Digital marketing campaigns are a fantastic way to reach a different audience and bring new traffic to your website. Digital marketing campaigns come in various forms: Social media marketing, banner ads, and blogger outreach to name but a few. Whatever your approach to digital marketing, we suggest the following advice to make sure your website performs to its best ability when presented to a fresh new audience.
Landing pages
A landing page is a dedicated page on your website where a visitor lands when they click on the link in your digital marketing campaign. Landing pages are great for introducing a new audience to your brand by clearly demonstrating what you offer with a clear, precise call to action and objective.
We recommend creating a dedicated landing page for each targeted campaign that has a different objective. For example, you wouldn’t use the same landing page for two different digital marketing campaigns if the objective of one is to get more sign ups to a newsletter and the other is to boost sales for that month. The same goes for pushing different products online through your digital marketing campaigns.
You could either adapt a pre-existing page or create a new one to be used as a dedicated landing page for your digital marketing campaigns. We would suggest in the beginning modifying a pre-existing page of your website. That way, when you become more experienced or more committed to your digital marketing campaign, you can create a dedicated landing page.
Within your landing page, we recommend including:
- The same imagery as in your digital marketing campaign – this is so that a visitor clicking on your advert and landing on your website will be greeted with consistent branding and messaging. You can ensure both the ad and the landing page use the same imagery by using the same Graphic Designer and graphics to design both the banner ads or social media post imagery, and the landing page graphics. It can also be done by ensuring the bloggers you use in your blogger outreach campaign use the same products or imagery in their post as that which features on the landing page.
- A clear message – this should say what you do and should use the same terminology and keywords as the advert your visitors viewed before arriving on your landing page. It is also an excellent opportunity to demonstrate your brand values.
- Call to actions – either to sign up, buy online, to call you or download. If you’re a service company, we suggest including a lead generation contact form or email address for visitors to get in touch via. “Add to cart” options are ideal if you’re an eCommerce website.
- Lots of white space – this will give your call to actions and messages more focus.
- Testimonials – keep them short and sweet. Testimonials give your business credibility to a new audience that may not have heard of your products or services before.
- A link to find out more – this will keep your landing page as simple and uncluttered as possible.
Here are our design tips for a killer landing page:
- Strip down the copy and put the call to action in the focus. You can do this by making the call to action big and clickable, bold, and in a contrasting colour to its surroundings.
- Add fun facts to grab attention and prove the need for your products or services. Although not necessarily beneficial for all industries, it can be ideal for technology and health products and services. A simple infographic will do the trick to communicate this.
- Use arrows or signals pointing towards the call to action. For example, you could have an arrow pointing towards the “sign up now” button. It doesn’t have to be a graphic; you could also use a photograph of a person looking at the sign-up button. If your audience looks at a photo of someone looking at a subject, their eyes will be instantly drawn to the subject.
- Include a newsletter sign-up form so that even if people don’t convert there and then they’re still going to keep in touch.
- Add a remarketing tag to the page set to target users that did not convert. If done correctly marketing allows you to gently remind your visitors of your products or services and help increase revenue.
- Strip down your website’s layout on the landing page. Remove the footer, sidebar and navigation menu to give even further focus to the message and call to action. As mentioned above, you can include a link to find out more that can take your visitors to your main website.
Design tips for a form on your landing page:
- Strip it down. Only ask for information that is necessary.
- Don’t ask for your visitors’ counties in an address form. Postal services don’t require them.
- Include postcode look-up, autofill and autocorrect to help your visitors fill out their forms quickly and accurately.
- Try not to ask for credit card details too early into the customer journey, you don’t want to scare your customers off.
Test, test, test!
Before you launch a big digital marketing campaign, we recommend testing your website regularly to see how it copes on all devices and with sudden surges of traffic.
Appearance
Make sure you landing page makes an impact on all browsers and devices. If your website is already fully responsive, chances are your dedicated landing page will also be, but it is always a good idea to test. It’s vital to ensure your call to actions appear above the fold on all devices and screen sizes to help maximise your campaign results. We would also suggest testing to see if your call to action button is big enough to be tapped using touch screens.
Accessibility is another thing to consider when testing your landing page. Colour blindness is common in males, so it’s vital your landing page uses contrasting colours that can be viewed by everyone.
Speed & performance
We would recommend investing some time into load testing your website to see how it would hold-up when a high volume of traffic hits it. You can do this by making a copy of your website, and by mimicking a surge of traffic. Load testing can be particularly useful if you wish to find out what areas might break in the visitor conversion path.
If you run an eCommerce website, it’s important you optimise your programing and database to be capable of having thousands of visitors adding items to a cart at the same time. If it takes more than a few seconds for an item to be added to the cart after the user has clicked the button, it may leave them frustrated, which could result in them abandoning their cart. To monitor this, you can setup specific tracking in Google Analytics that looks at the number of carts created vs orders placed.
If you’re a client of ours, we can load test your website for you and make recommendations on how to improve the speed and performance of your website.
Want to enhance your online presence and boost your marketing efforts? Explore our comprehensive guide on Digital Marketing for WordPress to discover strategies that will help you drive traffic, improve conversions, and grow your business.
