Everything You Need to Know About Landing Pages

What Is a Landing Page?

A landing page, simply put, is an attractive, elegant, and clean page that immediately gets the attention of visitors to your site.

When built innovatively, a landing page can act as the cornerstone of a successful online marketing websites campaign.

Why So Much Fuss About Them?

"Landing pages are the new direct marketing, and everyone with a website is a direct marketer." -Seth Godin

The landing page is a place where conversions happen. Having an effective landing page can turn your website into a money-making machine. According to Marketing Sherpa, 68% of B2B businesses use those pages to get new leads for conversions in the future.

A business that makes $1000/day could be losing over $25K per annum if the landing page responds slowly, says internet marketing guru, Neil Patel.

Here is an example that is old by now, but which still demonstrates the importance of building a landing page well. In the year 2010, President Obama was able to raise an additional $60 million JUST by A/B testing the page that was created for a particular campaign.

Remember: you have just a couple of seconds to make or break the deal. So... give it all you have!

What makes a landing page function as a converting machine? What are the best elements to be incorporated into your lead capture page so that even the most reluctant visitor to your site votes in your favor?

To answer these questions, let's take a look at seven of the top elements you need to consider when designing your landing page.

7 Ways to Captivate Users with Landing Pages

1. Create Compelling Headlines

The headline of your page is the first thing that your visitors will see and read. So, it makes sense to craft a killer headline that will impact them instantly. Years ago, Basecamp switched up its standard software benefit/feature driven landing page for a picture of a real customer. Basecamp made the headline a quote that summarized the major advantages that the customer's company received. The result was a massive increase in the conversion rate by 102.5%.

Here are some pointers on creating killer headlines.

• Be useful

When writing your landing page headline, remember to connect with the fears and wants of your visitors. According to Kissmetrics, Carelogger boosted its conversion rate by 31% when its headline focused on the fear and desire of its target audience.

• Be Urgent

Encourage users to act right now by providing a deadline or giving out some useful offers. This strategy can easily grow your reader base and compel them to act.

• Command Attention

Your words should trigger emotion among your users. It's always wise to pick up vivid adjectives for this purpose.

Some powerful words you can use are:

• Astonishing

• Never seen before

• High costs

• Power

2. Use Videos to Tell Your Story

Landing pages with videos can up the conversion rate by almost 80%, according to EyeView Digital. Also, recent statistics reveal that 95% of users retain the messages in videos.

Videos provide passive engagement. With minimum effort, visitors can discover exactly what you want to convey.

Many marketers don't know what a heatmap is. So CrazyEgg hired the Demo Duck crew to point out the reasons why small businesses need more than Google Analytics to improve their conversions.

Do you think visitors will abandon this page?

Never.

Some important pointers to note while creating video on a landing page are:

Use a tempting thumbnail to engage and convert your audience.

Put your video above the fold.

Keep your video meaty enough to be interesting for your target audience.

Try to include a transcript of the video. Some people might want to watch the video, some might want to read it, and some would love the idea of doing both.

What's the secret?

According to Entrepreneur, if an image is worth a thousand words, a great video is equivalent to 24k words per second. People love videos. The Guardian even claims videos will be the future of content marketing. Cisco states that videos will account for roughly 79% of consumer traffic on the internet by 2020.

3. Create a 3D Effect Using Parallax Scrolling

With the help of parallax scrolling, the background of your landing page moves at a reduced rate compared to the foreground. This feature results in a 3D effect as visitors scroll down the page.

What's so great about the scrolling effect?

It allows you to tell your story on your landing page. It allows your visitors to know more about your services or products. When you use effective copy with parallax scrolling, the result will be a very persuasive and professional page.

4. Trust Signals

The best landing pages make adequate use of trust signals.

Why do they use this tactic?

Trust signals indicate to visitors that your brand and offers are credible. These signals can take a number of forms, such as testimonials, endorsements from past clients, etc.

FiveStars has done a fantastic job of providing trust indicators on its landing page. The company showcases "proven results" and customer testimonials, as well as some personal information on website activity.

Another robust tool that acts as a trust signal is trust badges. These are nothing but logos of well-known companies with whom you've worked in the past.

When utilizing trust signals, always include the following:

• Customer testimonials

• Third-party seals

• Trust badges

• Privacy policy

5. Use Gifs to Demonstrate Your Products

Demonstrating the way your product works is extremely important. Gifs explain how your product can be used in a faster and more persuasive way compared to videos. Marketers are now realizing the importance of Gifs. They have become the go-to feature for companies seeking better engagement on social media.

With Facebook allowing brands to post Gifs and Twitter rolling out the auto-play videos as well, they definitely deserve a place on your landing page. Gifs are the best substitutes for videos on landing pages. In fact, they are much more cost-effective compared to videos when it comes to demonstrating a service or product visually. Gifs are also gaining popularity, particularly in this year's mobile marketing trends, so you should keep an eye on them. PineGrow uses a Gif on its landing page to explain how users can build responsible websites faster.

6. Give Out Offers

An offer is something you give to your visitors in return for getting them to do what you want.

Offers can include discounts, coupons, a free version of your product, a free trial, a matching gift, or a whitepaper.

There are a few strategies you can use.

A website that pays bills can offer users $10 for the maiden bill they pay. Users would have to sign up for the service and link their accounts to it.

A consulting firm might offer a free consultation of 60 minutes, which could be a meeting to describe how the agency can help people.

7. Put the Headline and Form into Two Columns

By breaking up the screen into two columns, you can show multiple page elements with an equal degree of prominence.

Do you think that the form on your landing page deserves the same attention as your headline or sub-headline? Can they have a cumulative impact on your visitors?

Even though there is no exact formula to creating an ideal landing page, there are some common rules of the thumb to improve your chances of making one that stands out.

Are you looking to achieve a high percentage of conversions this year?

Then don't forget to follow the steps above when creating your landing pages.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10311700

Google Adwords Tutorial

Google Adwords tutorial with Travis Marziani

Here is a step by step beginners guide to using Google Adwords

Defining Your Market

Defining your target market is critical if you plan on any measure of success in your business. A solid foundation for your business requires that one of the first things - if not THE first thing you need to do is to - DEFINE YOUR TARGET MARKET! In laymen's terms, that means you need to figure out who your typical customer is, and design your marketing to reach those people. If you fail to do so, you're marketing efforts will be like tumbleweeds - rolling around aimlessly in whatever direction the wind blows them.

Defining Means Being More Specific

There was a time when business owners would say things like "I'm marketing our products/services to people between the ages of 21 and 59." That's great if you think every 21 - 59 year old out there will buy from you, but that's just not reality. These days, age doesn't mean what it used to. I'm sure you've heard the saying "60 is the new 40" (or some variation of that). That's very true today. Generational marketing, defines consumers not just by their ages, but also uses social, economic, demographic and psychological factors, that give marketers a more accurate picture of that target consumer. Generational marketing is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to defining your target market.

6 Other Ways To Define Your Target Market

1. Look At Your Current Customers: Which one(s) bring in the most business? Why do they buy from you? It's highly likely that others like them would also benefit from your product/service.

2. Choose specific demographics: Who has a need for your product/service and who would most likely purchase it. Consider; age, gender, occupation, location, income/educational level, or marital status just to name a few.

3. Check out your competitors: Who are they marketing to? See if there's a niche they've missed, and target that group.

4. Check out characteristics: This is also known as "psychographics" in the marketing world. This covers things like; personality, attitudes, interests/hobbies, lifestyles, etc. How will your product/service fit in?

5. Analyze your product/service: Make a list of every feature of your product/service. Next to each feature, write down the benefit(s) each feature will provide. Once you've completed that, make a list of the people/businesses that need what your benefit will fulfill.

6. Assess your decision: When you've defined your target market, ask yourself these questions; Is there a large enough market for my product/service? Will they benefit from and/or see a need for my product/service? Can they afford it? Are they easily accessible? Will I be able to reach them with my message?

Defining your target market is the hard part, but you don't need to go crazy doing it. Once you have your target market defined, it will be easy to determine what marketing message will resonate with them and what media to use to reach them. Defining your target market will also save you big on marketing dollars while giving you a much better return on those marketing dollars at the same time.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9961145

What Are the Necessary Skills to Become a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Consultant?

Search engine marketing is amongst the most highly-rated digital marketing practices out there. A part of search marketing, search engine marketing is the practise to increase the visibility of a website on search engines through inorganic paid methods.

Compared to SEO, SEM is often not considered as important by most brands and companies across various industries. This is because while SEO is a free method that does not require any monetary transaction to take place, SEM is a paid digital marketing technique that basically allows brands to pay the search engine a certain amount of money to reach the top of search results.

Small brands and companies are often hesitant to ingratiate SEM into their digital marketing campaign. Fear of not getting a sizable ROI and wasting their precious resources lies as the heart of this hesitance.

In truth, search engine marketing can be used to pull a large amount of traffic to a website. For a new brand with a new website, getting meaningful traction through organic SEO techniques can be difficult. SEO typically takes a long time to bed in and produce results. In such a situation when a brand cannot reach a sizable audience organically, SEM is a great option to pull in valuable relevant traffic.

As a subject of learning, SEM is taught across various digital marketing courses across the board. Whether we consider an online training program or a digital marketing course, SEM is always a mainstay in such learning modules.

In this article, we will discuss the skills necessary to become an SEM consultant at a top institute.

Keyword Research

The best skill an SEM consultant can possess is the knack to pick out keywords a given brand can target for quick conversions and high CTR. In most digital marketing practices, keywords often end up playing a key role in the process. Even SEO as a practice is driven by select keywords targeted by content creators and SEO executives to optimize search rankings.

By finding the right keywords in an SEM campaign, a consultant can then organize the effort behind bidding for the keywords identified and post an engaging search ad to drive clicks through search engine results.

Get Google AdWords Certification

Although not entirely necessary, getting a Google AdWords certification is the best way for a candidate to prove his/her credentials in search engine marketing.

Google conducts its own certification exam for professionals interested in search engine marketing. By joining the Google Partners Program, applicants can give their certification exam. After getting certified, professionals can then show the certificate as a necessary attestation of their skills as an SEM executive.

To pass the AdWords certification, professionals have to brush up on their knowledge of AdWords. Going through some of Google's very own training guides to help test-takers is also a great way to prepare for the exam.

Content Writing Skills

Despite all the necessary skills about keywords, it can all be for naught if a suitable search ad copy is not created.

Even while writing short ad content, SEM consultants have to be adept at writing content which triggers readers into clicking on the ad and improving the CTR. For this, reasonable knowledge of content marketing becomes necessary, thus making an SEM consultant a very rounded professional in the field of digital marketing.

In Conclusion

In conclusion, the skills mentioned in the article are crucial for a professional to become an SEM consultant. With these skills, anyone is digital marketing can becoming an SEM specialist at any given brand or company.

Article source:  http://EzineArticles.com/10194409