Applying Godin Marketing Strategy To Landing Page Optimization

Author: Jono Smith on 24 January 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: online marketing

Seth Godin’s blog, particularly his insight into why people do what they do, is a good basis for determining how to better engage an event’s participants and donors. So when I came across this article outlining five visitor outcomes from a landing page, I was compelled to share (and paraphrase). According to Seth, a landing page (in fact, every page) can only cause one of five actions:

1. Get the visitor to click on your site or follow another link
2. Get the visitor to donate or sign-up to participate
3. Get the visitor to opt-in to your organization’s newsletter (allowing your organization to communicate with him or her further)
4. Get the visitor to share information with their community
5. Teach the the visitor more about your organization 

These are vastly different outcomes with one commonality -- a visitor to your organization’s landing page has “converted” in some fashion, allowing you to engage in creating and nurturing a relationship with this person.

To better optimize your site’s landing pages for these important conversion efforts, first see where you are currently achieving success and determine the areas where you can improve. Look at your Google Analytics results and check the bounce rates and conversion rates of your pages. (Quick definitions: Bounce rate is the percentage of people who view this page and then exit the site without viewing an additional site page; Conversion rate is the percentage of people who view a page that take a desired action, such as purchase or sign-up.) Based on the bounce and conversion rates, you can examine your landing pages and determine what type performs the best for each specific outcome.

Also, take the time to look at source traffic for those pages, which will help you to understand the root source of each specific visitor action. Insights gained from understanding traffic behavior can help yield more of these valuable conversion events. You will have to the knowledge to prioritize your outreach strategy for the most important sets of visitors to your organization, once you understand the entry point that visitors that convert use to access your site.

How is your organization prioritizing or tracking these conversions?

• SEOMoz - Landing Pages
• Hubspot - 3 Tips for Effective Landing Pages
• Marketing Sherpa
• SEOMoz - 6 Ways to Learn SEO