With the advent of digital advertising, the marketing world changed forever. Although print advertising may still have its place in your marketing mix, it’s clear that digital advertising has supplanted it in terms of relevance, utility, and pervasiveness. Gone are the days when one might place an ad in a publication and wait for the leads to come rolling in, always wondering how many people actually glanced at the ad or skipped over it entirely, and who these readers were. Today, digital advertising can provide a wealth of data to advertisers, including what search terms are generating the most clicks (great information for future campaigns), which ads are most effective (great for A/B testing and future campaigns), and—perhaps most interestingly—what users do once they click on your ad and reach your website. Although it’s unquestionably important to focus on your ad’s look and feel when setting up a campaign, you should be just as focused on the “now what?”—everything that happens once a visitor clicks your ad. This is where landing pages come in: they are literally the page that visitors “land” on when they click your ad, and where landing page magic happens.
Related: Why ETF Issuers are Marketing Companies
What is the difference between a landing page and an ordinary web page? For starters, most home pages typically serve as central clearinghouses of information, offering dozens of links to various topics and products that a visitor might be interested in. Landing pages are different. They are intensely streamlined, almost brutally optimized to provide the visitor just a single choice: take your desired action (by clicking on the only available link), or leave the webpage. Fewer links on your landing page offer fewer distractions for your new website visitor, which has been proven to increase conversion rates for paid advertising.
Naturally, the exact form your landing page takes is a function of your goals for your advertising campaign. If you’re an ETF issuer, you may have a number of different goals, but you’ll have to be targeted when it comes to your advertising campaign. Is the goal to boost assets under management? Then your advisor and investor-targeted ads should feed to a landing page that offers up value (often a lengthier, rich piece of content) in exchange for an email address. This way, you can gather up valuable data regarding who is most interested in your fund. You could feed those emails into a concerted, targeted email campaign, or even reach out to the most promising leads directly to engage with them on a more personal level. The key here, though, is to keep your landing page as simple and streamlined as possible. Too many links will muddy the message and drive your conversion rate—the percentage of visitors who engage in the desired action—down.
By keeping eye on your advertising campaign’s goals, and structuring your landing pages to focus visitors’ attention, you’ll be able to provide a cohesive, sensible experience to visitors who click on your ad. This can prove absolutely crucial in lead generation and advertising initiatives and should be a central focus of any advertising campaign. It’s usually not enough to simply get the word out; you need to engage with the website visitor and have them do something. Now that’s 21st century marketing.