July 28 2015
These tips cover both landing pages you create for all-online exposure, as well as print and other marketing that you want to lead a person to your website. You may be writing a guest blog post or social site post and you want to generate a click to a landing page to generate a lead. Or, you could be mailing a postcard to a neighborhood, and you want to take a listing prospect to a landing page to generate a call-in for an appointment.
Determine what you want to accomplish and a tightly focused goal and call-to-action. As an example, you want to post to Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ about the importance of a thorough CMA and how they're done. Or, you're doing a mailer into a neighborhood with that goal.
You now have your goal, and you want to stay true to that topic, focus on it, and don't dilute your message with other stuff. In other words, don't also try to talk about how you work with buyers just because you can free up some space or add some words.
Never just send a prospect to your home page if you're doing anything other than "brand" marketing. Using our example, you want a page created specifically about how a CMA is done and why it's crucial to price the home right from the first day.
Carrying the previous tip forward, everything you say in your social post or mail piece should be related to a CMA, including market statistics and how important it is to select appropriate comps. Introducing these concepts in the marketing piece and then elaborating on the landing page will be appreciated by your prospect who is interested in this topic or they won't click on the link or type it into their browser.
"Don't spill your candy in the lobby" is an old sales training saying. It's related to not telling the receptionist too much or you may not get past them to your prospect. It relates because you don't want to give away your most important information in your marketing piece, which may take away their reason to go to your landing page where your call-to-action is ready to get their contact information.
This is normal marketing advice, as people will only respond to any advertising if they see some benefit or feature of interest to them. Again, using our example, you may tell them that overpriced listings take longer to sell and almost always only sell when the price is reduced at least once. They can see that it's in their best interests to have their home correctly priced, so they'll be more likely to go to your landing page for more information.
The whole idea of landing pages and calls-to-action is to get their contact information to move to the next level of personal contact. Don't forget to skip the landing page step if you can by putting your phone number and maybe social sites info in your marketing. Place them on your landing page as well. They may not fill out a form, but they could go to one of your social sites and remain a possible future prospect.
You may already have a very thorough article about your CMA process on your site, or you should. That's a landing page for people arriving from search or navigating around your site, and you can use many of these tips in creating it. However, even if you copy some of it, you need to create a different page for each specific advertising piece.
This new landing page should not be anywhere in your site navigation. You want to know that visitors to this page most likely came from specific marketing campaigns so you can measure success.
Don't let your site software automate the META title and description. At least check them to be sure that they are true to your original plan and goal. Use the right description, as it usually shows in their browser and reinforces why they're there. This may get you some search engine traffic to the page, but the fact that they may see it in their browser when they come from marketing is still the higher goal.
Using our example, you might make sure that your landing page URL is something like http://yoursite.com/CMA. You don't want it longer for two reasons. First, you aren't looking for SEO exposure with this page. Second, you want to make it easy for mailing piece recipients to type it into their browser.
You can use the URL inside the mailer text or social site post in more than one place. Just placing it at the end could cost you traffic, as some people may never make it that far.
This is number one for a reason. You can do everything right and never get decent results if you don't have a strong offer and call-to-action on the landing page. In our example, how about offering a sample CMA for the target neighborhood? It's a strong offer, deliverable via email when they fill in your form.
This is a process with a single purpose, getting a visitor to the site and getting their contact information. Follow it and you'll be very happy with the number and quality of leads you get from your marketing through your website.
To view the original article, visit the WebsiteBox blog.