Facing the marketing automation mountain? Let's go back to square one.

I was very happy to stumble upon a blog post over on the BrightCarbon site called "Marketing Automation—A Failure". Of course, I am not happy to hear of anyone's failure, but I am happy to finally see someone talking about the marketing automation mountain so publicly. 

Everyday, I hear from marketers that their top priority is to "really dig in and get our marketing automation fully working". That's usually followed by "...once I do that, I can focus on X, Y, and Z". Where X, Y, and Z are big business priorities (increase customer acquisition, decrease cost per lead, generate more leads, generate more online sales, etc, etc).

The 'dig in and get it working' theme isn't just a marketer-driven initiative, it's becoming an executive-led mandate (as in, "My boss is so mad we invested in this marketing automation tool and are barely scratching the surface, I HAVE to get this fully operational this quarter...everything else is on hold until marketing automation is fully operational"). Everyone, it seems, is catching on to the fact that big investments are being made into marketing automation technology, but little of it is being leveraged.

I think it's healthy—and certainly much better for the marketing automation space in the long term—to have these conversations out in the open. If marketers are ill-prepared for the content, resources, processes and time necessary to make a marketing automation program soar, it doesn't go away by sweeping it under the rug.

But that's not really my concern. My concern is that oftentimes the marketing automation mountain gets in the way of actually moving the business forward (see above: "everything else is on hold until we get marketing automation fully operational"). Whoa! Marketing automation is a tool, plain and simple.

Marketing automation isn't a fix for not having enough leads or enough quality leads. And that's a real problem, as the blog post articulates well:

Not enough leads to nurture....We didn’t have a problem with too many early-stage leads that we needed to qualify because sales were too busy and wasting time on poor quality leads. We didn’t have enough leads, full stop. Marketing needed to go out and get them. Marketing automation could help qualify leads, and nurture leads.... 

But marketing automation can't go and get the leads! You need leads—lots of leads— to feed into the system. Here's how the conversation usually goes:

Marketer: "I need leads, lots of leads! And I need them at a lower cost too! And I need them to be higher quality!"

Me: "Great, so what's your plan to make that happen?"

Marketer: "Well, first I am going to dig in and get my marketing automation program off the ground."

Wait...wha? Isn't that the cart before the horse? If you need leads, isn't step one to get the lead generation machine fully operational? You need to know which messages, on which vehicles, landing on which experiences yield the best, and most, leads. And that's not a marketing automation strategy. That's a post-click strategy.

What kinds of traffic driving into what kinds of experiences will yield the highest number of qualified leads? A marketing automation platform can help give you insight into the answer. But it can't give you the strategy, and that comes first.

ion Is a Finalist in the 2013 MITX Innovation Awards!

ion is happy to announce that we are finalists in the 2013 MITX Innovation Awards in the “Best Customer Demand Driver” category. 

"Best Customer Demand Driver" category award is given to tools which "have transformed how we identify, sell to, and manage customer relationships."

The category "rewards technologies that are helping enterprises small and large drive their sales and marketing efforts, create leads, and support their customers in ways that were not previously possible."

We’re honored to be named a finalist in this category along with Postwire and Qvidian.

The 2013 MITX Innovation Awards Ceremony will take place on Monday, June 3, from 6:00-9:00 pm at the Westin Copley. The Innovation Awards are intended to:

• Celebrate the innovations powering the future of marketing and revolutionizing the way we work and play
• Recognize innovations developed in New England
• Connect the next generation of start-up success stories with resources and people to help create their stories sooner

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

Targeting High Funnel Keywords Through the Power of Conversion Content Marketing

High funnel keywords (and the visitors searching them), are a tough nut to crack! They’re searching for something that you offer, or similar to what you offer, and so you want to take this as an opportunity to educate, inform, and generally win them over. That said, if they’re higher up in the funnel, they’re nowhere near ready to buy. In this situation, the question becomes “how do I give them what they want while getting what I need?”

Enter: Conversion Content Marketing.

I’m not going to write an entire post about this, because our co-founder, Scott Brinker, described it in his recent webinar far better job with it than I could ever hope. You can view the slides here, and I highly encourage you to do so, it’s really good stuff: 

 

Conversion Content Marketing by Scott Brinker from ion interactive

 

By combining the content that you have to feed to high funnel visitors with the best practices associated with conversion optimization, you can finally create the win-win situation. This is the power that this concept can bring to your paid search campaign.

With these type of landing experiences, you’re giving your visitors the content they need to educate and inform while still providing your marketing and/or sales team and opportunity to capture data that can be used now or later to convert even that high funnel visitor into a customer.

 

Interested in learning more about conversion content marketing?

 

Download our free conversion content white paper and learn how to turn your content into more leads and more revenue through 6 proven conversion-focused principles. 

Download now!

How To: Monitor Your Competitor's PPC Landing Pages

This is a guest post by Jana Fung, Marketing Manager at MixRank.

If there’s one thing that online advertising teaches you, it’s how to survive when faced with fierce competition. As an online advertiser, I frequently find myself competing against hundreds if not thousands of advertisers for the same inventory and the same clicks. This is pure performance marketing, where the only things that matter are clicks and conversions. The main difference between clicks and conversions is the clicks are the investment while the conversions are results from a highly optimized landing page. Conversions justify the investment made on the clicks. So, how do you ensure your landing page is highly optimized and raking in as many conversions as possible?

You need to test to see what works. Chances are, there are a ton of competitors in your industry that are already doing this — and their landing pages are publicly available to view. So, what is the secret to fabulous experiences? The secret is knowing that your competitor's landing pages are not secrets! Pay-per-click destinations, whether websites or landing pages, are public for viewing and you can easily find design inspiration for your own campaigns. 

Check out some examples of these home pages that have very similar elements in their design, like the carousel, the call to action button on the left, and a link to a lead generation form that they’re promoting.

 

 

Although none of these platforms are direct competitors of each other, nor do they use the same color schemes, they all want traffic from the online marketing audience. Their design layout must be working for them, since so many leading companies are using the same exact design. But, who came up with the design first? Who knows? And, what does it matter? Will we ever know?  What we do know is that all of these landing pages are beautiful, yet surprisingly similar, and you too can benefit from enhancing your landing page design based on trends from your competitors’ landing pages.

Below is a simple use case of how you can easily spot your competitors’ landing pages in seconds using free competitive intelligence tools. There are several competitive intelligence tools that can help you find landing pages from your competitors’ PPC campaigns, but a quick and free solution that you can use is MixRank.com

Step 1: Search for a keyword you’re trying to rank for or a competitors’ domain. If you already know who your competitors are, feel free to search for them in the search bar.

If your business is in a saturated market with several competitors, I recommend using the keyword search to uncover even more competitors’ landing pages.

In this example here, I searched for the keyword “wedding dress.”

 

 

Step 2: Within the search results, click on the Landing Pages tab to view all of the advertisers who are bidding on this keyword and what pages they’re driving traffic to.

As mentioned previously, these landing pages might not be direct competitors in products or service offerings, but the fact that they are targeting similar audiences, like brides in this example.

Their designs are worth seeking out when brainstorming new design ideas.

With just two simple steps, you can easily and quickly start grabbing insights for your next landing page design test. The secret to design is there is no secret.  Designs are all over the web and publicly available for you to view and test for your brand.

Your competitors are already testing designs that you can easily test. With the convenience of competitive intelligence tools like MixRank, you can easily identify who your top competitors are for a specific keyword, and quickly uncover what landing pages they’re driving traffic to.  If you’re ready to boost conversions with new design tests, a great place to start is MixRank. With this strategy, you can spot what competitors have done with their designs, without having to manually visit each of their sites on a regular basis.

Have you found efficient ways to design and optimize landing pages? Tell us in the comments section below.

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About the Author

Jana Fung is the Marketing Manager of MixRank. She has managed successful demand generation programs for over 6 years. She is optimistic about the growth of online advertising and has a passion for helping online marketers with their campaigns. If you’re a MixRank fan or just want to say hi, she’s interested in connecting with you! Follow her on Twitter @jana_fung

About MixRank

MixRank.com is a spy tool for contextual and display ads. With MixRank you can see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them across over 100,000 sites. You can use MixRank to watch your competitors spend money testing different ads and traffic sources, see which ones worked best, and use that data to build your own campaign.

Don't do this on your forms!

I get an email offering a new report. I want that report. I click the email. I arrive on a standard landing page—image, headline, bullets and a form. Simple enough.

I fill out the form. Not so simple. As a user, I am buzzing right along, on my way to complete the form and get that report, but when I get to the industry drop down, I stop dead in my tracks.

 

 

This drop down is a lot of work. I have to scroll through a lot of choices to figure out what industry I fit into. Their names for industries isn't the same as my own personal names, so I have to think about this.

So, I bet you can guess what I do next? I leave the page without completing the form. Yes, I want that report. But this drop down makes me think, and I don't have time to think about how my industry maps to their industry list and suddenly getting my hands on that report is far less important than it was 10 seconds ago.

A drop down choice like this isn't user-focused. It's company focused. It's in their best interest to present a list like this—I am sure this list maps to their internal database of possible industries. But a drop down like this isn't in my best interest.

When you lose focus on the user, even for a second, you lose their focus on you.

Iron Mountain: Fueling Big Testing with Big Data

In 2012, the idea of “big data” was number one on almost every marketers mind. Everyone wanted to know how much data they needed, where they could get it, and where they could put it. For this year, (and even beyond), ion is proposing a new idea, “big testing."

Data is phenomenally useful to marketers, but only if they know what to do with it and how to truly learn from it- turning mere hypothesis into marketing gold. This is what testing allows for, proving out your hypothesis into actionable marketing insights. And what’s the payoff? Big experiences. These are experiences that not only wow, but also convert, leading to higher revenues increased ROI and the perfect user experience.

At this year's SiriusDecisions conference, Tom Berger, Director of Internet Marketing, at Iron Mountain co-presented with us the success that his team has seen through fueling big testing with big data. It’s a pretty impressive case study and one that we are especially proud to be a part of. 

Enjoy!

Iron Mountain: Fueling Big Testing with Big Data from ion interactive

7 Landing Page Lessons Learned (Over 7 Years)

This week at Interactivity Digital Conference in Miami, Scott presented "Seven Years in Landing Pages." Seven years ago, ion launched its first prototype of a landing page management software. Back then, many asked "what is a landing page?" Today, everyone (should be) creating, testing and optimizing landing page agilely and at a rapid pace. 

During his talk, Scott shared seven lessons learned from his past seven years in landing pages (or post-click experiences as we like to call them). 

1. Brilliant post-click marketing is far more a function of the people wielding the tools then the tools themselves
2. Digital marketing teams are tremendously more effective when they are agile and flexible rather than rigid and slow 
3. The future of marketing is experimentation — "big testing" rather than optimization
4. Specific is better than vague. It's not rocket science, but relevancy and context is probably the most important tactical improvement you can make in your digital marketing.
5. Landing pages don't have to be just one page. Think of your user, think experiences, not pages. It's 2013 — its time to break free of the cliche landing page.
6. “Beautiful websites are trusted. Ugly websites are not.” - Rand Fishkin
7. Winning happy, loyal customers, means delivering (or over-delivering) on your promises post-conversion. Be a brand champion in conversion optimization.

Here at ion, we live and breathe these principles. They are the foundation ion was built upon. They are the big themes that really make a difference in our work!

Check out the slides from his presentation below and check out the full article on Search Engine Land.

7 Years in Landing Pages from ion interactive

Targeting Low Funnel Keywords for Increased Conversion and Decreased CPC

In my previous two posts, I discussed the best types of page layouts to send both high and low funnel keywords to. These were the type of layouts that provided your site visitors with the information they wanted in a format that would resonate with their state of mind.

In this post, I’m going to dig deeper into targeting your low funnel keywords. Now that you know the type of page layout to utilize, it’s time to take it step further and start looking at ways to better create your content and messaging. If done properly, this is the most cost effective way to increase your conversions and decrease your CPC, all while not needing to spend another cent on your paid search campaigns.

We’ll look at three ways to better target these terms: dynamic content substitution, reduced friction, and leveraging ad extensions.

Dynamic Content Substitution

Remembering that people searching for low funnel keywords already know who you are and that they’re ready to purchase your product or services, it’s absolutely imperative that you find ways to make your landing experiences as relevant to their need as possible. Enter: dynamic content. This is one my absolute favorite techniques for low funnel keywords because it lets you:

• Put the power of logic to work to create just one page to serve dozens of keywords
• Display unique content based on a search query, geolocation, or anything else passed in on the query string
• Swap out images, headlines, blocks of texts, forms, etc. to make your landing experiences hyper relevant to individual users

Creating this type of relevant experience let’s you satisfy three basic marketing needs:

1. Increase page relevancy for your site visitors, ensuring them that this page is all about them and what they desire
2. Increase page relevancy for Google to decrease CPC and increase quality score
3. Decrease resources required for page creation. You only need one page!

In this example, all of the arrows are pointing to content that was dynamically swapped out based on the state that some came through.

 

 

Imagine if you had to create a unique page for all 50 states! This is what the power of dynamic content substitution can provide.

Reduced Landing Page Friction

In my previous posts, I referenced the idea that when dealing with visitors who are already at the point of wanting to convert, the best thing you can do is get out of your own way. This is really where reducing the friction on your landing pages come into play.

This should be achieved in a variety of ways, but the end goal is consistent:

• Remove “leaks” from your page, or links that take people away from the conversion goal
• Don’t make your visitors jump through unnecessary hoops
• Eliminate any unnecessary “work”  that they have to go through
• Eliminate distractions

This is best demonstrated through the use of a less than stellar example.

 

 

 

In the above example, my search query was “nine west pumps” and the page on the right is where I was taken. Now you’ll notice that there are clearly images of pumps on the tope of the page, and the headline even references the shoe type that I searched for. However, this is nothing more than an image that I cannot engage with in anyway.

In the results section of the page, which is where I really want to see some pumps, there are none to be found. This leaves me with no choice but to move to the left hand navigation and once again search for pumps. Actually, I suppose it leaves me with two choices: redo my search or leave. This site simply gave me too many distractions and made me jump through too many hoops. I left.

Leverage Ad Extensions

I have to preface this last section by saying that Ad Extensions (while totally cool), are still in Google Beta testing. This means that unless you’ve been invited to participate, it’s something that you’ll have to put on the backburner until a more wide scale release. That said, it can be really awesome, so it’s definitely something to be aware of and to plan for.

Ad extensions make it even easier for someone to convert on your page by taking a common, and often the first field on a form, and placing it directly in the ad itself. This lets visitors start the conversion process before they even land on your page. Better yet, it lets you take the information they input in the form and display dynamic content (see above) to better target that visitor.

In this example, I searched for “Florida car insurance”. In the ad, I was able to input my zip code and was then taken to page that showed all sort of content specific to me.

 

 

While there are lots of ways to make your landing experiences targeted to low funnel keywords, the above three are a few of the most successful that we’ve utilized. If you’re sending all of your keywords to the same, generic pages, it’s time to start looking at a few additional techniques.

Keep an eye out for my next post where I’ll talk about targeting high funnel keywords and how to get a return from visitors that aren’t yet ready to buy.

eHealthInsurance: Better User Experiences Through Post-click Marketing

Attention to big data is a breakthrough moment for marketing. Sure, data has always been present in marketing, but typically marketing has been about big ideas and big budgets. But big data? That's something new. Being data-driven means allowing data to drive marketing decisions, valuing a culture of testing (from PPC to post-click marketing) and broadly embracing experimentation.

Recently, Ian Lopuch, Vice President, Search Marketing at eHealthInsurance, shared his thoughts on big testing at MediaPost's Search Insider Summit. He provided some inspirational examples of how he has leveraged big data to deliver better user experiences through post-click marketing with ion.

Watch the below video of his presentation, or read more about his experience at SIS on his blog, PPCIan.com.

Ian Lopuch is a top online marketing executive who has had direct P&L responsibility on over $150 million of search engine marketing spend during his 8+ years in the industry. Currently, Lopuch is Vice President, Search Marketing at eHealthInsurance, America's #1 Health Insurance Website. Prior to eHealth, Lopuch held online marketing leadership positions at Inflection.com, QuinStreet, and Nextag. Lopuch holds his BS in Computer Science from Stanford University and is an avid blogger (http://www.ppcian.com).

25 Ways to Evaluate Conversion Elements for New Testing Ideas

Tomorrow I will be headed out to Austin, Texas (keep weird!) where I will be giving one-on-one landing page consultations at WhichTestWon The Live Event. We are WTW award-winners and huge fans of Which Test Won here at ion, so we are super excited to spend some quality time with #awesome brand marketers at the event.

During my consultations I will be walking through 25 ways to evaluate conversion elements within any landing experience — homepage, product page, landing page or mobile-optimized experience — to drive new testing ideas, hypotheses and actionable next steps for optimization.

The key takeaway: the best landing pages are conversion R.E.A.D.Y.

R.E.A.D.Y. is an acronym that stands for the five dimensions of great, conversion-focused landing experience: Relevant, Engaging, Authoritative, Directional and Yield Optimal. A relevant landing experience gives visitors exactly what they expected when they clicked. Engaging experiences communicate your value proposition in a compelling, differentiated way. Your pages should be authoritative, assuring people that you’re trustworthy and reliable. Visitors also need to be moved steadily toward their (and your) goals; thus your pages should be directional. In addition to these user-centric objectives, your pages should also be yield optimal — incorporating operational best practices to maximize your conversion rate. By evaluating the effectiveness of these five elements on you can immediately identify areas of opportunities and begin prioritizing your testing.

Relevancy 

Just as fashion has evolved over time, so should your landing experiences. Unless you’re Google or The New York Times, almost no one begins an online session on your site. They arrive at your doorstep from some other context — a search query, an ad on another site, a click-through from an email or a shared link in a social network. It’s up to you to make their ‘post-click’ landing experience relevant to who they are, where they came from, and what inspired them to click in the first place. Are you giving visitors what they want? Do you even know what they want? Time to start testing!

Things to test:

1. Message match — test your headline to improve message match and engagement. Check out: 5 Types of Headlines to Test on Your Landing Page for more headline testing ideas.

2. Targeting — test a conversion path to help identify and provide targeted copy to your visitors (hint: this is especially useful for high funnel keyword searches)

3. Design match — test a more visually cohesive experience from your email or banner to your landing page. Don't worry, redundancy is appreciated, rather than excessive in this instance.

4. Visuals —  test people imagery versus product imagery. Test directional cues — both implicit (direction of gaze, color, etc.) and explicit (arrows, curves, etc) to help guide visitors towards the desired action. Test icons against photography. Test, test, test.

5. Language — it is important to play to audience identity. Test tailoring your pages to the characteristics of the people who visit. The University of Texas Arlington uses authentic nurse imagery, job-specific terminology and “you” language to provide a highly relevant experience to their target audience.

Need more inspiration?
Check out five more examples of relevant landing experiences.

Engagement

What makes a conference fun isn’t necessarily the event itself. Often, it’s the communal nature of learning, networking and having great conversations with your peers. When you’re trying to convert people — into a lead, a sale, or for some other concrete action — you need to be more than just relevant. You also need to be engaging as well. Typically, bounce rate is a good metric for measuring engagement. Decreasing bounce rate often leads to increases in conversions as well.

Things to test:

6. Value proposition — probably the single most valuable element to test. Your value proposition answers the questions "why should I buy from you instead of them?" Creating a list of features is easy, but great landing page copy sells visitors on benefits, not features. One of the first techniques you can explore is transforming your major features into benefits. Write down your top five features and ask yourself, “what problem does this feature solve for our customer?” Then, test each as your headline. 

7. Real & tangible benefits — see above! MarketingProfs tested a benefit-driven headline and saw a 28% lift in email sign ups.

8. Emotional appeal — incorporate a story, an insight, a mood into your messaging

9. Persuasive content — focus specifically on why users need your product or service

10. Design — radically re-imagine the user experience, focusing on intuitive, user-centered design that communicates value

Marian University lifts conversion rates over 264% with radical landing experience redesigns

Need more inspiration?
Check out five more examples of engaging landing experiences.

Authority 

Trust is a critical component of all relationships. So now you’re relevant and engaging — congratulations! But before people will do business with you, they must also trust you. Your pages should exude an authoritative aura, one that establishes you as a credible source for your offering.

Things to test:

11. Trust assurances — test the impact of adding a telephone number to your page (if it isn't there already) or test placement and visual emphasis of customer-centric policies (100% satisfaction guarantee) and trust marks (BBB, Truste, Verisign, etc.)

12. Credibility — test using specific numbers and verifiable facts instead of fluffy claims

13. Context of use — provide evidence of how a product or service solves a real problem. Test showing your product in the hands of a user. Test a product video or a virtual tour.

14. Social proof — social proof comes in many shapes and sizes — expert, celebrity, user, and wisdom of crowds and wisdom of friends. Expert proof relies on the expertise, education or approval from a credible source. Celebrity endorsements can obviously yield high impact social proof, especially if unpaid. The only way to know what resonates with visitors and drives engagement is to test. 

15. Brand consistency — definitely a best practice, but something that can be tested as well (especially if you are creating campaign landing pages). Test a standard brand look and feel against a campaign-specific look and feel. Check out some of my favorite campaign-themed conversion paths from Overland Storage.

Various campaign-themed landing experiences from Overland Storage

Directionality

Your landing pages need to be directional. You want targeted landing experiences that move your visitors forward smoothly to their (and your) objectives. Think about a chalkboard on sidewalk advertising free appetizers at happy hour.

Things to test:

16. Call-to-Action — CTAs are definitely low-hanging fruit. Minor tweaks to button design and copy can result in conversion lifts. If you are offering content (white papers, webinar, guides) in exchange for lead information, you should test different offers to see what content drives the most (and the most qualified leads). 

17. Choices — executed properly, post-click segmentation reveals people’s preferences, intentions, and audience segments. Test providing a small number of choices that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

18. Removing distractions — test simplified segmentation (see above). Test without navigation! Remove distractions, remove navigation.

19. Additional motivation or incentives — test offering supplemental content as adding incentive

20. Progressive conversion — test breaking up your lead form into multiple steps. This works especially well for long or tedious forms. Don't forget to pay off each step with relevant and useful information. 

Two step form identifies sales-ready leads for CDCNews

Yield Optimal

The best landing experiences get results. Yield optimal refers to a deeper level of the landing experience that visitors never see — it’s about your use and implementation of testing and other conversion optimization best practices. 

Things to try:

21. Post-conversion engagement — test micro-conversions on your thank you page. Provide relevant content, links to additional information, social sharing or an upsell to see if you can further engage and build rapport post-conversion.

22. Data-driven hypotheses — use data to uncover potential testing opportunities and establish concrete hypotheses. Every test plan should include data that supports your testing hypothesis. 

23. A/B & MVT testing — if you are still practicing sequential testing, please stop now. You need a testing platform for split testing. There are too many variables that can affect the results of sequential tests. The only way to test is to do it in real-time. Check out our Buyer's Guide to help find the right testing platform for you. 

24. Putting testing requirements in place — make sure to put testing requirements in place. Whether it be a minimum level of statistical confidence, or a test timeframe, make sure you are setting yourself up for testing success: concrete hypothesis + testing requirements + a/b testing tool = analysis-driven next steps. 

25. Analysis-driven next steps — piggybacking off of data-driven hypothesis testing, analysis-driven testing is based on behavioral data and analysis of "click behavior." You can test your gut, but data-driven next steps are often the most successful.

Our 25-point R.EA.D.Y framework helps you identify areas of opportunities for testing and optimization. It was designed to help you ask the right questions about your landing experiences, to see how page elements relate to each other, and to stay focused on what’s most important in driving conversions.

Bookmark it. Print it. Use it daily! 

Use ion's 25-point framework for evaluating the conversion "readiness" of your landing experiences.

The Low-Down on Low Funnel Keyword Landing Page Templates

In my last post, I discussed three high performance landing page templates for high funnel keywords. Today, I will discuss low funnel keywords, the challenges associated with low funnel landing pages and give three example of low funnel landing page templates that I really love.

The Right Format for Low Funnel Keywords
These people are ready to convert, they know you, presumable like you, and are ready to be your customer. The goal at this point is to get out of the way. It’s all about decreasing friction and giving these visitors exactly what they want in a simplistic way.  

These pages need to:

• Stay product and purchase focused. They know the solution they need, now you need to sell what you have to offer.
• Strongly focus on the conversion
• Reinforce their decision to buy from you with added credibility and authority
• Remove all distractions

“Why this is easy!” you say. Au contraire mon fraire. Again, it’s not easy at all because now you need to make your landing experience super specific to one visitor, with one need. Not always an easily scalable or low resource task. Let’s look at the examples.

I like this low funnel landing page for a few different reasons. To start with, there is one very consistent CTA throughout the page, reducing the opportunity for someone to do something other than convert. I also love the way the form is encapsulated and takes up such a prominent percent of the layout. Finally, they’ve done a really nifty thing by allowing someone to create the username and password associated with their free trial account directly on this form, eliminating the need for a follow up email or additional form. What a great way to get someone immediately into your trial!

With low funnel keywords, it’s also all about delivering on the promise you made in the ad, even if that’s a very specific promise. This ad promises a free Buyer's Guide and then points to a landing page featuring an image of the guide, content around the guide, and the importance of choosing the right software. It’s extremely specific to what they were seeking and makes it incredibly simple for them to digest this information, decide that ion is the best option, and purchase from there.

With this page, it’s important to realize that different pieces of collateral and different ads require different pages with complimentary content.

Finally, we look briefly at social sign-on. In my opinion, social sign-on is quickly becoming a “be there or be square tactic”. It’s just plain awesome.

If someone is ready to convert, social sign-on allows them to login, register, or complete a form using the information already stored in their social networks. Talk about reducing friction: they click a button and BOOM, form complete. Contrary to popular believe, this can be incredibly successful in both B2C and B2B markets because a good social sign -on page allows a visitor to choose the site they’d like to use. It could be Facebook, GooglePlus, Linkedin, etc.

Interestingly, we’ve seen that just including a social sign-on option, actually increases the number of conversions received on even the more traditional form on the page. 

Ready to get more bang for your paid search buck? Send people to the right page, with the right content, in the right format. The first step is figuring out what level of the funnel your keywords fall, and then creating landing experiences that are relevant to that phase.

High Performance Landing Page Templates for High Funnel Keywords

At this year’s Conversion Conference in San Francisco, I had the pleasure of presenting three tactics for getting more bang for your paid search buck. I say it was a pleasure, because it truly was. You see, prior to falling into this crazy world of post-click marketing, I was a pre-click kind of gal. My life revolved around SEO, social media, online PR and of course, PPC.

With the paid search world always in the back of my mind, it was just awesome to present on a topic that merged PPC and optimization so well. Plus, who doesn’t want more bang for their buck, am I right?

As post-click marketers, we understand that every click your visitors make leads them somewhere and we happen to think that should be amazing post-click experiences. The only way to make them amazing to your paid search visitors, is to ensure that they’re giving visitors the right information in the easiest to digest format.

This varies greatly based on whether your visitors search query is considered a high or low funnel keyword. It’s this differentiation that gives you the first opportunity to get more return on your spend. Let’s start with the basic layout. This is what I refer to as PPC meets Landing Page, 101:

Once you’ve identified the type of traffic you have, high or low funnel, you can then start to really think about the type of experience best suited to that visitor’s mindset and where they are in the buying cycle. This is a crucial step.

The Right Format for High Funnel Keywords
Remember, these people aren’t ready to buy, they’re seeking more information and it’s your job to give it to them…without asking for anything in return. These experiences need to:

• Stay problem-focused and solution-driven. It’s about selling the solution, not your product
• Include industry-leading proof and build expert credibility
• Serve a lot of masters coming from a wide range of wants and needs
• Please everyone without disappointing anyone

You see, the challenge with creating landing pages for high funnel keywords, is that you don’t really have a read on your visitor yet and they certainly may not know you. At this point, the goal should be delivering lots of rich content that meets a variety of complex needs without overwhelming anyone and still directing them to an end conversion (easy, right?).

In reality, it’s not easy. In fact, it’s downright hard and often requires a high degree of template creativity and content control.

Need some inspiration? Here are three examples of highly effective high funnel keyword landing page strategies you can try today:

Audience Segmentation: The days of people criticizing segmentation paths due to the increased number of clicks are finally gone, thank goodness! Now, it’s time to really embrace this page layout and recognize that not only is it an ideal way to get hyper-relevant information in front of your visitors, but also gives you invaluable insights into how your visitors bucket themselves and what that means for their behavior.

In this example, a person is required to go through three different segmentation pages prior to completing a form. BUT, that form page has information that’s super relevant to that person because they now know three important things about that visitor that they didn’t know before.

I also appreciate that this experience has a super soft sell. An online demo isn’t hard to commit to and it’s yet another opportunity to provide these people with more information to push them lower into the funnel.

The “long layout”: This layout, also known as the “vertical layout” or “iPhone layout” (Apple is the pioneer of this format), includes a large amount of information on one long, scrollable page. This allows visitors to quickly browse a lot of information without having to interact with the page at all. A suggestions when experimenting with this layout:

• Break your page into easily identifiable chunks, with each chunk containing a block of text and image. This helps a visitor to scroll through and find what they’re looking for without getting lost.
• Because this layout reduces the number of engagement points, it’s important that you try to include some type of scroll tracking functionality to determine how far people are scrolling and what sections they’re stopping on the longest. This will you decide what sections to remove and which to move up.
• Don’t wait till the very bottom of the page to include the CTA! Make sure you include your CTA throughout the page so that someone can convert regardless of where they are. “Pinning” your CTA is also an option, so that it moves with your visitor as they scroll. 

This example does a good job with all of the above, on what is actually a three scroll long page. It’s also worth noting that in considering the mindset of a high funnel visitor, there isn’t a form on this page at all, making it even easier for someone who isn’t yet ready to buy to still move through the process.

Microsite: Last, but certainly not least, is the more traditional high funnel keyword layout: the microsite. We love them because it creates a way to include vast quantities of information, video, assets, and all sorts of other goodies in a way that lets visitors choose what they’re most interested in by clicking through the different pages.

We love them more, because if you do them right you can also tag each tab of your microsite, allowing you to gain insight into which tabs have the most interesting and valuable content.

This example is a four-tab microsite WITH a segmentation experience. I am in love people!

As if to increase my devotion, they’ve also included third party endorsements, videos, and customer testimonials. <sigh>, these things make me happy.

What do you think? Have you tried out any of these layouts for your high funnel keywords? Let us know in the comments below, we'd love to hear your testing stories.

And, stay tuned for my next post. I'll be giving you the lowdown on low funnel keyword landing experiences, along with some awesome examples.

More Bang for Your PPC Buck @ ConvCon San Francisco 2013

Last week Mary presented "Get More Bang for Your PPC Buck with Optimized Landing Experiences" at Conversion Conference San Francisco. Well, she's back and is sharing her slides from her session.

Want to decrease your CPC, raise your quality score and get greater return on your ad spend? (Obviously!) Her session unveiled three of the easiest and most cost effective ways to boost your PPC and display ad effectiveness. Learn how to segment visitors so they hit the right page with the right content in the right format, how to target low funnel keywords to increase quality score and enhance relevancy, and how to increase the value of high funnel keywords through the power of conversion content marketing.

Enjoy!

P.S. You can also check out some photos from the event here.

More Bang for Your PPC Buck - Conversion Conference San Francisco 2013 from ion interactive

Agile Marketing in a World of Constant Change - Marketo Summit 2013

Wow! What a whirlwind couple of months it has been for our leadership team. Both Scott and Mary have been traveling the country, presenting at various events and conferences. Most recently, Mary presented "Are you R.E.A.D.Y to Lift Your Conversions?" and Scott presented "Agile Marketing in a World of Constant Change" at Marketo Summit 2013. If you missed the summit, no worries, we have the slides available for you below. 

Agile Marketing: Managing Marketing in a World of Constant Change from ion interactive

Prefer to watch it live?

Scott will be presenting "Agile Marketing in a World of Constant Change" in a LIVE webinar this Wednesday at 1PM ET.

Don't miss it! Register today.

Are you R.E.A.D.Y to Lift Conversions?!

It was great meeting you all at Marketo Summit 2013 last week. Our booth was rocking and Mary received a tremendous response from her session "Are you R.E.A.D.Y to Lift Conversions?" If you couldn't make the event or didn't get a chance to see Mary speak, you can view the slides below. 

Are you R.E.A.D.Y to Lift Your Conversions? Marketo Summit 2013 from ion interactive

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Did you know you can improve marketing automation with ion?

You can use ion in tandem with your marketing automation solution for more leads, more branding and more revenue.

Integrating ion with your marketing automation solution can help you to generate results unlike anything that you could achieve singly.  Want to learn more?

Download our free guide, "The Power of Two." You’ll learn how to leverage the power of ion together with marketing automation to create a wider variety of better experiences with less effort, more sophistication, greater insights and streamlined testing.

7 Ways to Go Beyond Landing Pages

Didn't get a chance to attend Anna's webinar, "Facing Marketing's Moment of Truth: 7 Ways to Go Beyond Landing Pages"? No worries! You can watch the recorded version of the live webinar or check out the Slideshare version below. 

Learn to master your moments of truth.

1. Impress Instantly
2. Engage Deeply
3. Experiment Boldly
4. Move Swiftly—with great agility
5. Target & Personalize Precisely
6. Integrate Seamlessly
7. Connect Everywhere—mobile, tablet, desktop

Beyond Landing Pages from ion interactive

3 Slideshares that #RockTheCasbah

ion has been on the road, presenting at various conferences across the country — SearchFest, SMX West and most recently, Marketing Executive Summit in Del Mar California.

If you didn’t get an opportunity to attend any of these amazing events, no worries, we’ve got you covered.

You can check out Susan and Scott's presentations below!

Big Ideas. Big Results. SearchFest 2013 from ion interactive

The Quest for Awesome Mobile Landing Pages - SMX West 2013 from ion interactive

Agile Marketing: Managing Marketing in a World of Constant Change from ion interactive

And, don't forget to visit our Events section for a full list of upcoming conferences and events.

See you there!

Homepages Are Not Landing Pages

In my previous post, Shifting Focus from Traffic to Conversions, I say, "I’m Jay and I’m a traffic guy.” I do not want anyone to think that being a traffic guy is really a bad thing, because honestly, I still think about traffic generation a majority of the time. Only now, I think about what the user will experience post-click. Which leads us to the second part (in a three part series) of my journey from being a “traffic guy” to being a online marketeer — landing pages.          

The Dark Ages

There was a time in my online career when the term landing page actually meant homepage. Let’s refer to this period in my life as “The Dark Ages.” If I was buying ads for some affiliate niche, I would send those clicks directly to the homepage of the site. Of course, the homepage had everything that you might need to call it a legitimate landing page. It had a call-to-action. It had information. And more calls-to-action. There were banner advertisements, links to other parts of the site, and maybe even a link trade or two. If I couldn’t get the visitor to click a button, I was going to try to get them to click on a pay-per-click ad. If that didn’t work, maybe they could click one of my link trades. All this clutter did was end up confusing the visitor. With no clear direction, they would just hit the back button or close the window. Homepages are not landing pages. Repeat with me here: homepages are not landing pages.

The Landing Page Era

Now, I saw the terrible mistakes of my past and vowed never to go down that road again. I started to build landing pages for a single purpose: to have the end user complete the intended goal. Landing pages definitely provided a more targeted alternative, but often they didn’t make a great first impression and failed to win the conversion. The Landing Page Era was short-lived.

The Post-click Revelation

I knew that the click-through was a critical ‘moment of truth’ — when people were clicking through my ads, banners and links, they had pretty specific expectations. My major revelation? The standard landing page is an ineffective relic — just like my old “traffic guy” mentality. The time had come to forget the old cookie-cutter headline, form, call-to-action pages and start thinking about post-click marketing. So, what is a post-click marketing you may ask? According to Scott’s Post-click Marketing Heuristic, post-click marketing:

1. Starts with context
2. Delivers great content
3. Follows through on conversion
4. And is driven by metrics & testing

The "post-click marketing heuristic” offers a guided tour through the creation and optimization of post-click experiences. (Click the image below to enlarge.)

Ultimately, post-click marketing goes beyond a single landing page. It means really thinking about your audience and delivering them a relevant and valuable message. It's engaging people in your brand both pre- and post-conversion. And most important, it means testing, testing and more testing! 

Stay tuned for my final post, where wrap up my journey from traffic to conversions and talk about the importance of agile testing and optimization. 

American Idol—my own private landing page test

I love this time of year. It's American Idol time. During which I put my life, my work and my social obligations aside to veg on the couch for up to five hours a week.

Why do I love AI so much? Is it seeing the young talent go from undiscovered to unstoppable in just a few short weeks? It is the pithy commentary and awkward interpersonal dynamics of Nikki, Keith, Mariah and Randy? Is it the sparkle in Ryan Seacrest's eye? 

Oh no. It's really, really, really not any of those things. I really can't stomach the contestants that much (although, I do have a soft spot in my heart for a few—ahem....call me, Phillip Phillips).What I love about American Idol is watching who wins each week and seeing how it

compares to what the judges think. In my world, the contestants are landing pages and the judges are the marketers behind them.

On American Idol, judges spend weeks traveling around, selecting talent. They start the competition, whittling their list down from hundreds of candidates to just 10. Then, they turn it over to America's hands. Each week, the singers perform and then....my favorite moment of all...America votes.

Think about how much this mirrors landing page testing. Marketers make educated guesses & decisions about what type of experience, content and calls to action will influence their visitors to convert. A lot of good thought process goes into those decisions, and a lot of time is spent on layout, design, and copy. Then....they launch. The rubber meets the road. If a test is being run—say two versions of an experience against each other, then in short order educated guesses become reality. One experience will win out over the other. Sometimes, it's the sure thing you would have put your money on. Other times, it's the one you least expected to perform.

In last year's season of American Idol, the judges loved a singer named Jessica Sanchez. She was a crowd favorite as well, and there was much speculation that she would be the winner. Then one week, in truly shocking fashion, she got the least amount of votes and set to go home. Just like that, from a crowd-pleasing favorite to the chopping block.

It reminded me of how often I've been sure a landing experience would win, only to have it lose against something I judged to be inferior. Hey, it happens. That's why I love testing—we don't need to guess!

Don't cry for Jessica. The judges intervened, saved her and she went on to be the runner up for the season. And don't cry for any lost landing page tests either, just move on to the next one. 

What will you do with your 1/20th of a second?

FREE Webinar!

Join us Wednesday, April 3rd, 2013 at 1:00 PM ET for a free webinar featuring ion co-founder, Anna Talerico.

There are 7 characteristics of successful marketing moments. Seven ways to get past that 1/20th of a second that visitors give you and generate real results. What comes next is a lead, a social commitment or a sale. Great moments generate relationships—more revenue and better brand.

Learn to:

1. Impress Instantly
2. Engage Deeply
3. Experiment Boldly
4. Move Swiftly—with great agility
5. Target & Personalize Precisely
6. Integrate Seamlessly
7. Connect Everywhere—mobile, tablet, desktop

Learn to master your moments of truth. Register now!