Duct Tape Marketing Blog
Online marketers have used the term “landing page” for many years to describe a sales tactic focused on getting people to take one, specific action. Today, landing pages have simply become a required element in the marketing toolbox for every imaginable business, including local brick and mortar types.
Example of a personalized lead capture landing page
A landing page is just the page people land on because an ad or email directed them to that specific page as opposed to your site’s homepage.
Effective landing pages make it very clear what a visitor is going to get from a page and how to get it. That’s it plain and simple. There are many great articles on how to create better landing pages (including this one from Unbounce) but today I want to focus on why you need to create and use landing pages as a core online tool
Local content
One of the best ways to get your site to rank higher when people search locally and on mobile devices is to have lots of local content. Creating landing pages that feature very localized, down to the neighborhood perhaps, content is a great way to start building the local content and link necessary to have your pages move up in the search index for local search.
Social content
Sending your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook connections to landing pages that are personalized to each network is a great way to deepen the connection. By running Twitter and Facebook feeds on these pages and acknowledging the connection with those that come from those networks you will also find a much higher degree of engagement in those networks.
Smart content
By creating landing pages that address the specific market segments, product segments or key content segments for your business you can begin to better funnel people to the specific types of content they desire. Using a tool like Survey Funnel in conjunction with your landing pages could allow a visitor to tell you what they are looking for and be directed to specific content based on their choices.
Lead capture
Landing pages are your lead capture workhorse. If you have a great eBook or free workshop to promote you may want to create signup forms for most of your web pages, but your signups will soar when you create a page that details, sells and demonstrates the benefits of acquiring your free report. A landing page with video, audio, images, descriptions and very intuitive call to action is a must for lead capture campaigns.
Advertising conversion
Any form of advertising will be much more effective if it is targeted to a page that contains nothing but content that supports the message in your ads. The more relevant the page to the ad, the more effective. Smart marketers constantly experiment with ad and landing page combinations, including creating keyword optimized pages for specific groups of PPC ads.
Get Premise
There are many resources geared towards helping you create landing pages, but my favorite at the moment is Copyblogger’s Premise. I run my entire website on WordPress and Premise is a WordPress landing page plugin that gives me total flexibility in the creation of landing pages. The tool includes predesigned configurations for sales pages and opt-in pages and is very easy to configure and style. A tool like Premise is a must if you plan to take today’s advice to heart.
5 Reasons Why Landing Pages Are a Must is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Plenty of startups try to determine the perfect business model to take to market only to find that the market doesn’t need, want or understand what they are presenting.
The fact is most books or courses on business models take this into consideration by suggesting trial and error scenarios and market hypothesizes prior to launch.
Any business model, or plan for that matter, is little more than a guess and I believe that your best chance for getting that guess right is to build your business model based on a marketing strategy.
This assumes the role a fully developed marketing strategy actually should play in determining the direction of an organization. The fact is most people, if they consider marketing strategy at all, stop at a core message, identity elements and perhaps a sales proposition and call it a strategy.
A marketing strategy is how you plan to use the resources available to you to build an ongoing case that your business, products and services are the obvious choice for a narrowly defined ideal customer.
If you accept this expanded view of marketing strategy then I would suggest you answer the following questions in an attempt to measure where your strategy stands today and where it could go if your understood and integrated it fully as your business model
- What about this job, work, or organization are you passionate about?
- How does this business serve a higher purpose for you and your customers?
- What value do you really bring that benefits your market in ways that your competitors wouldn’t dream of proposing
- What’s the dominant personality trait that you need your customers to associate with your business?
- What does an ideal client look like?
- What is the simple 10-word core message that explains and excites?
- How will your market become aware of your business?
- How will your market come to trust that you have the answers?
- What are the revenue sources that you can tap to grow this business?
- Can you describe the perfect customer experience throughout your organization?
- What resource gaps and constraints do you need to overcome to achieve your strategy?
- What partnerships do you need to create in order to achieve your strategy?
- What would the result of using this strategy model to run your business look like?
13 Questions That Will Lead You To Your Perfect Marketing Strategy is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Everyone, from PR firms to individuals with a product to sell, pitches bloggers these days. Getting coverage or exposure for your business by way of a number of highly read blogs should be a foundational element of your PR approach.
So, I thought I would share of few of my thoughts on the most effective ways to get a blogger’s attention and stand out in a way that gives your pitch a far better chance of garnering coverage.
Sadly, it would much easier to write a post on what not to do, but I like to stay on the positive side here.
Whether your goal is to land a guest post, get a review of your product or just advance an idea you’ve got to put in the work to personalize your pitch and build relationships by demonstrating you’re a resource and not a pest.
Make non-spammy comments
One of the best ways to get on the radar of a blogger is to join their community by making relevant comments. Don’t drop in just to add a comment about your business or point to your recent blog post about some unrelated idea. Add to the conversation like someone who actually cares about the conversation and you’ll start to build a relationship based on trust.
Find regular features
Take some time to dig around in the archives of a blog and you’re likely to find some regular features just like you might in a magazine. Then, when it comes time to pitch your idea, you can suggest that it would be a good fit for a certain feature. This will always give your pitch more relevance and offer proof that you know a bit about the blog and that yours is not simply a bulk pitch.
I’ve run a Saturday post for several years now where I feature three services or apps that I call my weekly favs. Smart marketers have picked up on that and often pitch their product for a feature in that post. It’s a little thing, but it suggests a lot.
Look beyond the blog
If you buy that this is a relationship building game, then why not employ a few tools outside the blog to help. Build a Twitter list of your targeted bloggers and pay attention to what they tweet and what the retweet. Look at what they favorite on Twitter for some real meaty clues about what they like,
By monitoring what they do beyond their blog and in social networks you can often find angles that won’t be apparent on a simple media list.
Connect with guests and get referred
Many blogs run guest posts these days and one of the best ways to get your content on the list of potential guest posters is to study and connect with those that are already posting. In fact, you might go as far as to target these folks as suggested above and reach out to a few and ask for introductions.
A guest post on a highly read blog may be one of the most effective marketing tools you can employ so don’t just blast guest post requests, build a case for your post by becoming a part of the community and creating a network within.
Ask for an interview
Many bloggers, even well known bloggers, still work on building their awareness and will jump at almost any opportunity to spread the word about things they are working on. Many bloggers have business interests beyond their blog that need exposure. Many bloggers are also authors and have books to sell.
Consider interviewing some of your targeted bloggers for your own blog or podcast or connect them with other journalist or even customers of yours that might have a reason to want to interview them. An interview might consist of a twenty minute phone conversation or it might just be one well thought out question that you send via email, either way, this a great approach for building both content and relationships.
It warrants repeating, if a mention or link or review in your favorite blog is a worthwhile objective for your business, then put in the work required to get it done right.
5 Non Spammy Ways To Get a Blogger’s Attention is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.
I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or one that I took out there on the road.
New Duct Tape Marketing t-shirt design via Hugh MacLeod Gapingvoid
Good stuff I found this week:
Ming.ly – A personal relationship manager that aggregates your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter into a searchable merged address book that allows you to update and communicate on social networks without leaving your Gmail inbox.
Pinstamatic – Allows you to add locations, music, quotes, calendar dates, Twitter profile links, sticky notes and websites to to Pinterest.
Meetings.io – free and simple way to meet face to face online without the need to install software, join a social network or add contacts
Weekend Favs May Twelve is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
Business owners and marketers are told to measure and quantify everything. The problem is this practice alone can lead to false assumptions and a fixation on things that simply don’t matter that much.
lollipolluza via Flickr
It’s a lot like having a bunch of puzzle pieces without the box top picture that gives the pieces context.
The trick is to set all the measurement and analysis aside for a bit and determine your own unique and overriding “macro metric” of success. This is the one thing that you measure above all as a signal of the health of the business. This is the measure of the success of your overriding marketing strategy.
Once you do that you then you can use other data that measures things like awareness, engagement, sharing, loyalty, relationships, referrals and revenue as way to refine your focus on what matters most.
The macro metric is the core measure of “who you are” or “how you want” the brand to be perceived. It’s the one tangible or intangible signal that you’re being true to why you do what you do.
I’ll warn you, finding this one true measure isn’t always the easiest task and there’s no marketing analytics book that can shortcut this idea for you. You discover it when you decide the higher purpose your business serves and when you then listen to how your community describes that higher purpose.
I determined my macro metric years ago and I’ve used it as a guide for a great deal of what we do. For Duct Tape Marketing the metric is usefulness.
We go to great lengths to determine if what we’re doing is useful to our community and to the market as a whole. This thinking influences our content creation, our education, our products, our follow-up, our strategic partnerships, our analysis of revenue per customer, our traffic building, our lead generation, our lead conversion and even our internal processes to a large degree.
We ask our customers to share what they find useful. We track the number of times that people volunteer that something we’ve done is practical and useful. We get nervous when we don’t hear that word from our community during the course of any given day.
Find your macro metric and tie every other key performance indicator you can track and perhaps a few that you can simply feel to this metric and your brand will flourish.
Oh, and I sincerely hope you found this post useful.
Engaging Your Macro Metric As a True Measure of Success is a post from: Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
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