How to Effectively Utilize Your Website as a Marketing Tool
Published September 23, 2019 by Bryan Miller
When you’ve created a website for your business or brand, it’s time to start bringing in customers and marketing your brand!
Among the more effective ways to use your website as a marketing tool is by making quality landing pages that will appeal to site visitors. A landing page is the first page on your website that a user “lands on” after being directed from an external source (this could be a link, an advertisement, or simply a user manually entering the web address of your site).
If you’re advertising a product or service of yours on another website, any user that clicks on the advertisement will be taken to your website and this first impression of your brand will be the landing page. These landing pages can be used for a variety of purposes, which include detailing a product or capturing leads.
Landing pages can provide your business with fantastic marketing benefits, the most notable of which is that the effectiveness of these pages can easily be measured based on the number of clicks, conversion rates, and many other performance based metrics. These pages are also often easy to implement as they often utilize the current style and function of your existing, which makes them a cost effective tool to use for marketing purposes and for measuring the effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns.
To understand how effective well-designed landing pages are, you should think of your PPC ads as the first half of a transaction. While the initial click on a PPC ad is great for your business, you may not be able to keep the user engaged with your brand unless you draw them in with a good landing page. If your landing page is properly designed, your customer conversion rates and marketing ROI will be bolstered significantly.
Keep in mind that the landing pages you use should be unique to each particular sales campaign that you create. When a user clicks on your advertisement, the landing page that they’re navigated to should consist of content that’s similar to the ad. If you’re thinking about creating landing pages, the following is a short guide that should give you some ideas on how to make your landing pages unique and effective!
Engage Your Visitors with Visuals
Likely the most important elements of a landing page are the visual elements that you implement. The modern customer is drawn to beautiful and appealing imagery, which is clearly evident when looking at the psychology of using visuals in digital marketing. When an individual hears information, only 10 percent of that information will be remembered in three days time. When this very same information is displayed on an image that’s relevant to the audience, they will retain upwards of 65 percent of the information three days later. It’s been proven that using videos on a landing page will significantly increase customer conversion rates by more than 85 percent, which is just one of many reasons why you need to implement visuals on your marketing page.
It’s also been shown that adjusting color on your website can increase conversion rates by nearly 25 percent. However, different color schemes are necessary for different types of websites. If your website is primarily aimed at advertising to children and their parents, you’ll want to use a vibrant and bright color scheme that’s filled with reds, greens, and light blue colors. On the other hand, a website that sells makeup products would likely want to use a color scheme that’s sleek and stylish, which means that you might want to emphasize black and white colors with a touch of purple or dark blue.
You should also focus on implementing the right photos when you’re trying to hold the attention of your main audience. As is the case with color schemes, photos can evoke an emotional response. For instance, studies show that most people are inherently attracted by faces and will invariably react to this imagery faster than any other element that you could place on your landing page. Creating an emotional impact with users means that they are more likely to remain on your website. Keep in mind that photos of animals are also very appealing to many online users (there’s a reason cat videos are so popular on the internet).
The great aspect of visual marketing is that there are several different types, which allows you to make each landing page unique. Likely the best types of visual marketing for landing pages include videos, images, and infographics, the latter of which allows you to display pertinent information in a visually-appealing manner via compelling imagery as the background. If you want modern audiences to engage with your website once they’ve clicked on an ad of yours, you need to provide them with what they want.
Create a Prominent Call to Action
If you’ve built a website for your business or brand, you likely understand the importance of a well-placed call to action. A good call to action is even more important for a landing page. To create an effective call to action, you must first identify what you want customers to do when they visit your landing page. Once you’ve determined what you want these visitors to do, it’s important that you make it easy for them to accomplish. The call to action that you make for your landing page should be prominent. Many website owners will place this call to action at the top of the landing page or at the end of any written content.
A great way to emphasize the call to action is by ending it with a button that’s set to a different color than your landing page. If the call to action is about subscribing to your newsletter, you should consider placing a button directly below this sentence that states “Subscribe Now”. Once clicked, this button should lead directly to a signup page for the newsletter in question. You always want to use action-oriented words when creating a call to action for a new landing page. Supplement the short action-oriented words with relevant microcopy that informs and guides the users.
If you don’t place a call to action on your landing page, there’s no way for site visitors to move forward with your company, which means that the visit to your website was essentially worth nothing. There are many different types of calls to action that you might want to consider. For instance, you could implement a call to action on your landing page that focuses on form submission with some open fields that the user can write it.
Some additional types of calls to action for you to consider include product discovery, lead nurturing, lead generation, “read more”, and event promotion. If you have a WordPress website and want to create calls to action for your landing pages, consider using the Mai Theme, which comes with shortcode that’s easy to use and should help you implement calls to action on your landing pages.
Keep Branding Consistent
No matter what type of business you own, this business will have a brand, which is a design, name, symbol, or term that identifies your products or services as being distinct from the products/services of other companies. For instance, a key element of the Nike brand that they’ve cultivated over the years is the swoosh logo. One view of the Nike logo can cause an individual to immediately go online and purchase one of their products, which shows fantastic brand power.
When someone sees your logo or website, they should automatically know what they’re looking at or there should be some sort of symbolic relationship with your brand, product, or service. Your brand can be comprised of your logos, icons, taglines, and even the fonts and typography that you use on your website. The color palette of your site and the imagery that you implement could also be a part of your brand.
If you want to retain customers and keep them interested, it’s essential that your branding is consistent. Once you’ve actually cultivated a brand, you can use it to bolster brand awareness and increase customer conversion rates. An example of inconsistent branding is when a company uses a different tone with their website marketing when compared to their social media marketing. Everything on your website must be consistent from one page to another. When you’re creating a landing page, it shouldn’t be too different in appearance from the rest of your website.
Being consistent shows customers that your brand is dependable and that you can be trusted as a company. Consistent branding will also help push customers to make a purchase or visit your website simply from seeing your logo. If the branding on your website is consistent, you’ll almost certainly bring in new customers over time.
Offer Value to Visitors
Finally, it’s highly recommended that you focus on providing site visitors with value whenever they enter your landing page. Offering value to visitors for your marketing campaign can be accomplished with a variety of different approaches. However, the the main focus when you’re trying to add value to a landing page is to draw visitors to what is important for your business. Modern customers love videos and similar interactive content.
In order to provide value to visitors, you should create a video for your landing page that provides site visitors with what they want. If the PPC ad that the visitor first clicked on was advertising a product that you’re selling, the video on your landing page should highlight the product in question. The best way to add value to a landing page is by first understanding what customers want. Once you’ve determined what they want, you can market this on your landing page. Aside from video, some other great ways to add value to a landing page include form optimization, exclusive offers, buttons for social media sharing, and contact information.
Creating the Perfect Landing Page
When a visitor enters your website, the first page that they will see is the landing page, which is why it’s important to give careful attention to the strategic creation of this content. If you understand what your target audience wants, you can provide them with what they’re looking for when they enter your website, which should boost your customer conversion and retention rates.
Along with many other fantastic digital marketing tools, it’s essential that you use your website as a key marketing tool for your brand or business. When you implement high quality and engaging visuals or provide your customers with valuable content, you’ll be able to keep your customer satisfied.
If you need help building an effective and strategic marketing website, be sure to get in touch with our team at Bryt Designs today. We’ll be more than happy to put together a comprehensive game plan for success!
Bryan Miller
Bryt Designs
Bryan Miller is an entrepreneur and web tech enthusiast specializing in web design, development and digital marketing. Bryan is a recent graduate of the MBA program at the University of California, Irvine and continues to pursue tools and technologies to find success for clients across a varieties of industries.
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