The art of successfully driving leads and sales involves reaching two groups; targeting the right audience to brand and create awareness, and making certain you’re in front of today’s potential buyers – intent or interest-based prospects. A common mistake of marketing campaigns is to target one group but ignore the other. Doing so can severely limit sales opportunities. Here are some tips to leverage assets and reach the low-hanging fruit or “intent-based” buyers while also building awareness and brand for your product with your audience of future buyers.
1. Have an Audience-Targeted Banner Campaign and SEM Campaign
While audience-targeted banner ads may not receive the same conversion rates as an intent-based Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, having both in place can significantly improve reach and results. Many display content networks allow for cost-per-click and site-targeted banner ads, which can amount to a ton of impressions. Even if folks aren’t clicking on them, they provide valuable brand and awareness building and can improve the conversion rates of SEM campaigns. Finally, you might experiment by including remarketing or retargeting as part of your campaign.
2. Version Your Landing Pages
Versioning the content of your landing page not only provides valuable measurement opportunities, but it can also give you an advantage in Search Engine Marketing. You can experiment with different content on your banner ad landing pages (video, copy, etc.) to determine which engages prospects the most. For the SEM landing pages, you can version landing pages with keyword-integration strategies to improve the Quality Score of your ads.
3. Leverage Assets for Your Email Campaign
You can leverage the assets of your landing page to create emails to your subscriber base. Segmenting your email lists provides additional opportunities to version the emails to deliver relevant content to specific groups.
4. Leverage Assets in Social Media
Do you have a Facebook Page? Consider leveraging the landing page assets into an FBML tab or box and even link it to your landing page. When appropriate, integrate the landing page URL into conversations and status updates on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Finally, experiment with your landing pages by versioning some with links to your social media channels. For those prospects that are interested but not ready to buy, this can provide them with an alternative to abandonment with the option to engage with your company. You then have an opportunity to nurture them into a future customer.
