You’ve made the effort of writing a guest post, placing an ad, or adding your promotion to a partner’s site. Then you link this useful marketing piece – to your home page.
Uh-oh.
Your prospect is now lost. The conversation you were having has stopped midstream. They land, splat, in the middle of your generic home page. Forced to navigate for themselves, they say:
I don’t know where to go. I don’t have time to search around. I clicked to find out about this specific service, but now I can’t find it!
Instead of sending prospects to your home page, use landing pages. Landing pages let you hold your prospects’ hands, taking them from point A to a coherent Point B on your website. Oh, and they can statistically more than double your conversion rates.
Four keys to an effective landing page:
- Be specific. Whenever we write, we want to speak as specifically as we can—to whatever audience we’re speaking to. Right? The more targeted your page, the better. Tie the landing page into whatever ad, article, guest post or promotion they were just reading. Only the people coming from this specific guest post, article or ad will find this landing page, so speak directly to them.
- Continue the conversation. When you’re appearing as a guest blogger and people click through to your site, this will be their introduction to you. Go ahead and acknowledge that. Landing pages help you continue the conversation and make new ones. Give your audience further insight into what you’ve already delivered. Offer value. Think: What further benefits can you provide them? How can you engage them?
- Ask for the next step. Now that you’ve got them on your landing page, offer something more. Ask them to subscribe to your newsletter, read your blog, or download your white paper. Offer something relevant—and get them to sign up. This will capture their information and enable you to follow up. (Remember: Your offer has to be good, or your new visitor is history.)
- Test, track and tweak. With a landing page, you can accurately track visitors and conversions. You will know exactly how many people are clicking, and who is converting into a lead. Best of all, you can try different approaches and different offers to see what gets the best results. A landing page is not set in stone. Instead, it’s a jumping point for improvement.
A good landing page targets a specific person, continues the conversation, and has an interesting offer to capture information. Don’t make the mistake of bringing a specialized audience to a generic home page. Tailoring and paying attention to your landing pages will boost your marketing results.
Do you have any landing page success stories to share? Or home page horror stories? Either way, we’d love to hear them.
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