How Landing Pages Help SMEI Launch Customer Journey
You may be hearing or reading the terms landing page and customer journey. Wondering how to map the customer journey or just get the customer journey launched? Landing pages are a proven method in the customer acquisition step of marketing. In this post we’ll provide you tips and tools to help you craft a landing page strategy. [This post contains affiliate links.]
Keyword Research for Landing Pages
One of the first steps in creating a successful landing page is to do keyword and keyword phrase research. It is important to identify what potential buyers are searching for and what search terms are being used. Google Keyword Planner is a free site tool that can be used to conduct keyword research; however, you need a Google Ads account to access it. Semrush is a paid tool which offers more features and it also has a 7-day free trial so you can take it for a test drive before using the paid plan.
Landing Page Design
Landing page design is your next task. Ideally you want just one call to action (CTA) on your landing page. Many landing page experts agree that the most effective landing pages are built without access to your website’s navigation menu so that the viewer only has one option of engaging and that is through the CTA.
It is also important to match the theme of your marketing collateral and website so that the customer journey is not mismatched or confusing. Good examples are adherance to color schemes, fonts and images.
Having a mobile responsive landing page is critical. At SMEI we’re seeing a steady increase in mobile traffic and the majority of views of landing pages are now taking place on mobile devices.
There are a few good landing page websites that you can use to create landing pages. When choosing the best option some you’ll want to check the integration options. We use Unbounce for its intuitive design interface and integration options with automation tools like Zapier and Mailchimp.
Unbounce has recently acquired Snazzy, and cool site that uses AI to create landing pages and other content. We haven’t used it for landing pages but have used the content creation feature.
A/B Testing for Landing Pages
A/B testing is one of professional marketer’s favorite terms, and landing pages give you the perfect opportunity to actually put the term into practice. A good landing page software allows you to generate multiple versions of your page. You can manually weight each page as to the amount of traffic you wish it to receive and subsequently monitor the results and tweak the ratios. We like Unbounce for it’s “Smart Traffic” feature that does that hard work for you.
Images for Landing Pages
Images are an important component of a good landing page. Images are eye candy and have proven to be effective in engaging readers and retaining their attention. You’ll also want add your image source link so that it shows up when you share the landing page URL to social media. Unbounce has a javascript editor that allows you to add the code for your image and page title.
Example Landing Page
Here is an example of one of the landing pages we use at SMEI to launch the customer journey for our Certified Marketing Executive® program. Click here to see the landing page.
In summary, landing pages have been a key to helping SMEI launch the customer journey. There are many more aspects to a successful customer journey and we’ll cover those in future posts.
