your landing page – if you expect someone to do four different things, they’ll do none

Every time you give someone an excuse to leave your page (like a social sign in), you’re giving them the opportunity to leave and never come back.

You have to think about why the visitor wants to interact with your content. Nobody cares about features – if you’re creating the right emotional feel for a product, you’re going to have higher conversion rates.

Things that can help your landing page:

• Bullets
• Graphics
• Emphasis (italic, bold, underline)
• Images

Many of your customers don’t think about your product in the same way you do, this is why testing is so important. Always try to find out what a potential customer would want to invest in emotionally when creating a landing page.

Test your content

If you’re selling a luxury item, you’re probably going to need to provide more content. If you’re just asking someone for an e-mail address, keep the content short. The important thing is that you test the content to see what works for you. Don’t argue with people about changing the headlines or other content – just change it, test it and use the one that performs the best.

Creating a great landing page: The Process

Phase 1

• Brainstorm content
• Design and write
• Create more content than  you need
• Create control page
• Create variations
• Test

Phase 2

• Analyze your results
• Choose new control
• Revise variations
• Test again

Phase 3

• Headline
• Call to action
• Large images
• Length of content

Your headline needs to take the visitor from “I think this is the right place” to “I know this is the right place”. Once they realize they’ve come to the right place, they have patience.

Images

Sometimes a picture of a woman works really well and sometimes a picture of a man will work. You need to test the images and choose the one that conveys the right emotion for whatever you are selling.

If you use a picture of a person on your landing page, make sure the person faces the action on the page. If they’re looking at you, you start thinking about the person in the image instead of the content on the page.

Buttons

One of the last things you need to be testing is the buttons on the landing page.  Your headline and images are more important.

Ways of expressing value

It’s a requirement that you communicate value. After the website visitor realizes they’re in the right place, you need to make sure they know that what they’re about to buy or sign up for is valuable.

Forms

Don’t create long forms that ask a visitor to give you their name, phone number, e-mail etc. Don’t use the word “submit” on your buttons. People don’t want to “submit”, they want to “buy”.

Content critique

People don’t care about you and your company; they want to know what you can do for them.

Written by: Francois Muscat ,  WSI consultant 

Content Marketing

Why do we need content marketing? Because sales are going down and marketing initiatives like cold calling no longer works, which is why you need more inbound marketing tactics.

What is content marketing? It’s about understanding what information your customers need to know about your products and services. After this, you need to give them relevant content and educational content that persuades them that you are an expert in your field.

Why do you need quality content?

• It develops trust
• Drives traffic to your web traffic
• Educates and informs

The Panda update focused on ensuring that sits that are given high SERP’s are actually relevant. It penalizes a site’s poor quality content, which are usually used to farm back links. The quantity of links isn’t important; it’s all about the quality. You need to write good quality content and you need natural links.

If you aren’t on social media and you don’t have the social share buttons on your website, you’re not giving your content the opportunity to be shared and distributed online.

Content audit

• Analyze your current content efforts
•  Size up the competition
•  Observe the social climate
•  Determine the gaps

What are your social efforts?

• How well are you using social technologies?
• Website
• LinkedIn
• Blog
• Twitter
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Pinterest

How personas can improve your SEO

• Help find the right keywords for target audience
• Identify target for link building
• Help create the right content

A good way to write relevant content is to keep an eye out on the news and relate it to your business. Another thing you can do is follow the thought leaders – find the CEO’s, the people who are breaking news etc.

You should never refer to your “Facebook strategy” or your “LinkedIn strategy” – it’s all a conversation strategy.

Web property strategy

You need to own all your website properties, such as a Facebook fan page, Twitter accounts, a LinkedIn company page and so forth. Your social strategy needs to engage, inform, participate and provide behind the scenes info.

Ask yourself: Do I know what my customers are saying about me through the socialsphere? You can do a keyword search to find out where you are being mentioned, what the sentiment is and who is talking about you.

These should be your goals:

• Listen and learn about our customers: Set up alerts on Google, Twitter, Blog. Create rivers of information.
• Grow community to 5,000: Develop targeted campaigns to encourage sharing of content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook Pinterest
• Website integration: Integrate social properties with website properties
• Reach new markets: Grow the LinkedIn group to 250+ members
• Become a resource authority: Build up your website & company’s authority and trust, both on and off-site

Openness & Transparency

Society is moving more towards full transparency as a sign of truth and trust.  That goes for corporations and individuals. You need to be transparent – if you talk a big talk, but people can’t find you online, it becomes risky to do business with you.

When you optimize a website, your home page has to be optimized for your company as a whole, not individual products. When doing keyword research, you need to move away from single keyword phrases like ‘carpet cleaning’ at some point. Do keyword research that includes questions like ‘why’ to get to the top of the funnel. Try Ubersuggest.com to broaden your results.

The content funnel

Awareness

Creating your voice. Increase knowledge, understanding & awareness of your company. E.g:

• Blog Posts
• Social Media Updates
• Infographics
• Press release

Consideration

Make people think about the value proposition of your products & services. E.g:

• EBooks
• White papers
• Webinars
• How to
• Presentations

Decision

Create confidence, purpose & conclusion around your brand. E.g:

• Case studies
• Products
• Brochure
• buy now
• services
• free demo
• loyalty scheme; packages; methodology

 Written by: Francois Muscat 

How to Leverage your existing Advertising Dollars through “Remarketing”

Conventional wisdom is that your best customer is the one you are talking with at any given time.

Why? Because unlike your next prospect, this one has at least shown some interest in your products and services…otherwise why would they be in front of you at all?

The modern interpretation of that is the prospect who took the time to seek you out and go to your website or blog or any number of other web properties. They didn’t get there by accident. They either searched for you, or clicked on an email, or interacted through some social medium. In any case it was most likely through an effort that cost you money or time.

So let’s go on the premise that they were interested enough to check you out, but like the vast majority of initial web interactions, they weren’t ready to take any action. The reality is that they will probably check out your competitors…and do nothing with them either. At least initially…

Thus the reemergence of a technology called “Remarketing”, or the process of marketing specifically to people who have recently shown interest in what you offer.

Here’s how it works:

When a consumer visits your website via a search engine result, pay-per-click ad, email link, or even an off-line advertisement, all of which you undoubtedly paid for in one fashion or another, we “tag” them. As they go about their business across the Internet over the next hours, days, weeks or months, we show them your custom banner ad. Your brand literally follows your best prospects around in the places they surf for mere cents per impression (literally a fraction of a penny).

Remarketing is designed to get the most out of the advertising dollars you’ve already spent, however a fulldisplay advertising program is designed to do that AND increase your brand awareness to specific demographics by advertising on our extensive network of hand-picked and “A-list” websites.

Written by: Chuck Bankoff, WSI Certified Research Analyst