Have you ever found yourself daydreaming about how you can increase the amount of web-inbound leads coming to your site? Wake Up!!! The answers have been right in front of you the entire time. As you browse the internet, you pass over many tools that can be used in your quest for lead generation and brand awareness. Popular options are landing pages and microsites. How can they benefit you and your quest to achieve marketing greatness? Read on to find out!
So What is a Landing Page?
There is a lot of confusion, even within the industry, as to what constitutes a landing page. To be clear, a landing page is not a separate website, it is a page on your website with a focused message explaining the benefits of a particular product or service. Think of your landing pages as digital sales reps who are gathering information about potential customers. The great thing about these digital sales reps is that they work 24 hours a day & seven days a week. Gathering information about your website visitors allows you to build relationships with your leads, so that your real sales reps can focus on the most qualified contacts.
How You Can Benefit
Page Quantity
Research has found that companies with 30 or more landing pages generate seven times more leads than companies that have less than 10 landing pages. Knowing this, you can do a quick audit of your business and website to see where you stand. Start with 15 landing pages and develop a great base to begin your digital marketing strategy.
Lead Generation
All landing pages should use a form to gather information. Forms allow you to capture important information about people who want to express interest in your product or service. Combined with a CRM, the completed forms can help develop your sales departments list with warm leads instead of cold calls. Since you are already aware of which products or services the person is interested in, you’ll be able to build and better nurture relationships with your leads. This is why landing pages are a great driver for the conversion stage of inbound marketing. In essence, the more quality landing pages you have on your website, the more opportunities you have to convert leads. Now, who doesn’t want that!!
Quality of Leads
Not every person who arrives on your landing page will be ready to purchase immediately. It is possible, that some are in the research stage of their process and looking for information. Allowing them to indicate this, by providing a space to comment, will help you to better understand their needs. Adding these options helps you gauge if your leads are interested in knowing more about your products and services, or whether they will eventually convert over to being a customer.
There are some situations in which using a landing page is not the appropriate course of action. Another tool that you could use instead is a Microsite.
What Is a Microsite?
Microsites are exactly what they sound like…..They’re small websites, which usually have a page or two, catering to a specific task like promoting a particular brand, product or service. The majority of the time you probably shouldn’t use them. However, they can work and be effective in specific circumstances. Maybe your company offers a service that is different from its core competency or your website is crowded enough as it is. These scenarios would offer you the perfect opportunity to create a microsite.
Is a Microsite Right for You?
A microsite can be a powerful tool in the quest to attract prospects, deepen brand loyalty, and extend your brand or organization’s reach in a non-spammy way. Here are some of the ways that you can use them to your advantage.
Flexibility
Changes to a major site can..move…at…a…glacial…pace. Microsites, on the other hand, are quick to design and go live, therefore representing an efficient use of your resources. While IT departments may cringe at the thought of marketing folks tinkering in their domain, they’ll appreciate not having to go through a long site change process.
Testing
Microsites are exciting opportunities for brands to experiment and take some risks. A microsite doesn’t involve tinkering with your company website, so it’s possible to take more risks with content than you usually would. If you have an idea that you have been playing with, and you want to dip a toe in those waters, a microsite can help you gauge audience reaction.
Focused
Your primary company website, almost by definition, most likely focuses equally on each major content section so that it feels balanced. A microsite asks for no such thing from you. Instead, it offers the perfect antidote to the lack of specificity required of a main site. Because a microsite only focuses on one topic, idea, promotion, or visual, you have the luxury of devoting all of your attention to your pet project.
User-Friendly
Forget the backslashes and hashtags. In fact, forget a complicated URL altogether. Microsite web addresses, are easy to remember, find and share, since they do not need to be tied to your main site. Users don’t need to remember a complicated pathway—simply name your campaign or pick a specific keyword phrase and slap a “.com” onto the end.
The Takeaway
So what have we learned today? Landing pages are an effective tool to generate leads, analyze the potential of these leads and accordingly convert them into customers. You can always experiment with the content and design of your landing page to figure out what works best for you and provide a better user experience for a potential customer.
Microsites can be a perfect solution if you need to reach out to a target audience or market, track a short lived campaign, launch a new product or testing marketing strategies. It can provide a truly seamless, easy-to-navigate, task-based approach to connect with your target audience. Now that’s a customer experience that’s worth the effort.
With these two powerful tools, your day dreaming of lead generation and brand awareness can come to a quick reality.