Marketing and sales go together like peanut butter and jelly. Sure, each one is great on its own, but when you put them together, you get something even better. It may sound a little strange, but it’s a helpful analogy to help you conceptualize your new digital marketing strategy.
Great websites are key to great customer experience. It lets a prospective customer know immediately who you are, what you’re about, and how you can help them. They’ll figure out a glance if you’re fun and fresh, professional and experienced, helpful and informative… or if you’re just a little shady. It’s not just about the design, or the copy, but the overall impression you make on each new visitor. In that sense, we like to think of websites as a digital storefront. It lets people know straight away if they want to walk through the door and learn more, or walk away and go somewhere else.
However, new websites can be expensive. We get it. Website design and development is a huge process that requires a considerable investment of time and money to be done well. The good news is there are lots of different ways you can create a great digital customer experience. In fact, we’re going to let you in on a secret that marketers have been using for years to boost sales without creating an all-new website. Okay, are you ready? We do it by using something called a landing page.
Time-poor and looking for a quick solution? Call our team today.
What is a landing page?
A “landing page” is just a marketing term for the first page a prospective customer visits (or “lands on”) when they click through to your website. Once you have a digital marketing strategy in place, there are a few different ways people can find you – and it might surprise you how:
- A blog post. This typically occurs if they’ve done a Google search and your post contains lots of search-friendly keywords that has made it rank on the results page. Alternatively, this can occur if you’ve shared the post to social media and people have clicked to read it in full.
- A product or service page. Again, this can occur as the result of a Google search, but it’s more likely that people will enter your site this way via Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
- The home page. This is actually not the most common way people will visit you. Generally, this occurs through a direct search or through a referral mechanism like Google My Business.
It’s easy to find out the most common port of entry for new people visiting your website. All you have to do is install Google Analytics on your site. There will be a menu on the left-hand side, so click on Behavior, and then Behavior Flow, which will generate a flow-chart illustrating the way people move through your website. The first column will show you the top landing pages, the next few columns will show you what people typically click on next, and the final column will show you where they left.
A great website should walk them through the process as quickly as possible, until they either go ahead and buy something from your digital store, or schedule a service. The goal is to give customers what they want straight away, so they don’t have to choose their own adventure on your site.
Make it easy for them to find what they need so they have a great experience.
Landing pages can qualify your leads. Find out how.
Key elements of a landing page
Here’s where it gets interesting. A landing page can be a pre-existing page, like a product or services page. It can be a blog that addresses a specific topic, such as a common pain point your customers experience or a frequently-asked question. It can be a custom page, like a special offer.
However, there’s one thing every landing page needs: a call to action.
A “call to action” is another marketing term you’ll hear a lot. It’s used to describe the next step you want a customer to take when they land on your website. This blog post is actually a great example. Right at the start, we asked you to call us. Since we like you, here’s a heads up that we’ll ask you to call us again at the end. (And hey, we’ll do it again now just for good measure – if you want to talk landing page strategy, give us a call. We genuinely love helping people with this stuff.)
Yes, content is important. You need to tell people how you can help them. Yes, design is important. Your page needs to be eye-catching and easy to navigate. However, unless you have a strong call to action that invites a prospective customer to engage with you and take the next step on the path to purchase (we’ll come back to this in a second), the page won’t serve you as well as it could.
Again, make it easy for people! Tell your customers what you need them to do next.
Learn how to create a high-converting landing page.
Landing pages are key to sales
Remember how we said that marketing and sales go together like peanut butter and jelly? The eCommerce boom closed the gap between marketing and sales together, because now it’s possible for customers to float along the journey from hearing about a brand for the first time to buying an item, or scheduling a service, all on their own. This process can happen in as little as five minutes!
In marketing terms, this is called the “path to purchase.” It goes something like this:
- Exposure: This occurs when a prospective customer becomes aware of your products or services for the first time. Maybe they saw an online advertisement; maybe they’re actively searching for businesses like yours. Either way, they found you.
- Discovery: This phase starts when the customer decides they want to learn more about you. Hello, landing page! They will click on a link and end up on your website. Put your best foot forward and make sure they land on the page that’s going to be most helpful to them. This means promoting products and services pages, or a custom page with a special deal.
- Consideration: If they’re still here, it means they’re now a “qualified lead,” which means they’re the type of person who is likely to go ahead and complete a sale. This is where content comes into play, because you need to anticipate any issues that may arise and address them proactively. Answer frequently-asked questions. Remind customers how your product or service will help them. Add video to build trust, so they can see that you’re a real person doing real business. Anything that provides useful information in a digestible way is good.
- Conversion: They complete a sale and officially become a customer! Whether they stepped straight through the path to purchase in one go, or they came to your website, left to think about it, and came back again, this is what it’s all about. Congratulations on the sale!
- Retention: They have a good experience and either come back again or refer you to others. All you have to do now is rinse and repeat.
If you were going to divide this into marketing and sales, you could say that steps 1-3 fall into the former category, while steps 4-5 fall into the latter. However, as you can see, the digital sales funnel blurs them both into one smooth funnel and gives customers exactly what they need at each step.
Best of all, by focusing on landing pages and the path each customer will take through your website, you can make targeted upgrades without shelling out for an entirely new website. It’s an efficient, effective, and economical way to improve customer experience and boost your bottom line.
It’s time to start making some sandwiches.
Remember how we said we’d ask you to call again? Yup, we’re doing it! Talk to our team about a landing page strategy.
