White Board Drawing of World Wide Web with a website and Landing Pages on the site
Step 1 in growing your online presence is simply the creation of your digital properties including a company website and blog. With this, a business creates their online footprint and "home base" or "store front" on the web.
As I've noted before in my "5 Keys to Thrive in this Digital Age", blogging is key for companies today! This is Step 2 in growing your business online, namely, blogging with the intent to create, publish, and share content with the intent of drawing in visitors who can become customers. Often referred to within the realm of "Content Marketing", blogging offers the opportunity to answer common questions via education blog posts related to your industry and line of business. You can outline solutions and tips to key items, offer best practices, "how to" posts and more. Blogging helps a company offer greater detail on the problems their products and services solve. More importantly, it serves as a gateway to be found and begin the process of moving visitors towards entry into your sales funnel.
The key is then moving visitors into funnel! This is Step 3, converting visitors into leads or potential customers, and we'll look at this below!
Landing Pages move visitors into the funnel
Converting visitors to leads is done by providing a form and incentive for the user to sign-up for something.
Typically that "something" is a resource such as a coupon, discount, ebook, or other item of value that is valuable enough for the user to complete a sign-up form requiring their name and email. With a opt-in you can get their permission to be added to your email marketing list. This moves the visitor from an anonymous surfer on the website to a potential customer. The key in doing this is to have landing pages on your website and other locations such as your Facebook Page tabs.
What is a landing page? Glad you asked!
A landing page is a focused page that exists with one intent, to motivate the visitor to complete a simple online form. This is done so that the person can be moved from anonymous by the company to an identified potential customer. This then enables the company to market to and nurture that person towards becoming a customer. Typically this would be done via follow-up email marketing.
More details on what exactly a landing page is:
In essence, landing pages are streamlined web pages with a form. They invite users to sign-up. Those landing pages that have the highest rates of getting visitors to complete the form are those that offer an incentive or something of value in return. The value has to be significant enough to move the user to want to complete the form.
For example, at the bottom of a blog post that attracted the visitor to the site in the first place, there can be a sentence that links to the site's landing page. An example would be to say this, "If you're interested in learning more about how Facebook promotions can grow your company Facebook page Likes, then check out our free ebook here." The link would then take the user to the landing page. The same goes for posts in social media. A business can share a post that inspires and informs, and then end with a link from the post to the landing page. Smart businesses are looking at ways to increase traffic to their web properties and then developing strategies using tools such as landing pages to convert visitors into potential customers. Once a visitor is then identified, a strategy to nurture towards a sale can then be implanted. The key to remember in landing page design is simplicity with an incentive.
How about your website and Facebook page, are you using landing pages to move visitors into your sales funnel?
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