The great thing about improving your landing page quality is that it’s usually way easier than improving other marketing aspects, and a little upgrade can go a long way. Think about it this way – a jump from 0.5% conversion rate to a 1% conversion rate doubles your sales. So the question becomes “How can you improve that conversion rate?”

In this article, I’ll list seven examples of effective pages and name some tips and principles that hopefully will enable you to make some strategic adjustments. 

What makes a high-converting landing page? 

How you put together your perfect landing page will depend entirely on your target audience. The page’s CTA (call to action), copy, visual assets, and overall design should be informed by who you want the page to resonate with most. Even though each landing page is unique to the company and its goals, here are some points to keep in mind when designing the page to get the best conversion rate possible:

• Figure out what CTA you want for your landing page. Do you want visitors to learn more about your business, learn more about your product, subscribe to a newsletter, or buy your product? Keep your CTAs clear and limit the amount per page to keep your audience from being confused about why they’re on your site.  Whatever CTA you choose, focus all the page’s content to that end.

• Keep your audience in mind when writing copy. When you work at a company, you have all this background information on your product—your readers don’t. Write to your customer as if they are hearing about your company or product for the first time, and focus on the core problem you’re trying to solve. You can get a little wordy and detailed in the blog, but on the landing page make it highly skimmable and highly digestible. 

• Make sure it has a visual impact. The best landing pages keep the viewer engaged with beautiful and interesting visuals. Attention spans are shorter than ever these days. Photos and videos on your landing page can both entertain and inform your audience, and lend credibility to your brand. 

Now that we’ve gone through some basics, let’s look at some examples of some of the best converting and most effective landing pages I’ve been able to find on the internet. 

1. Airbnb’s Earn Money Hosting page

With copywriting and design, white space is gold. Airbnb’s simple design and layout bring the focus of the page to the content. The CTA is clear, and the copy is easy to follow as you scroll. Write concise headers with short, and punchy paragraphs. Even though the blocks of texts on their page are short, they still convey all the information they need to get the message across. It can be difficult finding the balance between too much and too little writing, but Airbnb shows us here that having lots of short paragraphs is usually smarter than having just a few, big meaty ones. 

2. Drift’s conversational AI page

I can’t overstate the importance of having good reviews and showing off to your customers what reputable names have trusted you with their money. In addition to Drift’s dynamic slightly rebellious branding, their scrolling gallery of logos and reviews does an amazing job of proving to the consumer that they are proud of what they do and they know what they’re doing. Social proof is a big deal to potential customers. If you have high-profile users, show them off! It’s a small world—you could land some more high-profile clients this way. 

3. Bills.com’s debt recommendations 

Sometimes the simplest landing page is the most effective. Landing on Bills.com’s page, you’re forced to use the interactive bar and go through a few simple questions to get to their recommendation. Interactive elements can help your user feel their experience on your site is personalised, and they keep users’ attention far better than just content for reading. To see their debt relief recommendation, you have to put in your contact information. If the viewer gets past this point, you can generate a lot of leads for future email campaigns and retargeting. 

4. Smartcare’s schedule a demo page

 One of my favorite elements on Smartcare’s page is the video. In clear, relatable, and charming terms, their video at the top of the landing page relays the benefits of their product and earns an emotional response. (Adorable children playing will do that to a person.)  Videos on landing pages can be difficult to pull off since mobile-first design causes people to watch shorter videos with no audio or not watch videos at all, but luckily this page’s beautiful design and persuasive bullet points do a good job substituting for the video when they need to. 

5. Moz’ keyword explorer

It’s a challenge for SaaS companies to visually explain what their product is on a landing page. For companies that don’t have a physical product, photos are still vital. Moz does a great job explaining how their software works by using screenshots of their product and how the customer would use it. We usually think of screenshots as being cheap and ineffective compared to featuring professional photography, but this isn’t always the case. There’s something refreshingly authentic about a screenshot, and for products and services that are entirely online, they play an imperative role in explaining what exactly the product is. Giving your users visuals will help them understand your value offering and how it can solve their problem. 

6. Unbounce’s landing page optimisation software

With Unbounce’s expertise in the landing page design space you shouldn’t be surprised that their own landing page is beautifully done. In particular, I love Unbounce’s sticky nav – that bar at the top that follows you as you scroll so that you can click “Start My Free Trial” at any time you like. Sticky navs are a great strategy to make sure your page’s CTA is clear and to remind you why you’re on the page as you scroll. This page’s CTA buttons are large, they stand out really clearly from the background, and they make themselves extremely tempting to click the way that they light up when you hover over them.

7. Flickr stock photos

Great landing pages often have an interesting or thought-provoking headline at the top that entices you to read on and learn more. The landing page is also a great example of how simple design can work in your favor. The screen scrolls through beautiful photos with only two sentences of text and a CTA on the centre of the page. There’s no way for the viewer to get lost and go where they shouldn’t. No distractions, no complexity, just photos and a CTA button. More often than not, simple is best. 

It’s time to convert!

When done right, landing pages can convert viewers to buyers like crazy. To make the most effective landing page you need to find the right balance of copy, visuals, and design that works best for your audience. Make data-driven decisions and test lots of variations to see what hits your audience in just the right way. Researching what’s working for other companies in your industry will prepare you to get as many conversions as possible. 

The post 7 Great Landing Pages and Why They Convert appeared first on PerformanceIN.

The slogan “adapt or migrate” applies well to our situation in the current economic landscape. The good news? With all this market shifting and many of your competitors making costly mistakes, this might just be the big break you’ve been waiting for.

Let’s talk about five PPC tips that will help your company succeed during the “coronaconomy”. 

1. Don’t mistakenly run socially inappropriate ads

Be careful to not subtly or overtly encourage people to engage in unsafe behaviors regarding the pandemic. With the immense danger the coronavirus poses and all the emotion around the subject, extra precaution should be taken to prevent yourself from making an embarrassing blunder. You might want to review your PPC campaigns and scan for anything that may have been fine and normal before but is now socially inappropriate in our current condition. 

When the virus started to break out, Geico was running a video ad called “The Perfect High Five”. In it, a woman describes the feeling of switching to Geico as the feeling of giving a perfect high five to a coworker. The high five is so perfect, apparently, that the whole office breaks into a cheer and the boss comes into the room and gives her a promotion. While the ad is quite funny and would normally be yet another great Geico commercial, the timing was horrible. This was right when social distancing was beginning. Loud voices on Twitter began criticising Geico for their counterproductive efforts in the pandemic, and undoubtedly some ill-will was generated before the ad was finally taken down. Not a great look. 

Other embarrassing examples of this mistake came from KFC, who premiered a new “Finger-lickin’ good” commercial that showed restaurant patrons energetically licking their hands, and Lysol, who continued to show how great and wonderful their sanitising products were long after Lysol was all sold out in stores. In the best scenario, these kinds of ads make a company seem oblivious, and in the worst scenario, they make a company look cold and uncaring. 

Hopefully if you review your PPC you won’t find anything quite that behind the times, but chances are that there will be something worth changing. Consider making some updates.

2. Don’t run ads that will likely be disapproved

The google trends of how many people are searching for coronavirus related terms online are insane. Many advertisers and PPC specialists are attempting to use these terms in order to inflate their impressions. 

That said, platforms are on the lookout for misleading campaigns that are trying to exploit the hype, and if you include any keywords too closely related to “coronavirus”, “covid” or “pandemic”, your ads will likely be disapproved. 

As almost all of us in the PPC world agree, having your ad campaigns disapproved can be extremely frustrating. Check out this guide to why your ads may not be running to learn more.

3. Pivot your brand to make it more relevant to society’s new needs

With the way the world is shaken up, many consumers have unmet needs that advertisers can address. Don’t miss out on a chance to help make your brand look good, help people cope with quarantine, and spread goodwill and support for those affected by the virus. It may be that one of the products or services you offer can be reframed to address your audience’s new needs. 

Take a look at this clever telephone ad from the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic.

“People who are in quarantine are not isolated if they have a Bell Telephone.” This messaging has been perfectly tailored to reframe the product benefits in context of the quarantine. 

I was recently running the PPC for a company that sells clips to help soap dispensers give out a less exorbitant amount of product and thereby help homeowners save money by not wasting soap and shampoo. When the pandemic hit, we pivoted this marketing message to instead cater to helping people in general – and especially the parents of pump-happy kids – dispense product more responsibly and not fall victim to shortages. We thought the reframing of the product benefits would catch people’s interest and the results agreed. This more relevant messaging more than tripled previous PPC revenue. 

4. Recognise that many of your previous campaigns are no longer going to work well

Although your PPC campaigns might be approved and they might be pandemic-culture friendly, it is likely that some of them will no longer function. Recent market shifts have changed industries a lot, and your PPC probably shows it. Now is a good time to make some optimisations and adjustments. 

Consider starting with your ad schedule. Because of radical changes in people’s schedules, it is more than likely that your dayparting strategy needs an update. You might find some lucrative times of day to get conversions that you haven’t seen before. 

Naturally, checking your keywords and your ad copy will also be an important step. If there are still a good amount of people clicking your ads and coming to your keywords, their motivations for doing so may have changed, and your keywords and copy need to reflect that. 

A similar audit on your bid strategies, as well as your devices and placements, will also be helpful for cutting costs and identifying any new low hanging fruit that may have appeared. 

5. Don’t let fear make any decisions when it comes to running your PPC

When it comes to any decision, giving priority to emotional responses (especially fear) over a data-driven approach is almost always a bad idea. Recognize that many times your “gut feelings” are deeply seated biases that will lead you astray if you let them. If such “gut feelings” do happen to be trustworthy, prove them right with good data. 

Analytics appraised, it might be the case that certain aspects of your PPC campaign need to be temporarily shut down. This can be a good way to cut costs and focus on campaigns that have more potential. For example, I used to run a successful Google Ads campaign that targeted people searching on Google for things to do. Now, with so many things closed and so many safeguards in place, the way people search for things to do and what they’re looking for when they make such queries has radically changed to the point that my campaign has become ineffective. This particular campaign needed to downsize. 

Even though some segments of the marketing world have taken serious damage, there are also other segments that have arisen and are ripe for the harvest. Not only that, but with the vast amount of new free time that many people now enjoy and how many people are stuck inside and looking at their devices, users are spending much more time on platforms than before. Even better, concerned marketers dropping out of the keyword bids have reduced the typical CPC rates to a refreshing discount. 

For these reasons and more, deciding where to take your CPC strategy right now should be a careful, calculated decision, and not something that turns on or off based on the sporadic ups and downs of the pandemic. 

Adaptation is good marketing

The climate of the business world is always changing. Good marketers know that successful marketing is simply the ability to change quickly accordingly. As you adjust and optimise during this new time of PPC strategy, hopefully, you can learn from others’ misfortune so that you don’t have to learn from your own. 

The post Five PPC Tips to Keep You Afloat During COVID-19 appeared first on PerformanceIN.