Last week I wrote about content marketing and its growing importance for industrial B-2-B marketers in terms of SEO and engaging visitors. Customers are using keywords to find your website and you want to show well on SERPs and keep them engaged straight through to the contact phase of the sales cycle. Good, fresh content is essential to staying competitive and there is a surprising amount of application research and product development at every company that customers and prospects will find useful and interesting. Details about trade show attendance and milestones can show a healthy company on the move, but make sure there’s something more universally engaging to your target market to offset more internal content. Houston-based industrial marketing and consulting company Tiecas, Inc. have a helpful post on their blog that gives you six steps to getting started.
In this post I want to focus on Landing Pages and why they’ve become essential web marketing tools. Not only is adding a landing page a great way to add content to your website, it is the best way to generate leads through digital marketing. Got your attention now? Great, let’s get into it.
So what are landing pages, exactly? Landing pages are pages of specific content that receive traffic from corresponding inbound marketing initiatives that can take the form of print ads, email blasts, banner ads, PPC ads, social media posts and even organic searches. Those initiatives usually include an offer with enticing information about a white paper, product or service that, once followed, lead to a landing page that provides information in greater depth with a form that visitors can fill out to take the next step in the process. When someone fills out a form, not only does it mean they want to be contacted, but they usually volunteer vital information that can be used to reach other prospects like them. Sent forms also create a metrics trail with statistics that can further direct future marketing efforts.
But what about all that information on the website that took months to add and polish? No worries, it’s still there and links to other sections of the website can be included on the landing page to attract your visitor to related topics, videos, .pdfs, and resource content. Ideally, everything works together and customers will sense that their valuable time has been considered because the content they’re interested in hasn’t been gated behind a half dozen clicks from the homepage – a common B-2-B web marketing mistake. And once you’ve created a landing page for each of your specific initiatives, they can be tweaked affordably to reflect new initiatives down the line.
Okay, all of that makes sense but how many landing pages make for an effective mix? Pamela Vaughan of Hubspot posted a number of statistics that basically translate to the more the merrier. In short, while up to 10 is good, conversions increase dramatically between 10 – 15. For B-2-B she suggests 40+ segment specific pages to increase variety and targeting opportunities. Again, once they’re created, tweaking them to reflect new products and services builds affordably on the initial ROI.
– S. Norton
For more info on how you can affordably create effective landing pages for your company through our experienced SMS staff, send an email to [email protected] and/or reply in the comments below.