Now that you’ve got traffic coming to your site, it is essential to capitalize on that traffic. Part one of this equation is presenting an attractive, professional design; part two is tailoring your message to compel your audience to take action. According to a recent MarketingSherpa report, however, a staggering number of businesses fail to speak directly to their audience. Non-relevant messaging not only results in a lost sale, it also wastes the time, effort and money expended to bring in that traffic in the first place. Don’t be part of the crowd – build campaigns that convert your visitors to sales.

Be Specific

Does your home page speak to a specific segment of your audience? Of course not – instead it serves as a general introduction to your product/service. Yet, nearly 50% of targeted ads drive traffic to the company’s home page. Can you see the disconnect? A visitor who clicks on your carefully crafted link, expecting to see the specific thing they clicked on the link for, instead gets a generalized presentation that may not relate to their needs. Rather than dig into your site to find the specific thing they need, human nature dictates that most of the time they will simply click away to someone else.

Most of us by now are quite familiar with the concept of a landing page: a Web page that allows you to capture visitor data, via a call to action form. The most effective landing pages are specifically tailored to their target audience. Visitors typically reach this page by clicking a link elsewhere on the web. This may take the form of a PPC ad, or a link in a newsletter to download a white paper, or something similar. Whatever the case, your link was theoretically crafted to appeal to a narrow market – so make your landing page reflect that specificity!

Implement, Then Perfect

We’ve mentioned split testing before in the context of email campaigns, but it’s equally relevant to landing pages. What font size will yield the best results? Should that heading be black, or red? Which of these three images most persuades people to click? You’ll find all this out by split testing, so get your best guess in place and then start tracking it.

You can measure a lot of metrics with your landing page, but the key is to change only one variable at a time. If you change more than one variable, suddenly your results are far less useful, because your different results could stem from any of the things you changed. Changing one thing at a time allows you to very accurately track what works and what doesn’t.

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Shameless plug: MWD Web can help you implement a landing page strategy for your company’s site. Let us worry about the details, and you can watch your inbound marketing efforts yield tremendous fruit.