Minal meets… Sam Bailey, digital marketing specialist
You may have thought about creating landing pages for your business for a while. But something’s been stopping you. Maybe that thing is not really knowing why you would create one and what they are good for. I know I’ve yet to really explore creating landing pages for my business. That’s why I decided to interview an expert – my good friend, Sam Bailey of Silver Compass Digital Marketing. Sam regularly helps his clients create landing pages that positively impact their businesses. Read his advice on how they could help yours.
Minal: Tell me a bit about your digital agency. What’s your specialism?
Sam: I own a small agency, based in Malden. My team and I work with amazing small businesses to help them market themselves online. We do this through social media management, Facebook advertising (generating new leads) and creating structured email campaigns so existing customers buy again.
Minal: What would you say landing pages are good for?
Sam: Landing pages can be an incredibly powerful tool if you use them in conjunction with Facebook advertising. They work well if you have a product or an offer to promote and are an important part of finding new clients or enticing existing clients to buy a different product or service. You can use them to provide information about a product or service in a streamlined area, with the distraction of information available on your usual website. It’s all about the visitor completing an action.
Minal: What are the main elements you need to include on a landing page?
Well, it depends on the business and what you want to achieve. Largely, think of it in the same way as you would when you’re putting together an email campaign. You need a decent, compelling headline. Then include a short description. You can use images and videos too. Finally, add a strong call to action button, and make sure your landing page is mobile-friendly.
I would also recommend split-testing the heading. If you use a tool, like LeadPages, you can split test from within it. You can also use Facebook adverts to split-test your headlines. I’d recommend running them for between 3 and 10 days.
Minal: How would you recommend following up with people who took your action?
Sam: Depending on your business, you can follow up in a number of ways. For example, a Pilates studio may follow up with an email or phone call to get the person booked on to a taster session.
For a business where the sales cycle is longer, and where trust and rapport need to be built, I’d recommend using an email autoresponder series. It can be as simple or complex as you need. The automation can be a set number of emails that get sent out one after the other. Or they can be based on conditional logic, which works on actions people take on the emails you send.
My main piece of advice would be: don’t be afraid to follow up to get the sale.
Minal: Where would you promote your landing page?
Sam: You should promote your landing page in the same way as other content you generate. Send it out to your email list. Share it on your social media networks. As I’ve mentioned, landing pages work particularly well with Facebook advertising, especially when you combine them with the Facebook pixel, so you can remarket to the people who didn’t take action!
Minal: Would you recommend putting a link to the landing page on your website?
Sam: Yes! Avoid setting up a landing page that is part of your website. There’s just too much distraction there and you’ll lose people to other pages on your website. When you use a landing page, the visitor’s sole focus should be what’s on that page and you should encourage them to take action. But your website is definitely another place you should be promoting it!
Minal: What are the main gotchas you need to watch out for?
Sam: Not having a strong enough call to action; the thing you want people to do. It needs to be an instruction to do something now. You can talk about how cool something is and miss getting people to take the action you want. What you want people to do needs to be explicit.
The next thing is not telling people about your landing page. Don’t create it and expect people to find it. There are lots of pages on the Internet and it’s not something people will stumble on. You need to lead them to it. You can do that organically or with paid advertising, but you need to point people to it.
The best landing pages are the ones that give something away for free. But don’t give away something you can’t afford to give away! Marketing should always cost you less money than what you bring in from doing it.
Lastly, make sure the branding is easily recognisable. It doesn’t need to look the same as your website though. And don’t go crazy with colours and fonts. Just go an appropriate amount of crazy!
Minal: How do you keep track of whether the landing page is working?
Sam: Most good software providers will have accessible analytics that will tell you the number of people who have visited, the number of people who have taken action and the bounce rate, i.e. those who left the page without taking action. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than knowing those numbers.
Minal: Can you recommend some landing page tools my readers can use?
Sam: The main ones are LeadPages, ClickFunnels and Unbounce. I know that GetResponse is doing them too.
Minal: How often should you use landing pages in your marketing?
Sam: It depends on the type of business you have and the offers you want to promote. Stay away from promoting the same thing for too long because there will be a point where results will tail off. Think about refreshing your offer on a monthly basis. Definitely don’t promote the same thing for longer than three months. If monthly is too quick for you, try a two-month campaign and then change to something new.
I hope this interview has spurred you on to use landing pages for your business. I’d love to know what you think you can use them for. Tell me in the comments section below.