Tag Archives: Paid Search

One overwhelming theme from the sessions at the Online Marketing Seminar in San Diego was“customer first.” It’s no longer all about what information the company wants to push out, but rather about understanding and addressing their customer’s pain points. 2012 is the year of the customer and marketing efforts from social media to landing pages are going to need to be focused on addressing those pain points.

Now what does that have to do with paid search landing pages? Successful paid search landing pages will have to move from landing pages that only serve to get the customer to fill out a form to those that focus on addressing what the customer really wants. In the next era of landing pages it’s about giving customers the information they need, and being confident enough in your product that your customer would, after getting the information for free, still want to contact you.

The new paid search landing pages are really going the direction of micro-sites that offer up all the information that companies used to hide behind the form. What makes a micro-site better than a one page landing page? By creating a 4-5 page micro-site you have the ability to get beyond the surface and really draw the customer into why you’re better than the competition, and convince them that they want to speak to you instead of assuming they already do.

Now you’re probably thinking won’t my “leads” go down if I don’t require the customer to fill out a nice long form and isn’t that bad? Well yes leads will go down, but that’s not bad because the quality of the lead will be better.  Here are my top two key points to take into account as you look to revamp your landing pages in 2012.

Don’t hide behind the form – Share the Information. In the old landing page cycle you had to give up your personal information to get what you wanted. As more customers have become internet savvy and have been bombarded by emails they have become more hesitant to give up their email address to simply get information they feel should be free. Change your way of thinking of landing pages from getting contact information and having to sell yourself to the customer to letting the micro-site do the selling and utilize your sales team to follow up with customers who really want to be contacted. While this thinking might decrease number of leads, this change in thinking will help drive better quality leads, which your sales team will no doubt be thankful for.

Good Design is Key – The Google Preview Tool. With the new Google preview tool searchers can see what the landing page looks like before even clicking on your ad. Would you rather click on an ad for a page with information concerning your pain points or one where all you can do is fill out a form? As more people utilize the Google preview tool, if you continue to utilize a page with a form, you will no doubt see the performance of your paid search suffer. Create a compelling design that reflects your company’s brand image and contains relevant content to improve click-through-rate and cost-per-click. You can no longer hype what your customer will get within the paid search text ad and not deliver on the landing page, the customer will know before they even click. Failure to realize this will begin to affect your click-through-rate and therefor your cost-per-click and relevancy ranking. You have been warned!

Would you click here knowing that is what you’re going to get?

Google Preview Image