There’s an old saying that you no doubt know: “All roads lead to Rome.” If you think about it, this can be applied to your marketing campaigns – each one ultimately leads to your website. However, it’s easy to get so caught up optimizing your campaigns that you neglect your site’s landing pages.
Landing pages need special care and attention if you want to increase conversions. Once you have piqued a reader’s curiosity, it’s your website that has the challenging task of actually selling them on your offer. That’s why you need to save time in your busy campaign schedule to properly optimize your website for sales success.
In this article, we’ll discuss four steps that can help you recenter your website as the core of your marketing campaigns. Let’s get started!
Step 1: Consider your campaign platform
Facebook ads are just one of many popular marketing platforms.
Marketing campaigns are typically extended across multiple platforms. To understand how to best optimize your website, you need to first understand the platforms you’re working with. It’s important to consider that your audience is coming from a number of different places. Each segment comes with its own unique needs, relationships, and expectations.
For example, social media users are probably online to find and share new and interesting things, but they may not have a lot of time or patience. On the other hand, email subscribers are likely already a fan of your work or company, and are more likely to be comfortable reading long-form content.
Even within each source, you may have different relationships with some users than others. As another example, consider that some people on Facebook already like your page, while others don’t. The first group is already familiar with you, while the second is starting from square one. Thanks to targeting, you can send each group to a unique page on your site that reflects its differences.
Every platform is unique, and has its own demographics. Therefore, it’s up to you to research how that will impact the message you want to send. You can start by using marketing analytics tools to study your own audiences and get a sense for what makes them tick. On a more general level, companies like Pew also publish results that show you basic demographic differences between platforms.
Step 2: Build custom landing pages
Lyft’s new driver page is targeted to certain users, and contains clear calls to action.
Once you’ve identified the key subsets of your audience, it’s time to craft unique landing pages for each group. This way, visitors receive a message showing that you understand them and their needs.
A landing page is essentially any page on your website that you direct new visitors to. You can use everything you learned in Step 1 to create focused, engaging, and action-inspiring landing pages. This part is crucial, because the landing page is what actually sells the visitor on you and your offer. The initial ad is simply the conduit that gets them there.
For example, you might send Twitter users to a short page full of interesting, ‘tweetable’ facts. Email subscribers, on the other hand, may appreciate a longer landing page written in a style similar to your regular email blasts. You can even customize each page to directly address the reader, with lines like: “This is our Twitter special!” or “Check out our offer for Google users!”
Here are a few more tips for creating the perfect landing page:
- Match your ad copy to your web page’s headline.
- Write clear and concise headlines.
- Use trust factors, such as testimonials and third-party certificates.
- Include a strong call-to-action, and make it highly visible.
- Use media that relates to the ad content.
As your ads drive more traffic to your website, you can focus on tweaking each of these elements to push your conversion rates higher.
Step 3: Drive targeted traffic to each page
Twitter allows you to target many different subsets of their users.
Now, it’s time to combine the first two steps together and deliver your designated audiences to their custom landing pages. This is typically called ‘segmentation’ or ‘targeting’, and most marketing campaigns allow you to handle it in a few different ways.
Depending on the platform, you may be looking at audience targeting, list segmentation, or some combination of both. For example, Facebook and Twitter both offer audience targeting features. Meanwhile, email companies such as MailChimp, ConstantContact, and AWeber usually let you aim for specific subscribers via segmented lists or tags. Google PPC offers match-type segmentation, which is a related but distinct strategy.
As a digital marketing agency, there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with how to use these campaign platforms. Our job is to help you focus on the website angle. The most important part is that you remember to serve the right audiences the right pages!
Step 4: Measure results per source and per page
Facebook Pixel tracks visitors to your site and can show conversions driven by Facebook ads.
Finally, it is time to evaluate the success of your campaign! This means analyzing the results of your ad clicks, traffic, and conversions. This step is important because it tells you how well you did at targeting your campaign and offering a compelling message, so you can improve for the future.
Tools like Google Analytics Goals and Facebook Pixel allow you to track important actions such as email subscriptions, purchases, and more. You’ll want to make sure these are set up before your campaign launches, so you can review the results at the end.
Using these analytic tools, you’ll be able to compare:
- How many people clicked your ad on any given platform, such as through Facebook or from within an email.
- How many visitors made it to your website, and from which of those sources.
- How many of those visitors performed the desired action (for example, signed up for your services).
These numbers will highlight which areas of your campaign need to be strengthened. If you have a low number of ad clicks, then it’s time to improve your ads. If you have a lot of ad clicks but very few visitors stay on your site for longer than a few seconds, you need to optimize your landing pages’ load speed and initial design. If people are spending time on your site but not buying anything, you need to work on your website content and calls to action.
Again, how you address these problems will depend on the platforms you’re using. Some fixes will be self-explanatory, while other advice can be easily found online. For example, Google Analytics offers a guide for using their information to improve your marketing campaigns. If you want, you can also use the principles of A/B testing to dive fully into this type of optimization.
Refocusing your website is essential
Refocusing your website is crucial, no matter what platforms you launch your marketing campaign on. Your campaign’s job is to bring people to your website, but then your site must successfully sell the product or service you’re offering.
In this post, we’ve outlined five steps that will help you ensure that your website is ready for every marketing campaign. Let’s quickly recap them:
- Consider your campaign platforms and their audience’s unique needs and expectations.
- Create targeted landing pages that fulfill those expectations.
- Segment your campaigns so that each audience is sent to the right landing page.
- Measure the results of each landing page to see how well you did, so you can make improvements.