Have you done advertising for your business before? Most of us business owners have done some form of advertising. Magazine ads, editorials, newspaper ads and the like are all part of the common ways we can get our business out to more people.
But as you would know in this modern day where the internet reigns king in many areas of our lives, businesses are turning their focus to advertising on the web as a way to generate business but many businesses make a fundamental mistake that causes them to miss out on a LOT more potential ‘bang-for-their-buck’ return on investment.
Advertising online is what I call a two-step process. The first step is the hook, and the second step is actually hauling in the catch. Most people only send out a hook and don’t actually reel in the catch! You’re probably thinking “get to the bloody point!”, yes sorry. So what i’m getting at is when advertising online you need to focus on getting the person to actually enquire. Because with all online advertisements we generally have whats called a ‘landing page’ and many fail to set one up let alone create it properly.
Landing pages are where we have to actually get the user to fill-in their details or make a purchase! It’s a bit of a process over conventional advertising. What we suggest is people setup a custom landing page that matches their ad as close as possible. So if you’re a Law Firm for instance, make advertising campaigns for your different areas of practice. For instance, a campaign for Trusts, a campaign for Conveyancing, and perhaps a campaign for Commercial Law. Once you have your various campaigns setup, you now need to create landing pages for each of the campaigns you have created. So a landing page tailored with text, imagery and call to actions for each of those campaigns is going to get the best result.
If someone clicks on an ad for ‘Commercial Law’, they want to land on a page that is specifically about ‘Commercial Law’, NOT your homepage. Many people make a fatal mistake with online advertising by landing people on their homepage. Your homepage is generally NOT a suitable landing page because its not specifically setup for what you are marketing.
A landing page also requires a few additional features above and beyond what a standard webpage has.
Our tips includes:
- Give people a single pathway to taking action
- Hide your main navigation, hide your social media buttons, hide your footer - remove distractions and links - we want people to enquire / buy and not get distracted by too many options
- Have a call to action on the page, in way of a contact phone number, contact form to fill in and limited offer (ideally)
- Backup your product / service with testimonials - ideally video if you can too. Also make sure your testimonial is specifically about the product or service you’re selling because that’ll help convince people to enquire
- Make a limited offer - if you’re selling a product this can be a great way for people to take action. However make sure you have a good product and a compelling offer!
- Keep the wording to a minimum ideally, have a few large, clean, clear headlines on your page
To really gauge how well your landing page does, setup Conversion tracking on these pages. So if someone clicks your ad, then makes an enquiry, you can gauge how many people are taking action in comparison to how much you spend on ads! So you spent $500 on ads and get 10 conversions worth $500 each, then you can say you got a $5000 return on investment (which was $500)… great! You may also have the scenario where you spent $500 and get 1 conversion for $500 and think “that was a waste of time!”. So measuring your return is important to help you know how you’re actually doing.
So the lesson here is make sure you setup a landing page. The more you can tailor your landing page to match the advertising campaign you’re marketing then the more likely you will get a result from your advertising efforts, be it sales or new leads.
