The Pragmatic Marketer

In my last post I identified six best practices that you should pay attention to when creating landing pages.

Here are six more that will further help you get your landing pages “right the first time”:

Beware the Fold

Visitors will give your landing page a few seconds to engage them. Any requirement to scroll reduces the chance that they will complete the objective, which is to convert. So your landing page should be constructed so that everything is visible - especially the call to action - to visitors using 1024 x 768 screen resolution (which is the lowest common denominator for most B2B site visitors).

Use Powerful Action Button

Your action button should achieve two things:

a. It should be descriptive. Using words like “Submit” or “Download” don’t drive the emotion like “Get my Whitepaper Now” or “Set up My FREE Needs Assessment”.

b. It must pass the six foot test, i.e it should be easy to read from six feet away. If it isn’t, make it bigger!

Take Care of Copy Length

A good rule of thumb with landing page content is to write down what you want to say and then halve it! Remember,  the visitor will only stay engaged for so long and the more copy you have prior to them taking a conversion action, the more likely you are to loose them before the do.

Be Brutal with Form Length

When it comes to forms, the watchword is short! The form is one of the biggest friction points on your landing page. And friction is not a friend of conversions. Think about the contact information that it is absolutely essential to have and make this mandatory, the rest, which is nice to have, should remain optional. Remember, with just a name, work email and web address you can find out the address and phone number of an awful lot of people with just a little bit of internet research..

Leverage Whitespace

Landing page visitors don’t really read - they scan the content to quickly determine if the page is relevant to their goal or not. Careful use of space, so that content is accessible and friendly allows them to scan and understand key messages quickly and easily.

Don’t Forget “Free”

Free is a powerful word that tells the visitor that they are going to get something in exchange for their contact information. If what you are offering is indeed free, make sure you spell it out so the visitor knows.

Add these best practices to the initial set of six that I shared with you last week and you’ll be on the way to creating killer landing pages that should help your conversions soar.

_______________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

Nothing beats smart, ongoing testing programs to consistently drive up your B2B landing page conversion rates in the long term. However there are a number of landing page best practices that you should pay attention to from the get-go to make sure you aren’t unnecessarily impacting your conversions as soon as your landing page goes live:

Message Match Your Headline

A clear and direct headline should be the first thing the user notices upon viewing the page and it should assure the visitor that they are “in the right place”. So make sure that the term they searched for in Google is front and center in that headline.

Powerful Value Proposition

Your landing page should have a compelling value proposition in just a few words. This should encapsulate the sum total of the value you bring. This is not the time to get cute or fancy - if visitors can’t quickly and easily understand the benefits of your product or service, they will leave. A powerful value proposition helps keep the visitor engaged and stay on the page, increasing the chance that they will fill out your form and convert, because they see value in what you do/offer.

Maintain Message Clarity

Beyond a succinct and clearly articulated value proposition, your landing page should also clearly articulate your call to action that tells the visitor why they should take the step you want them to take, which is to register for your value added content.

Minimize Anxiety

Landing page visitors always harbor some anxiety. “What will they do with my information?”, “Will I get spammed with promotional emails?”, “Will I get pestered by a sales rep?” Make sure that these anxieties are managed as best you can. Trust/security icons and assurances, as well as testimonials provide credibility and give confidence to the visitor that can have a positive impact on conversion. And be sure that there’s a clear link to a privacy policy that explains how careful you will be with any contact data they give to you.

Avoid Distractions

In B2B the singular objective of a landing page is to secure a conversion or registration in exchange for some value added content or service. To this end you should avoid any unnecessary distractions on the page that might cause the visitor to deviate from this objective. This means having one clear choice of what to do next, no site navigation and no unnecessary links to other content (unless they are integral to the conversion objective).

Create a Sense of Urgency

If possible, you should try to communicate time sensitivity, scarcity or privilege to incite the visitor to act NOW. Examples might be a webinar invitation where seating is limited, a free needs assessment available to the first 100 registrants, etc.

Pay attention to these best practices when you create a landing page and you’ll be on the right path to achieving your conversion goals.

Look out for six more landing page best practices next week

_______________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

In paid search you are in complete control of your ad wording. So you can say precisely what you want to say, to attract the most qualified visitors. As your campaign progresses, Google will tell you how each of your ads are performing, so you can change the poorly performing ones and gradually improve the overall success of your campaign.

Relevancy
In organic search, the task is a little more complex. First, you need to optimize your main content pages for specific keywords or keyword phrases, so that Google can assess whether you have “relevancy” for a particular search term.

Authority
You also need to convince Google that your content has “authority” (as evidenced by the number of relevant inbound links to your site), which further increases your chance of Google granting you an organic results listing on page one.

Currency
Thirdly, you have to demonstrate “currency”, by ensuring you update and expand your content regularly.

Yet, even if you do a great job in all these areas, you risk falling at the final hurdle if you don’t put sufficient thought into what your organic ‘ad’ looks like. Why? Because the typical searcher spends less than two seconds on each ‘ad’ on the Google search results page. And if your organic ’ad’ isn’t meaningful, it will likely get overlooked in favour of one that is.

How to Display Meaningful Organic Search Results

By carefully managing the content of your meta titles and meta descriptions, you can significantly increase the chance of Google choosing these as the page “snippet” it displays in a search results page.

As Google itself puts it:

“The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your organic result being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta descriptions for each URL.”

Example

Here are two search results that came up when I did a search for “Document Management Software”:

First, a  meaningful result:

Document Management Software System | Content Central^TM
Your Search for Document Management Software Ends Here. Experience Content Central: The All-In-One, Browser-Based Document Management Solution.
www.ademero.com

A quick check of the page source at www.adermo.com confirmed that this snippet came from very nicely constructed meta title and meta description content.

Second, a not so meaningful result:

Explorer Software News
31 Mar 2008 … Vancouver, BC - US-based Ferrell Companies, a provider of EnterpriseDocument Management Software
for construction companies, and Explorer …
www.explorer-software.com/news-detail.asp?newsID=80

Be honest, which one would you click on first?
I think this provides a clear illustration of the difference you can make by spending time crafting your Meta Title and Meta Description content to create organic results are both meaningful and compelling to your search audience.

_______________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

I read a great article from Marketo recently, that dealt with the question of landing page form length. They asked the question, “Do short form convert better?” and carried out an experiment to find out. The results were quite compelling:

They used a landing page that had already been performing relatively well for them. To test their hypothesis, the only thing they changed was the form length. The three different forms they used comprised:

Form #1 – five fields
First Name
Last Name
Job Title
Company
Work Email

Form #2 – seven field
As above, plus:
Employees
Salesforce.com User?

Form #3 - nine fields
As above, plus:
Phone
Industry

Results- Shorter Forms Reduced Cost Per Conversion by up to 25%

- Short Form: Conversion rate 13.4%, cost per conversion $31.24.
- Medium Form: Conversion rate 12.0%, cost per conversion $34.94.
- Long Form: Conversion rate 10.0%, cost per conversion $41.90.

The difference in the cost per conversion between the short and long forms is $10.67, or over 25%. This means that each additional piece of information costs $1.85. Asking for a phone number (the most invasive of all the fields) costs more than $5.00.The conclusion was obvious: keep only the landing page with the short form and turn off the other versions.

Shorter is Better

I have always been a proponent of the short form, so I was pleased to see the results that Marketo observed. It’s just common sense really. If you ask someone to fill out 8, 10 or even 12 mandatory form fields (yes I’ve seen that many and more!) to access a simple piece of value added content, they are less likely to convert  than if you ask them for just three or four bits of information.

Once you have a persons name, work email, job title and company name you can pretty much guarantee getting hold of their address, phone number, web site, etc. All it takes is a little sleuthing on the web, or even easier, deploying the services  of a data cleansing and augmentation vendor to append the missing information, which could cost as little as $1.00 per record.

So, I would like to make a suggestion to all those form junkies out there. Ask for less and you will be rewarded with better conversions. It will take a little more work on the back end, but if you are able to bring in 25% or more additional conversions for the same marketing spend, the extra effort should pay for itself many times over.

_______________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

In paid search campaigns the majority of organizations simply use their web site (typically their home page) as the destination for the respondent that clicks on their ad.
In most cases this is absolutely the wrong thing to do.

Think about it. The respondent is searching for something very specific, and they are sent to your home page. If it’s like most home pages it’s actually designed to serve the needs of all sorts of site visitors, with many different goals. So the responded is forced to stop, think and then click around to find content that is relevant to them. If they don’t find what they are looking for in 5-10 seconds, they will simply go back Google and check out another link.

That’s why I’m such a huge proponent of using smart post-click marketing programs to manage the visitors experience much more tightly. In many instances, these can be built around simple custom landing pages that direct respondents to content that is aligned with their search term. (In B2B, this usually equates to a conversion centric landing page, designed to generate leads by offering some value added content in exchange for some contact information.)

However, if you want to increase your conversion rates, I recommend getting a little more sophisticated, by implementing fully-fledged conversion paths.

What’s a Conversion Path?
A conversion path is a linear landing experience, specifically designed to convert incoming traffic from your online marketing campaigns. It allows you to segment and qualify your online respondents from paid search, increasing the likelihood that they will take action once they get to the conversion point.

Conversion paths help a respondent to move easily from click through to conversion, using a series of connected pages.

Start With Segmentation
A conversion path typically starts with a segmentation page, served up directly after the respondent clicks on your ad in Google. It is very simple in design, and asks the visitor a question so they can identify who they are and what they are looking for.

For example, I have a client that sells Electronic Document Management software to Banks and Credit Unions. A simple segmentation page for them might have two big buttons on it that ask the visitor: “Are you a Bank” or “Are You a Credit Union”. This is easy for the visitor to answer, so there is little to no friction and they simply click through on the correct button.

Now we know a little more about them we are able to serve up a landing page that is more relevant, with an offer that’s more closely aligned with their particular profile.

Alternatively, we can further segment the visitor by serving up a sub-segmentation page that helps us understand their profile even more precisely. For example, if they identified themselves as a credit union we might then serve up a page that asks Do you have “More Than 5000 Members” or “Less Than 5000 Members”. Using this additional insight allows us to then serve up a landing page that speaks even more closely to their own particular needs. For example, for the small credit union we might serve up a landing page that talks about our SaaS capabilities and offers a while paper on the “Benefits of SaaS Solutions for Small Credit Unions” - since market intelligence and sales history show that it’s the smaller credit unions that are attracted by the low cost and ease of implementation that SaaS solutions offer.

The key to segmentation and sub-segmentation is that each click delivers a new page that’s relevant to the respondent but also low in friction and therefore keeps them engaged. Rather than sending respondents to a web site and hoping they will randomly surf around to find the information they are looking for, a conversion path makes it easy to serve up truly relevant content to your audience.

Don’t Forget to Say Thank You
Once you’ve elicited a conversion, which in B2B is typically a registration for some value added content, don’t forget to serve up a thank you page. It serves two purposes:

1. It’s an opportunity to provide the visitor with access to site content that’s relevant to their profile, as identified by the conversion path they took. Information that, had it been included elsewhere in the path (e.g. as optional links in the landing page), would only have served to distract the visitor from the ultimate goal, which was to get them to convert on the landing page.

2. It’s where you put the Google conversion code so you an easily track conversions in Google AdWords!

Conversion paths won’t always be a good fit, especially if you can’t create a clear, simple and unequivocal segmentation of audience. But when you can, they can do wonders for your overall conversion rates.

With thanks to Anna Talerico for some of the concepts covered in this posting.

_______________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

There are a lot of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) providers out there that do a very good job of getting you clicks on Google (paid or organic), but very few of them think beyond the click, to focus on the conversion of B2B visitors into identifiable leads.

That’s why I recently launched FunnelBuilders - a consultancy that helps technology organizations develop post-click marketing strategies to generate inbound leads.

Because all these SEM providers are so click-centric, they seem to have skewed the expectation of many of the technology organizations I prospect. As a result I get a mixed bag of response to my prospecting calls:

Not Interested in Internet Marketing
These people cut me off pretty early on in the call and tell me they are “Not interested.” They say they’ve tried paid search before and it didn’t work for them, so they have focused their marketing efforts elsewhere. Now, I always check out a prospect’s online presence before calling them, to assess if they would be good candidate for smart inbound marketing programs and the majority are. It’s sad that these people are ready to brush me off so easily, because most of them could really benefit from a well thought out, well run internet marketing program.

They Think They Have it in Hand
Some people are actually doing something on the internet and think it’s going OK. “Thanks for your call but we’ve already engaged a web agency and they’re helping us with all that stuff.” Now, there are very few SEM vendors out there that really grasp the complexities of high value B2B technology lead generation, and even fewer that understand the many facets of post click marketing best practices. Most of them believe that if they can get you on the first page of Google and garner lots of click throughs to your web site, they think they’ve done their job. Sadly, they’ve managed to convince their clients to think this way too. The fact is, clicks without conversions really don’t amount to much of anything from a lead generation perspective.

They Know They Could be Doing Better
Thankfully, there are a number of organizations out there that know they should be leveraging the internet more for lead generation, but they don’t necessarily understand what to do or how to do it. So when I call in with my pitch about the value of post-click marketing and how it can positively impact their inbound lead generation activities, they are very receptive. They quickly grasp the compelling value that post click marketing can offer and typically ask me to swing by for a face meeting to find out more. 

In the current climate, with sales cycles getting longer and longer, generating qualified leads is more important than ever, and getting the best value you can out of those difficult to find marketing dollars is of paramount importance. For the majority of technology organizations this means focusing more time and effort on intelligently leveraging the Internet as a source of potential leads - and this is what Post-Click Marketing is all about.

If you are interested in finding out more, feel free to contact me. Or at the very least, challenge your current SEM provider to spend more time focused on creating conversions vs. just clicks.

______________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of  FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement intelligent post-click marketing programs to generate actionable in-bound sales leads  -    www.funnelbuilders.com

A few postings back, I recommended that companies think twice about severely reducing marketing spend and laying off some or all of their marketing department in the face of current economic uncertainties.

Unfortunately some companies had no choice in the matter and had to make some hard decisions concerning people. In these exceptional times, when even the experts are unable to agree on how long or how deep this recession is going to be, a judicious tightening of the purse strings seemed to make sense.

The problem is, hacking into your marketing budget creates both a short- and a long-term headache for your organization. Neither of which is desirable.

Short term it reduces, or even shuts down, the output of your lead generation machine. This leaves your sales team with fewer leads to work on, which in the current climate is exactly the reverse of what you want. Especially as sales cycles on existing opportunities are being stretched out further and further and further.

Longer term, once you decide to loosen the purse strings, there will be a significant lag time before you can begin to feed new leads to your sales team again. This is because the well thought-out and effective marketing programs that you recently chopped off at the knees took a good while to develop and implement, and a lot of hard effort to optimize. Getting back to the enviable position you were in before you made those budget cuts simply won’t happen overnight.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to kick-start the economy by convincing you to go into massive rehiring mode. I understand you can’t justify that. I just want to bring your attention to the fact that most worthwhile marketing programs don’t deliver instant gratification. So whether you believe things are going to recover later this year, or early next, you need to be thinking about breathing some life into your more critical marketing programs (like inbound lead generation) at least three months in advance of your expected recovery date. And, don’t worry. You can do this without going into rehiring mode, with all the baggage that’s involved. Just use contractors.

There’s an abundance of very competent marketing talent out there right now, only too willing to fill in for you until you reach a point where it makes sense to hire for full time positions again. Many of these marketers, like myself, offer a wealth of experience, talent and know-how that is available on tap, as and when you need it. And, so long as you use their services judiciously, you’ll spend way less than you did to keep one or more full time members of your marketing staff on the payroll.

An added bonus of course, is that you get to test drive a few different individuals that might just turn out to be good candidates for a full time role, as and when you are ready to move back into hiring mode again.

_______________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

This week I was planning on writing a post about business blogging but realised that the key messages I wanted to share have already been covered off in one of my wife’s recent blog-posts. So, I am taking the liberty of re-blogging “Five Reasons Why Your Business Should Blog”, giving Amanda full credit for this excellent post.

________________________________________________

OK, so I admit to being a bit of a born-again blogger. Now that I’m no longer a blog-virgin, I feel compelled to share my new-found enthusiasm for social media.

But what about you? Are you still struggling to work out how and why you should become a business blogger? The reasons are many, and they’re also compelling. With all due respect to attention spans, I’ve produced a condensed list of the most important reasons for you to blog. They may inspire you, but if they don’t, you could wake up tomorrow still hopelessly blogless. Perhaps you’re allergic to the writing process. Maybe you’re short on time. Either way, please seek professional help. There are plenty of great writers who can blog on your behalf.

Why Blog?

One - Your Competitors Are Doing It
Blogging has crossed the corporate divide. Many businesses in your market are already using blogs to communicate with their customers. And they’re listening when their customers talk back. A blog is an excellent way to establish two-way communication in a 2.0 world.

Two - You’ll Improve Your Search Ranking
Google likes to see changes in your website content, and it will reward you with higher rankings. When you write a blog that contains relevant business content, you’re disciplining yourself to create frequent content updates, and that makes you more attractive to the search engines.

On top of this, when people follow your blog, and link to your content or respond to your posts with comments, you’ll be attracting inbound traffic to your site, which is also good for your site ranking.

Three - You’ll Become A Thought Leader
When you create a blog that contains informative, ethical and entertaining content, you quickly establish yourself as an industry leader - and draw attention to your products and services. Writing a blog is also an excellent way of keeping up to date with all the latest trends in your industry.

Four - Your Network Will Grow
Think of your blog as a conversational hub, an opportunity to network with anyone who comes into contact with your business. It’s a way of keeping in regular contact with customers, suppliers, channel partners, industry associations and employees.

Five - You Can Test New Ideas
A blog is a great way of sounding out clients when you’re planning a new product, or you’re in the early stages of development. And, once you’ve launched a product, your blog can act as a forum for feedback, allowing you to correct faults and strengthen favourite features.

_______________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement intelligent internet marketing programs to generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com

——————————————————
Amanda O’Donovan is a Toronto-based freelance business writer with a passion for her clients’ products and an obsession for detail, deadlines and common sense

My last few postings have focused on paid search and how landing page best practices can help improve conversions. So I thought this week I ‘d change it up and take a look at some basic best practices for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), specifically:

1. Identifying the right keywords
2. Optimizing your content correctly
3. Paying attention to keyword density

Optimizing a website to improve search engine rankings actually involves two key activities:

1. Embedding appropriate search terms in your website content, so that Google sees the association of your content with those terms, and includes you in the organic results it returns.

2. Developing as many (appropriate) inbound links to your website as possible, so that Google views you as being highly relevant for a given subject.

I’m going to focus on keywords this week. I’ll cover off link-building in a separate posting sometime in the near future.

Selecting the Right Keywords
To effectively optimize your website you must first establish which keywords and keyword phrases are most relevant to your business.

If you haven’t already done so, the best way to achieve this is to kick off a paid search campaign, coupled with an intelligent landing page program, to see which keyword phrases perform best. This will yields three key benefits:

1. You can track actual conversions vs. simple clicks, which is a much better measure of keyword value.

2. You get empirical evidence of what real people are actually searching for, vs. making educated guesses about which keywords to optimize against.

3. You’ll generate real inbound leads en route that you can hand off to your sales team.

Optimizing Your Content Correctly
Once you’ve generated a list of priority keywords, you should optimize one or maximum two keywords/ keyword phrases on each page of your website. First and foremost you must ensure that these keywords are included in your headings (H) tags, as Google pays a lot of attention to page headings, and reflects this in your search rankings. To do this, make sure your site pages are coded in such a way that main page headlines are H1 tags and subheads are H2 or H3 tags, and incorporate your keywords appropriately. You should also incorporate keywords into your main body content and you can also add them to alt and comment tags - but don’t overdo it. Google will penalize you if you have too many keywords in a page, and this will be reflected in a lower page ranking.

Keyword Density
Research indicates that keyword density on any given web page should ideally be 3% to 5% of the total text on the page. So calculate the keyword density on each of your key pages to ensure you don’t exceed these optimal levels.

To calculate keyword density, don’t just focus on the page content that you can see. Google doesn’t differentiate between page content or meta content, so you shouldn’t either. When you’re calculating your overall word and keyword counts, be sure to include Title tags, Description tags and Alt tags. It’s widely agreed that Google no longer pays attention to Meta keywords, but Yahoo does, so include these in your counts too.

Of course, there are many other things you can do to maximize the success of your website optimization program, but these three items are so fundamental, you should really place them at the top of your task list.

 ___________________________________

Sean O’Donovan is the owner of  FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement intelligent internet marketing programs to generate actionable in-bound sales leads  -  www.funnelbuilders.com  

I was watching a very compelling webinar from Ion Interactive a couple of weeks back and was pleased to see that this cutting edge internet marketing agency is very closely aligned with my own thinking on landing page best practices.

 Like me, they preach four best practices for landing page programs:

1. A landing page is not a web page – avoid superfluous navigation

2. In your landing page headline, include the keyword searched

3. Entice the visitor to register by “selling” your value added content

4. Don’t let the registration form be a roadblock to conversions

 However, the webinar focused on a fifth best practice that intrigued me no end. They call it “pre-conversion segmentation.”

 The idea is to have a “pre-landing” page that helps you segment your visitors into different categories. You present this page immediately after someone clicks on your Google AdWords ad, before you serve up a landing page itself. Once visitors have segmented themselves based on this page, you can then serve up  landing pages that speaks most effectively to their needs.

 For example, you might have a Google AdWords campaign to promote an ERP solution.

 You run a pre-conversion segmentation page that has two big buttons on it and asks:

“Are you: An SMB or An Enterprise?”

 This is clear and easy to understand. It causes very little friction for the visitor, who self segments by clicking on one of the buttons.

 Now that you know something about the size of your visitor’s organization, you can serve up a landing page that is tailored to speak to particular needs, including access to value added content that’s business-appropriate– e.g.  for the SMB you might offer a whitepaper on “Ten Things to Look out For When Selecting an ERP for Small & Medium Businesses,” while for the Enterprise visitor you might offer one on “Deploying ERP across the Enterprise - Ten Tips to Assure Success.”

 By including pre-segmentation conversion in your landing page programs you can create significant improvements in conversion rates. Ion Interactive’s own research shows that it can increase conversions by 20% or more. That’s a very nice improvement for a fairly modest adjustment to a program.

 I have recently ‘published’ a handy reference presentation on post-click marketing best practices, including pre-segmentation conversion pages. You can download it here:

www.funnelbuilders.com/post_click_mktg.pdf

 
If, you want to start (or improve) your own landing page program but don’t have the bandwidth, expertise or resources, do feel free to call me. I’d love to help you build out a carefully crafted approach that delivers actionable inbound sales leads.

 ___________________________________

 Sean O’Donovan is the owner of  FunnelBuilders, a consulting company that helps technology organizations develop and implement intelligent internet marketing programs to generate actionable in-bound sales leads -  www.funnelbuilders.com