Successful, effective landing page design for natural search and PPC campaigns:

No matter what type of online marketing campaign you want to run, whether it be based on organic SEO activities, paid for search or email campaigns – web users ultimately always have to ‘land’ somewhere within your website.

This entry point typically represents your first, and biggest, opportunity to leave a positive impression with the consumer and is therefore a vitally important aspect of any website development.

Remember that the internet offers a wealth of choice within most markets, making it quick and simple for users to click away and take their potential business. This is unless you give them an excuse to stay!

This is where landing pages come in. Before launching any online campaign you should consider exactly where web users are likely to enter your site (be it the home page, a specific page build for an email campaign or other).

In this article we now consider some of the most important factors in landing page design.

Clearly define your goals:

Ok, so you’ve invested a lot of time and effort into getting people to come to your website, but have you really thought of what result you want to achieve when they actually get there? Typical goal scenarios could include:

- immediate conversion to a sale (particularly if you are running an e-commerce shopping website)

- subscriptions to news letters or article feeds - quote requests by way of an online enquiry form - a call to your sales team

Well defined goals are vitally important because they form the basis for analysing the performance of your campaign. Performance analysis is essential for diagnosing any problems with your online marketing campaigns and ultimately determining if your time and resources have been well used. We will consider performance in more detail later.

Consider your target audience:

In any online marketing campaign, not only is it key to know your product, but also know who you are trying to sell it to. Consideration should be given as to whether your product or service is targeted at the retail consumer or whether you are offering a business-to-business type solution.

An obvious difference between these two markets is that commercial customers are likely to be looking for singular units, while business customers are likely to be looking for bulk orders or express delivery promises. It is essential that your landing page reflects the needs of the market that you are targeting, as the wrong message could invalidate much of your hard work.

Triggers and "calls to action":

When designing any landing page, it is essential to incorporate one or more triggers, or "calls to action" as they are also know. Typical examples of calls to action include "buy now" or "next day delivery".

Again, you need to consider who your target audience are and then think about what kind of things would trigger you to complete the process (filling out a form, signing up to a newsletter etc) if you were the customer.

Consider what problem you are trying to solve and what pain for the customer you are trying to take away.

For instance, a typical frustration of buying anything over the internet is that unlike purchasing a product in store, we have the frustration of having to wait for our goods to arrive. Therefore a call to action such as "next day delivery" can compel the searcher to click on your ad and not that of a competitor – in other words, calls to action often trigger positive responses.

Offer brief, targeted information:

Your landing pages should be short and brief, with text kept down to a minimum. Keep your conversion goal in mind and ensure that any information you offer encourages the visitor to reach this goal.

Briefly explain how this product or service will help them, or why your product has an edge over the competition. Use of bullet points and sharp, glossy imagery can be ideal for conveying the critical elements of your message and ultimately enhance your chances of getting the visitor to reach your goal state.

Consider the visitors next step:

We have considered the idea of landing pages being used to stimulate the visitor to reach your desired goal. However, we also need to consider what, or where, the user goes next.

For instance, say that the goal of our landing page is to encourage the user to fill out an enquiry form i.e. we want to generate a sales lead. After completing the form, the user will typically click on a submit button, which in tern leads then to another "thanks for your enquiry" type page.

Remember that this page is again an opportunity to convert this visit into something more and therefore this page should be every bit as targeted as the original!

Measure the performance of your campaign:

So, lets say that you’ve now been running online marketing campaigns for a number of weeks or months. Each of these campaigns have been designed to lead web users to specific, conversion targeted, landing pages.

Before you spend any more time or money, its now time to think about analysing the performance of your campaign. Here is where your goals come into play. If you don’t have goals, and an effective method of quantifying whether or not these have been reached, then you will never really know if your campaign has been a success.

Imagine that your goal is to get people to fill out a quote request form on your landing page. If you notice that you appear to have a high number of page visits, but a poor quote request rate, then you may want to consider changing the look and feel of your landing pages to try to encourage more people to fill in the form.

If the conversions are high, then what is the potential value of all of these enquires over the last month? How does this compare to the amount of money that you have spent on the campaign in the same period?

Performance analysis is a big subject in itself and is therefore something that we will tackle in more detail in another article. However, what we have said here so far should give you an idea of the types of criteria you need to consider when running and analysing any online marketing campaign!