Category Archives: Lead Generation

The Future Landing Page May Be A Micro Site

Posted on November 15, 2011 | Leave a comment
Landing Pages

Landing Pages - How to get the most conversions...

Landing pages are living canvases in the world of direct response marketing. We’re always testing, tweaking, refining and even full-scale redoing them to achieve the perfectly optimized and conversion experience.

[Need more tips - here's my list of great landing page optimization resources]

Consumers crave information, and unless your conversion point is a coupon or freebie, you’re going to need to work at convincing the consumer to complete your form.

That’s why you might need a micro site.  A micro site simply let’s you string together a few extra pieces of content to tell a story or help the consumer understand your value proposition a little bit more before they convert.

I’m not going to dive into how to create a micro site today. Instead, I want to simply encourage you to think beyond the stereotypical landing page that only has a headline, image, paragraph of text and a form. Start thinking outside the page. What else can you do to convince the user to convert? Is it a social signal? Visual impression? Navigation to other content? Testimonials?

To help you understand that a landing page is not limited to a single URL, here’s a great article by Scott Brinker on “Landing Pages 3.0″.

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Posted in Lead Generation, Websites

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Should you advertise on mobile devices?

Posted on September 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

If you are still asking yourself (or your business) this question, the good news is that it is not too late to start; the bad news is that you are a little late to the game.

Gavin O’Malley for MediaPost reports that in-app inventory is expected to surpass display inventory in the not-too-distant future.

It is easy to get started if you are already advertising through AdWords. You can begin creating campaigns that specifically target mobile devices such as tablets (which is a no-brainer) and smart phones. If you are going to target small-screen devices, I strongly encourage you to create separate campaigns and landing pages. If your existing landing pages and forms are already mobile-friendly, then you may be able to skip creating a new set. There’s an easy way to find out – just pull up your pages on a mobile device and participate in the user experience first hand. Here’s what you need:

  • Fast-loading page
    • few graphics
    • few plug-ins and calls to external files such as css, js, etc.
  • Easy to navigate
    • intuitive funnel
    • easy to ID links and CTAs
  • Easy to complete form
    • remember it is hard to type, so limit free text fields
    • limit hovering which is difficult without a mouse
  • Click-to-call phone number
  • Click-to-email email address
  • Limit scrolling from left-to-right
If your page complies with the short list above, you are headed in the the right direction. Google recently acquired AdMob, an advertising network for in-app ads. Between Google’s suite of products and AdMob, you’ll have plenty of inventory to pilot. You can opt-in and opt-out of various sites and apps, just like you can in the Google GDN (placements).
So don’t ask “should I?” and instead start doing!

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Posted in Lead Generation, Search

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QR Code Adoption: Is it an issue of Trust

Posted on August 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Mobile Commerce recently published an article showing that adoption of QR codes by students is lacking (especially compared to other areas of the world such as Asia).

Could this be due to trust issues? Is it possible that young students don’t particularly trust advertising? Rather than save time by scanning a code to pull up a page who’s content they are not aware, students would rather control the conversation and type in the URL manually.

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Posted in Everything Else, Lead Generation

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