Digital marketing is considered to be among the more cost-effective methods of marketing. You don’t need to buy any expensive television ads or magazine ads and can instead focus on making sure that the marketing you put out on the internet is effective at reaching your core audience and providing them with a message that they want to hear.
For instance, online analytics provides businesses with the ability to micro-target specific customer segments that they believe would be most receptive to their product or service. Through online advertising and agile PPC campaigns, you can run multiple advertising campaigns at the same time that are targeted at specific customer segments, which should ensure an optimal ROI.
Many businesses make the mistake of wasting massive marketing budgets on under-performing websites and landing pages, which can quickly cut through your budget without providing you with any kind of return on your investment. You want the landing page to run well and be properly optimized before you start spending money on larger marketing campaigns. There are many reasons as to why this is the case, the following of which details five of those reasons:
1. Optimize Pagespeed & User Experience to Reduce Bounce Rate
It’s not enough to get users to enter your website via a landing page. Once they do, it’s essential that they remain on the website long enough to become interested in your brand and the product or service that you offer. A slow loading page will cause users to leave before they ever engage with your content and take action. The modern web user often expects the website to load quickly (studies show most web users prefer for a web page to load under 3-4 seconds), which extends from the landing page to loading times when switching between different pages on the website. If you optimize page speed on your website, you should be able to effectively reduce the site’s current bounce rate, which will invariably lead to more sales.
You also need to ensure that the user experience a visitor has when on your site is optimized so that they can properly access your content from any device. When looking at all online traffic across the globe, nearly 50 percent of this traffic occurs on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. If your website hasn’t been optimized to account for these users, your site and overall business will suffer. In the event that you haven’t yet implemented a responsive design, the site will appear far larger than it should be when a user accesses it, which will lead to endless amounts of scrolling and pinching to zoom in and read your content. In such a scenario, site visitors will often bounce off page to another site.
Optimizing the performance of your page will reduce your bounce rate and keep users on page longer, which increases your chances at a conversion. Higher conversion rates result in your site having more return customers that will continue to visit for months or even years to come.
2. Ensure Content is Strategic and Conversion Driven
When you are getting ready to deploy a new online marketing campaign, keep in mind that the content on your landing page is as important as the content of your marketing campaign. The landing page content must also be related to the marketing campaign that you’re running in that it’s strategically created to convert traffic of a specific customer segment that you’re appealing to.
Let’s say that you’ve implemented a pay-per-click ad campaign that takes the user who clicks on the ad to your website. If the user clicks on your ad, this typically means that they are somewhat interested in your product or service. If they are then taken to a landing page on your website that’s filled with unrelated content that fails to drive them to a desired call to action, they’ll likely turn away and take their business elsewhere.
You should always focus on implementing landing pages into your marketing campaign that are created with conversions in mind. The content on your landing page should also be strategically placed, which means that it needs to inform users about your product or service while also touching on your overall sales pitch in a way that provides value to your users. The main focus of yourcontent should be to generate leads and/or conversions.
3. Make Sure You Have a Solid CTA
Many companies with an online presence feel as though their ad has been successful when a user has clicked on the ad and reached the company’s website. While this is a great start, users need to know what to do next. If the ad and landing page is focused on advertising a specific service, the user must then be told how to purchase or use that service.
You can provide site visitors with direction by implementing a call to action on your landing page. Without a clear call to action, the user may loser interest and leave your website for good.
A call to action is a very simple prompt that should always be direct, precise, and to-the-point. In most cases, the call-to-action will be a phrase that includes a hyperlink, which means that the user will be able to click the hyperlink or button and be taken to a form or the page that they’re searching for. If the landing page for your marketing campaign focuses on a specific product, the call-to-action could take the user to the order page for that product (..or directly add the item to cart).
When implementing a call-to-action on your landing page, you’ll want to lead the user into the CTA in manner that naturally causes them to click on the link. For instance, a standard blog could include a CTA such as “Sign up for our exciting newsletter” with a hyperlink to a form or an input field that the user can fill out if they would like to receive regular newsletters in their e-mail. Standard calls-to-action for eCommerce websites include “Add to cart” or “Buy now”, both of which would take the user to a page where they could purchase the advertised product or service.
4. Set Up Analytics Tracking to Better Understand Your Customer
If you want to have a better idea about how to properly optimize your landing page and how to create an effective marketing campaign, it’s essential that you set up analytics tracking, which will allow you to collect some highly useful customer data and information.
These metrics can be obtained in a variety of ways and with many different tools, which gives you the ability to sample different analytics platforms before finding the one that works best for you. For instance, many businesses utilize a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to collect this data and information.
A CRM is a business tool that allows you to manage the interactions and relationships that your company has with current or prospective customers. This information can assist you in improving business relationships by helping you adapt your content and marketing strategies to the needs and desires of the customer. There are a wide range of CRM systems and platforms available for you to select from, which include highly popular options like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Microsoft Dynamics.
You should also consider using Google Analytics for the purpose of tracking user behavior and metrics on your website. This platform has tools that allow you to effectively measure the ROI that you’re receiving from your advertisements and marketing campaigns through goal conversion metrics. While Google Analytics primarily focuses on collecting and analyzing user behavior, it will also allow you to better optimize your page and content by looking at visitor falloff, bounce rate, and more.
By having very specific information and measurements at your disposal, you can fine-tune your landing page and website to better service your target audience. Use analytics to understand your users’ behavior and you will be provided with additional marketing opportunities and customer insight that can prove invaluable.
5. Marketing Dollars Go Further With A Targeted Content Strategy
When you’re looking to market your brand online, it’s important to understand just how beneficial it can be to use a targeted content strategy for your next marketing campaign. For one, marketing dollars will almost certainly go further with a targeted content strategy as opposed to one that’s more broad and aimed at all types of users who may or may not be interested in your product or service. While a targeted content strategy may focus on a smaller segment of customers, this type of strategy will often be much more effective at appealing to those customers with more buyer-intent.
By accurately targeting your customers or potential customers with long-tail keywords, you’ll typically have less competition when optimizing your landing page with such keywords. For instance, the “furniture” keyword is going to have a lot more competition among similar websites when compared to long-tail keywords like “high quality contemporary furniture” or “vintage furniture near me”. The cost-per-click is also much lower for PPC campaigns when using long-tail keywords since there’s less competition to drive the price up. Rather than paying $5 for a highly competitive keyword phrase like “cars for sale”, you might end up paying only $0.50-$1.50 per click for a long-tail keyword like “Honda Civic 2019 for sale in Los Angeles”, the latter of which is more likely to lead to a purchase. In most cases, long-tail keywords have more buyer intent, which should increase your chances of converting a new visitor.
Conclusion
When you focus on reducing your bounce rate, increasing your click-through rate, and optimizing for conversions, you will certainly reach your desired ROI in a more cost-efficient manner. While you may need to put in some extra work to optimize your landing page and the website as a whole, you’ll see numerous benefits from these efforts in just a short period of time. With a proper optimization strategy — you’ll likely need to spend less on a marketing budget while also increasing the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
