Increase cost effectiveness of advertising dollars

by Claudia Hafner

Specialized landing pages and calls-to-action reduce costs by increasing the value of your prospects.

When a visitor clicks to your site from a paid search (pay-per-click) or banner ad, it has already cost you the price of a click to get them there. If the page they landed on is specific to the ad, you may have increased the value of that click in several ways.

1. Google likes to see content that matches the Google ad your visitor clicked on. In such cases, Google actually charges less for that click than it would have otherwise.
2. If the visitor sees what they are looking for as soon as they land on your page, they are apt to stick around and read it...and maybe even take some form of action.
   
3. If you offer your visitor something compelling (a call-to-action) in exchange for their contact information, this person has become a lead, which, over weeks, months and years, can potentially bring continued revenue.

As you move your advertising dollars away from interruption marketing to inbound marketing, you want to keep giving your visitor more of what they are looking for through specialized landing pages and calls-to-action.

Think about the different traffic streams through which your visitors are reaching your site. Can you provide more focused content through a landing page designed to give them what they are looking for? Give this some thought and leave comments about the challenges you are facing in this regard.

Start creating your specialized landing pages with this downloadable worksheet.

Download our Landing Page Worksheet.

 

Are your internet marketing dollars wasted on interruption?

by Claudia Hafner  

When you visit your favorite websites for news, entertainment, socializing, or anything else, do you find the ads on those pages intriguing? Most often, if you are like me, you ignore them or even get annoyed by them. Generally, you are on these sites to accomplish certain activity, and if you noticed one of those banner ads, and they were about something you didn't care at all about, what impact do they make on you? Think of the volume of traffic these sites may get, but how few eyeballs are interested in looking at those ads.

Banner ads, in internet marketing, are a form of interruption marketing. You aren't on these sites looking for what these ads are selling (much less looking for these ads), but they try to interrupt you anyway, wrestling you away from what you were trying to do. Think about what kind of traffic these ads are pulling in...or not.

On the other hand, you use search engines to find what you are looking for and sponsored ads on these pages can be selling exactly what you are looking for. Since you ARE looking...no interruption here.

Spending marketing dollars on what people are actively looking for will bring you more targeted traffic...people already looking for what you are selling. And most of these marketing dollars are spent only when your ad is clicked on (pay-per-click).

More and more, interruption marketing is getting less and less attention from consumers. It may be time for you to shift your marketing dollars to activity that gets attention...and not provide interruption.