Ideas for Business

Editor’s Note: The next in our series of guest posts from SEM professionals comes from Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo. Marketo is a client of our PR agency M&O and provides B2B marketing automation software in the form of pay per click management, landing page optimization and integration with salesforce.com. 

With Jon’s B2B software marketing expertise, excellent work both on his blog Modern B2B Marketing and as a contributor on Search Engine Land, I asked if he could write up a guide for search marketers that would provide actionable advice for readers on the topic of landing pages.

Perhaps the largest difference between business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) pay-per-click is that the post-click goal for most B2B marketers is to capture a lead, not make a sale. This means that B2B companies must focus on converting clicks into leads as much as they focus on getting clicks in the first place.

Landing pages are critical to making this happen. From the prospect’s perspective, clicking on your link is easy and doesn’t cost (them) anything. In contrast, converting and becoming a lead requires them to invest their time and energy to understand your offer and fill out your form — not to mention risk unwanted marketing since you require they share their contact information.

According to Marketing Sherpa’s Landing Page Handbook, improving your landing pages can increase your conversions by 40% or more. In our experience at Marketo, optimized landing pages work even better — as high as 200% improvements in conversion rates.

So how do you do it? Here are ten tested and proven tips you can use to improve and optimize your landing pages.

1. First Impressions Matter

When a prospect scans your landing page, they decide in just a few seconds whether to bail or stick around. When making this decision, they consider two things: “Does this page look hard or complicated?” and (2) “Is this page relevant to my search query?”. Design, copy, font size, and form length all influence the former. To influence the latter, make sure your page (especially the headline) directly connects to the search term. This means having dozens or hundreds of landing pages — at least one per ad group and ideally one for your each of your top keywords.

2. Have an Offer

Your landing page doesn’t need to sell your product, service, or company. It just needs to sell your offer. Focus your page around a single call to action, such as a free whitepaper or demo. Avoid the temptation to include extraneous company information.

3. Remove The Navigation

This isn’t your home page, so remove your main navigation. Simpler pages almost always work better for lead generation. In eye tracking studies, the navigation draws attention away from your offer and conversion action. Worse, each link is an invitation for the visitor (which you paid for) to click away instead of converting. As Marketing Sherpa points out, it’s tempting to leave those links just in case the visitor wants to dig through your site and learn more. Drop this fantasy. Your goal is to sell your offer, and the only thing those links can do is reduce your conversions. You can always share additional information after they convert, on the thank you page or via your lead nurturing. (Note: You can make your logo link to your home page, and you can include your footer navigation since it draws the eye less than your main navigation. These links help the page appear to visitors and to Google as part of a larger site.)

4. Use Graphics Wisely

Graphics are the #1 thing that draws the eye. Use them carefully since the wrong graphic can distract from the offer and conversion. Include a hero shot, e.g. a mock up of the white paper cover with the title blown up to be readable. Two other tips: Let people click the graphics to get more info (visitors often click on graphics) and be sure to have a caption (besides the headline, captions are the most read copy on the page).

5. Make Your Content Scan-able

People don’t read landing pages, they scan them. Write in bullets, if you can. Be sure your copy sells your offer when someone scans just the first three words of each bullet or paragraph. Bold key words. Consider using interactive elements, such as an audio clip or short video / demo, on your landing page. This can engage buyers who want more info without making the page look overwhelming.

6. Only Ask What You Really Need

If you met someone interesting at a bar, you wouldn’t ask for a ton of information like their annual income —you’d simply get his or her contact information so you could build the relationship over time. The same is true for landing pages. Every field you ask reduces your conversion rate, so collect as little information as you really need to route the lead and stay in touch. You can always collect more during your nurturing process.

7. Capture Implicit Information

Use hidden fields to capture additional information about your leads, such as the keyword used, the search engine they came from, and the ad they clicked. You can also use “click paths” to capture implicit information. For example, if you want to know the prospect’s industry, add some navigation on the left that lists your top industries. This is different than your site navigation. Prospects are likely to click on the link for their industry, so take them to an even more targeted landing page —and capture their industry as a hidden field.

8. Have Reasons to Give Valid Info

After conversion, don’t just hand the offer to the prospect – email it to them. This is a great trick to ensure that you get a valid email address. Also, be sure to place a link to your privacy statement near to where you ask for their info.

9. Say Thank You

After a customer converts, take them to a thank you page. This is important to track the conversion. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to deepen the relationship by making another offer, promoting your blog, asking for feedback, or running a poll. Up to 40% of prospects say they are willing to share additional information after they convert.

10. Test… But Don’t Over Test

Testing lets visitors vote with their actions, removing any debate about what works and what doesn’t. The most valuable things to test are the headline, graphic captions, the submit button, form length, and graphical elements. However, be careful not to over-test. A good rule of thumb is to take the number of conversions you get per day and divide it by 10. Then take your testing period in weeks and divide that by 2. Multiply the two results together to get the number of versions you can confidently test in your testing period.

Landing Pages Don’t Need To Be Hard

Given the dramatic ROI of having multiple targeted landing pages, why do three out of four B2B companies still send clicks to the home page? The main reason is a lack of resources —and getting time from web developers is the most difficult resource to get. As a solution, companies can leverage products like those offered by Marketo that allow marketers to create landing pages with no IT. The Marketo online demo can provide a first hand example.

Sponsored By: 2007 Email Marketing Benchmark Guide All new report from Marketing Sherpa

On-line reputation management has become the most important aspect of on-line marketing. You should incorporate this into your Internet marketing strategy today by doing the things that I will suggest in this article. If you are already doing these things, let this serve as a gentle reminder.

The fact is, anyone can go online and post anything about you or your company on any forum, blog, or user-generated website. They can even do this anonymously and you’ll never know who is trying to ruin your reputation. The statements these anonymous posters make about you or your small business do not even need to be true. A lot of times, one comment can do more damage than you could ever do yourself through lousy customer service.

Let these businesses serve as your example:

A private physician gave advice that a patient didn’t like; the patient, a blogger, posted some negative things about the physician on her blog. Since the physician did not have a website or blog of her own, the only results for that doctor when a potential patient conducted an on-line search were the blogger’s negative comments.
A construction contractor fired an employee and in retaliation the former employee posted some comments on a popular forum online. Even though the company had a website, they had not done a lot of Internet marketing and the negative comments outranked the construction company’s own website.
A small business owner who also performs charity work through a separate organization was attacked through an anonymous blog on a free blog host by a former customer who began posting negative comments about the charitable organization as well as the business owner.

These types of attacks online are becoming more and more prevalent. The Internet gives the illusion that there are no consequences for comments that are not true. Off line, such comments would be considered slander, but online they can be made anonymously and influence potential customers to stay away from your small business based on nothing but hearsay. Once the damage is done, it is extremely hard to reverse.

The good news is you can manage your on-line reputation through an on-line marketing strategy that involves proven techniques that are not expensive or do not take up too much time. You can do it yourself or hire an Internet marketing consultant to do it for you. Either way, on-line reputation management is an absolute must for every small business owner, even if you do not have a website or do any business online. Here are the essential tools for your on-line reputation management strategy:

-A domain name with your personal and/or company name in it
-Your own small business website
-Article marketing
-A blog that you post to every day
-Social networking and social bookmarking on a regular basis
-Forum posting and blog comments on blogs related to your business
-On-line press releases
-Building in-bound links to your website from quality, highly respected websites within your industry

On-line reputation management is all about marketing your business online in a positive way without tearing others down. You don’t have to make others look bad in order to make yourself look good. On-line marketing strategies are an extension of, and should be approached as an addition to, traditional marketing approaches. The first step to your on-line reputation management strategy should be to sign up for Google Alerts using your personal name, your company name, and your website URL as keywords. That way you can see when people are talking about you online and head off any repercussions from erroneous or negative comments before they get too entrenched in the search engine databases.

The essence of all on-line reputation management is ensuring that more positive reflections of your business appear in as many places online as possible, as often as possible, and to keep fresh content alive about you and your business that creates a positive impression. By maintaining a consistent approach to on-line marketing, you can ensure that your reputation online is unmarred by negativity and reputation-killing talk. For more information about on-line reputation management, consult an Internet marketing consultant with a background in managing reputations today.

Caroline Melberg
www.SmallBusinessMavericks.com
Back to Small Business Marketing Mavericks Blog

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Conversion optimisation is a tough task. But one thing I can say with 100% confidence - it becomes a whole lot easier when people can actually get into your website:

source: www.fitzbiz.com

Myself an A.N. Other are looking for some office space. We came across Fitzwilliam on some of the property sites. Looked kinda nice. A.N. Other likes it.

5 links and 2 mailto: anchors. 3 links are broken. Fitzwilliam Court is a complete orphan. Maybe they could do with a duo of web experts?

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Kristen Browning-Blas, the Food Editor at the Denver Post mentioned two of my blogs today in her article Join me as I jump into the blog about her new blog, On Tucker's Plate (with Tucker Shaw).

Here's what she writes:

Delving into the food-blogging community in Colorado and nationally has turned up some addictive sites:

Mamarant.blogs.com/mamacooks: Anne-Marie Nichols is a transplanted New Yorker and copywriter who started blogging in 2004. I love the tagline for her main site (mamarant.blogs.com), "Writing about motherhood, complaining about everything else." The cooking portion of her site has become a diary of sorts as she tries to lose weight on the "Extreme Fat Smash Diet," an actual book by Ian K. Smith.

I'm thrilled even if she didn't get the names of the blogs right. But the URLs are out there, so all is fine.

Lately I've noticed that the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News (two Denver papers owned by the same publisher) have really gotten into blogging. The Post has recently launched Mile High Mamas, which has the potential of becoming a terrific parenting site once they work out their navigation bugs. (Click here to see the entire list of Post staff blogs and Rocky staff blogs).

So are newspapers getting the blogging thing? Yes...slowly. However, most newspaper columnists only write content. They don't blog even if their online column at the newspaper's website is called a blog. Why? Because they have no clue about what most bloggers do. They just turn the copy in (or type it into the paper's blog platform) and someone does the rest - SEO, advertising placement, marketing, adding graphics, tagging, linking to previous content, design, etc. (Mile High Mamas is an exception to this as the Post hired real bloggers to blog and comment on their discussion boards.)

Even so, it's good to see that newspapers are starting to offer blogs because it gives blogging an air of legitimacy. With that, I hope to see professional bloggers getting properly compensated for their writing - not making less than most junior freelance writers. Also, we'll start to see the lines between journalism and blogging get even fuzzier if not fade away completely. Like they say at BlogHer conferences, "We're all press!"

So do you read any newspaper blogs? Comment below!