We introduced the concept of landing page optimization (LPO) to y’all at the beginning of this year. If you remember, it was a two-parter (Search Marketing Special: Landing Page Optimization; and Pt. 2) on LPO and how it plays a significant role in search marketing, specifically to drive direct response from consumers who clicked on your search marketing advertisement. You also learned a few ways to improve the effectiveness of your landing pages, like adjusting the transparency of CTAs or the navigation of your website. Today, we’ll be extending the subject matter into how LPO drives direct response and ultimately increases the ROI of your website.
Direct response is a type of marketing that’s designed to generate an immediate response from consumers, where each consumer response (or purchase) can be measured with a specific value and correlated to individual advertisements. For instance, perhaps you’re running search marketing advertisements for a specific boat in your inventory, and your destination URL (landing page) follows all of the best practices of LPO. This is good! Furthermore, let’s say that you have a form on the page that allows visitors to request floorplans. This is getting better. And let’s say a few customers have even come in to test drive the boat after receiving the floorplans. This is wonderful! If you’ve captured this data and kept good records, you can probably determine the value of your advertisement, the landing page, and the form that got you the qualified lead. That’s direct response at its finest.
While LPO might not be as prominent as other digital marketing disciplines, it’s the natural successor of direct response, which has been one of the best ways to generate leads for more than one-hundred years. And still, social media marketing and digital advertising overshadow LPO as a more viable marketing option. Guess what? IT ISN’T! LPO is what makes the most of resulting website visits, whether the traffic generated in a source of SEO, search marketing, email marketing, or reputation management. Heck, LPO has been branded as web design, when most designers have little knowledge of the subject.
LPO focuses on communicating an offer and triggering a response. Web design could be any visual information the brand communicates to the website visitor in order to get a response, which is much different that the focus of LPO. In a sense, LPO is web design with an agenda - to increase the quantity and quality of the visitor response to their website experience. This response can be correlated to a digital marketing discipline and measured with a specific value to each. For e-commerce, most of this calculation is relatively easy, as conversion is automatically associated with revenue and profit, but savvy marketers don’t stop there, they look for ways to nurture their post-sale leads into a remarketing and lead nurturing cycle.
The website is a key communication point between your company and your target market. LPO is the difference between amplifying and wasting the effort and expense involved in bringing more visitors to your website. LPO ultimately converts traffic generated digital marketing efforts into sales or leads, and its impact on the bottom line is direct and measurable.