Can you apply the spirit of social media to other marketing channels?

At this year’s SMX East, after my presentation on Landing Page Usefulness—emphasizing a “usefulness” mission over “usability” tactics—it struck me: great landing pages can bring many of the ideals of social media to paid search marketing campaigns.

Here are five principles of social media marketing that can energize your landing page program:

1. Engage in specific conversations, not generic one-size-fits-all talk.

When a company engages in social media, the worst thing it can do is echo canned, cut-and-paste responses to every incoming comment. It’s painful just to imagine! Yet many paid search marketing campaigns commit that very faux pas: a user clicks on a keyword/ad combination with a specific promise, and then they are unceremoniously tossed to a general-purpose page. Such “message mismatch” between keywords/ads and their associated landing pages damages brands and hobbles conversion rates.

The reason I advocate deploying dozens—or even hundreds—of landing pages is because doing so lets you deliver focused and well-matched introductory dialogues with respondents, framed in their terms. As I said in my presentation, the goal is have respondents exclaim, “thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for!”

It’s not about optimizing one page to rule them all—an illusory, marketer-centric fantasy—but deploying many separate pages that each speak authentically to their niche. That’s the kind of respect that honest social media marketing shows to people reaching out to you, and a good landing page strategy can live up to the spirit of that goal.

2. Embrace “constant content,” continually releasing new ideas out into the world.

From blogging to tweeting, the engine of social media is the frequent generation of content. Hopefully it doesn’t take a committee or half a dozen pairs of hands to put up a new blog post or to update your Facebook fan page. The incentives in social media are to be fast, prolific, experimental, relevant and real.

The same tenets should apply to landing pages.

Sometimes, when I suggest that people should publish dozens or hundreds of landing pages, I get a look of incredulity: how could we ever create so many landing pages? Yet organizations who embrace social media marketing produce 10-times as much content without breaking a sweat. The resistance to such agile production of landing pages is often a hang-up from the bygone days of long-cycle web development. Today, deploying new landing pages should be as easy as—maybe even easier than—posting to your blog.

If you have a good content management system (CMS), a nice collection of page design templates, a shared library of images, maybe a few reusable Flash components, and a standardized mechanism for data collection and analytics tracking, then you’re ready to crank out landing pages on demand. And if you don’t have all of those pieces yet, none of them are particularly difficult to put in place.

3. Harness fast feedback to learn about your audience.

Arguably the best feature of social media is that it lets you tap into candid and immediate feedback from your market, albeit in an unstructured manner. It’s a wonderful environment to put ideas out into the community and quickly gauge reaction.

However, you can also solicit a different kind of feedback—more quantifiable and more directly connected to sales—through rapid experimentation with landing pages and keyword buys. Participation is more predictable with such PPC experiments, and the results can be easily benchmarked against your e-commerce or lead funnel metrics. It’s a small, low-risk investment that can help you discover big wins.

Struck with a novel theory about an unaddressed customer segment over your morning coffee? Don’t just hypothesize about it or file it for the next quarterly planning meeting. Launch a targeted search ad and tightly matched landing page for it before lunch and have real-world feedback by the next day. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You can test and tweak as you go along—an ongoing feedback loop.

Ads and landing pages also lend themselves to A/B tests, in a more controlled fashion than variations in social media tactics. If you structure your tests with good hypotheses, you can learn a lot about audience preferences and personas.

4. Open up a dialogue by asking relevant questions—and respecting the answers.

Social media is a conversation, not a soliloquy. People can ask questions, usually quite informally, to help identify the content or information that’s most relevant to their interests. This allows a single discussion to adapt itself to many different participants.

A similar dynamic can be achieved with landing pages. Sometimes, you have to field clicks from keywords/ads that appeal to several different segments of respondents. Instead of reducing the specificity of your content to a bland common denominator—the ill-fated, one-page-to-rule-them-all approach—start by offering them a few meaningful choices. Are you more interested in A, B, or C? Based on their one-click selection, you then deliver more detailed content that’s tailored to their needs.

This technique is known as multi-step landing pages or conversion paths. It can be a tremendous source of feedback, especially when you test different types of choices. However, it’s crucial that the choices genuinely help respondents find what is most useful to them—you want segmentation that benefits users, not just marketers. Remember, we’re striving for that “thank you, that was exactly what I was looking for” effect.

5. Champion transparency and authenticity over cleverness and technology.

The essence of social media is its authenticity, plain and simple. You can try to manipulate it with gimmicks and complicated machinery, but such machinations tend to fall flat. People love what’s real in social media, not what’s artificially crafted to appear real. Human trust is more important than plastic perfection.

Certainly this holds true with landing pages as well. There’s no shortage of sophisticated software you can use to dynamically alter your pages to users based on their IP address or behavioral profile. You can layer rules upon rules to calculate the optimal offer for each respondent. But inevitably, such overly processed experiences lose their authenticity.

Similarly, you can play UI tricks to try to force people to engage with your page (e.g., you must fill out this form before continuing!), but it’s almost always more of a turn-off than a successful hard-sell tactic. If you’re going to remove your regular navigation choices from a landing page, do so because it helps eliminate clutter for a respondent in that context—but still always give them an option to easily jump to your main site.

Be genuine, creative, open, and enthusiastic in your landing pages, and you will win more converts.

Landing pages, like social media, are something that you get better at by doing. So release your inhibitions and make more landing pages.

All landing page tests are not created equal. What you test on your pages—and what you learn from those tests—can better inform tactics and strategies throughout your entire marketing program. Here are four kinds of landing page tests that can help you learn about your market.

Beware butterflies and magic bullets

How much can you learn from landing pages?

Some landing page optimization experts will warn you about reading too much into the results of a particular landing page test. There are often multiple factors at play in a given experiment, and it can be difficult to precisely separate the different effects.

It’s a valid point, but taken to an extreme it becomes an argument for the “butterfly effect”—that a butterfly flapping its wings in Thailand might trigger an elaborate chain of events that dramatically alters the outcome of your experiments.

While that’s a fun philosophical debate, it’s not a practical position. As marketers exploring new ideas, we always have to deal with uncertainty—the secret of success is making educated guesses based on empirical—albeit imperfect—information.

On the opposite extreme, other folks claim that there are universal recipes that improve conversion rates in all situations—so-called “magic bullets.” These aren’t general best practices, such as “employ good visual design,” but rather specific formulas such as “use a green background,” “have an image of a smiling person”, and “include three one-line bullets.”

Warning bells should go off in any marketer’s head when they hear such one-size-fits-all recommendations without regard for the particulars of audience, market, or brand.

Rational landing page optimization

The middle ground between those extremes is what I dub the “rational” school of landing page optimization. There are three premises behind this approach:

• Different audiences, markets, brands, and campaigns have different characteristics
• All tests are not equal: different kinds of tests reveal different kinds of insights
• All confounding variables are not equal: some are more controllable, some have more influence.

The first premise dismisses the magic bullet approach. Selling a subscription to a pop music service is different than generating leads for a network storage solution. Even the network storage solution is—or should be—marketed differently to small-medium businesses (SMB) versus large enterprises. They have different desires, pain points, demographics/firmographics, etc.

As you dig deeper, you identify more and more segments in your market that respond to different marketing messages and presentations.

In rational landing page optimization, you embrace such segmentation in your marketing programs. After all, the big advantage of targeted search marketing with matched landing pages is that you can authentically engage different audience segments at the very top of your sales funnel.

This leads to three rules of thumb:

• Treat each segment as its own experimental space—look for learning within a segment.
• Don’t try to create “one page to rule them all”—pages are cheap; customers are valuable.
• Iteratively narrow your segments as long as doing so produces ROI—the digital world often rewards deep segmentation.

With such segmentation in mind, you can then consider four different kinds of tests—trivial, contextual, tactical and strategic—categorized by how much reusable learning they can provide:

Trivial tests. In this model, tests of different headlines or page colors are mostly trivial as far as reusable learning is concerned. That’s not to say that such elements might not have significant impact on a specific test—I’ve seen headline changes generate 50% lift—but rather that such factors are hard to reliably adapt from one set of circumstances to another.

Contextual tests. It’s at the next level up—with contextual elements—that you can start to form meaningful hypotheses. How much impact do seasonal themes have on your conversion rate? How much does the degree of specificity between the ad and the landing page impact the outcome?

To a certain extent, contextual tests are about discovering what would otherwise be confounding variables and systematically testing them. There’s still circumstantial sensitivity here, but useful and reusable patterns can emerge. For instance, is it worth tailoring your landing pages for seasonal factors?

Tactical tests. Higher yet are experiments to identify winning tactics within a segment. Tactical tests include things such as different offers, different levels of “depth” in the format of the landing experience (one page? a multi-step path? a microsite?), different data collection requirements in forms, etc.

These differences often have economic implications for both the respondent and the marketer—such as trading off the value of collecting additional information with the friction that a longer form imposes on the conversion process. In my experience, these type of tactics—when winning ones have been discovered—have a relatively high degree of portability from one landing page to another, at least within a segment for a particular company. You can learn what works here.

Strategic tests. At the highest level are strategic tests to identify new audience segments, the overarching value proposition for each segment, and the granularity of sub-segments within them. In multi-step landing pages, these tests may be conducted with different segmentation choices.

Often, however, strategic testing is about determining how many completely separate pages are optimal within a marketing program, each matched to a different slice of the audience. Honing in on new segments is possibly the greatest payoff from structured landing page testing, as those insights are useful not just in future landing pages but in other marketing vehicles as well.

If you disagree with what I’ve put in each category, feel free to adjust them to your own hypotheses—perhaps in your case color is a tactical choice? My overarching point is to construct tests with these different learning objectives in mind.

Measuring success

With a nod to the butterfly effect folks, it’s true that the reusable learning from these tests is hard to quantify precisely. However, rigorous dissection is not really your goal.

In rational landing page optimization, I would assert the following:

• Most tests are hypothesis-driven—you’re testing an idea from the start, not trying to fit explanations to the data after the fact. This is an important distinction.
• Especially with tactical and strategic tests, the number of simultaneous elements varied in any one test should be minimized, reducing interaction effects.
• Ideas that are believed to be applicable from one landing page to another will, by that belief, be tested repeatedly in a variety of circumstances; if they continue to correlate with high conversion rates over time, that belief is rationally reinforced.
• Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding—with rational landing page optimization, you expect to sustain improved conversion rates across many pages in many programs over time. If you’re successful by that metric, does it matter if the weights of contributing factors are somewhat fuzzy?

People in general, and marketers in particular, are very good at intuitive pattern recognition—in ways that are, frankly, hard to capture in oversimplified mathematical models. To be sure, this sometimes leads us astray, but more often than not it gives us a competitive edge.

Rational landing page optimization helps develop that intuition within relevant contexts and segments. What you learn won’t always be perfect, but it will give you momentum that can be measured in the net results.

Are your landing pages feeling tired? Is your conversion rate stagnant? Not quite sure what to try next? To re-energize your post-click marketing, it can help to step back and evaluate your approach from several different perspectives.

Here’s a quick exercise, the Landing Page Wonder Wheel—as in, “I wonder how to improve my landing pages?”—that can give you fresh inspiration.

The Landing Page Wonder Wheel consists of eight dimensions on which you rate your current landing page creative and management capabilities, on a scale of 1 to 10. A 1 means you’re not doing very well there, while a 10 means you may be the best in the world at it.

1. Message match. How tight is the continuity between your adverting and your landing pages? If you run lots of ads across different keywords, but you’re driving everyone to the same few landing pages, then your message match probably isn’t very good. For example, if someone clicks on an ad for home refinancing, but they’re sent to a page that generically talks about mortgages, that’s not as tight as a page exclusively on refinancing.

Message match explicitly connects the dots for your respondents, instead of counting on them to hunt for and infer your relevance to their goal. Achieving good message match usually requires more specific landing pages and a process to keep them in sync as your advertising changes.

2. Visual design. How good do your landing pages look? From the high-level concept and layout, down to the details of execution such as fonts and image cropping, are your pages attractive? For most people who click on your plain text search ads, the landing page is where you will make your real first impression. Just as you probably shouldn’t show up to a job interview looking as if you rolled out of bed five minutes ago, tossed something on, and stumbled out into the world, you don’t want your landing pages to looks disheveled or uninspired either. This is a quintessential branding moment.

You may not be a graphic designer yourself—and if you aren’t, I wouldn’t recommend buying Photoshop and trying to fake it. Instead, find a great graphic designer who can make your pages beautiful. It doesn’t have to be a full-time position: a little quality design effort can go a long way, with page templates and a library of reusable image assets. Don’t downplay this though: in a competitive landscape, landing pages are in a beauty contest.

3. Depth. How much substance do your landing pages have? Depth is about delivering meaningful content rather than fluffy marketing-speak. Landing pages shouldn’t be superficial—otherwise they’re a waste of time. You want to share real information, tailored to the search that respondent was pursuing. Just pasting a dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) into your headline isn’t sufficient.

Depth doesn’t mean you should shovel a ton of content on to a single page though. Multi-step landing pages, where respondents drill down to the content and offers that are best aligned with their interests, can be highly effective. The key is to make sure that with each extra click, you live up to expectations, providing a deeper and more relevant experience. Microsites focused on a particular topic or idea can work well too. But ultimately depth is more about quality than quantity.

4. Freshness. How frequently do you revisit your existing landing pages to update them and inject new life? If you have stale pages out there from a year or more ago, then your freshness score is low. If, on the other hand, you systematically check your pages each month, your score should be climbing. This is more about landing page management than landing page design.

The basics of freshness are making sure that content and offers are current. There’s no surer way to damage your brand than to proudly present someone with an expired offer or a stale fulfillment piece (e.g., “fill out this form to receive our hot-off-the-presses 2006 research on the state of social media”). But freshness is also keeping your messaging up to date, recognizing that as your market evolves, your customers acquire new baseline knowledge, nomenclature, and shared cultural references. Even the look-and-feel of your pages can signal how on top of things you are, as the “fashion” of leading websites progresses from year-to-year. Bottom line: to keep respondents engaged with your landing pages, you need to stay engaged with them too.

5. Interactivity. Are your pages flat text and images, or do you provide interactive ways to capture a respondent’s attention? In the age of YouTube, a video can be a compelling way to build rapport. A Flash or AJAX widget that lets respondents click on tabs or thumbnails—or perhaps play with an animated diagram of your key benefits—can get them involved with a low hurdle. The secret is to incorporate these features as part of your design and messaging, not something garish or slapped on as an afterthought.

Social media is another way—albeit more experimental in this context—to add interactivity to your pages, such as bringing in Twitter feeds or Facebook Connect applications. You have to be careful about reinforcing your message and not distracting from it. But if you can use social devices to humanize yourself early with a new prospect, and coax them into a conversation, then you’re ahead of the curve.

6. Launch speed. How long does it take you, concept-to-completion, to launch a brand new landing page? Maybe there are technical or administrative hoops you have to jump through. Maybe you get held up waiting for someone to take the URL live, or add a tracking code to your checkout page. Maybe you just don’t have the time or resources. But whatever the reason, if you can’t deploy a new landing page as quickly as you can publish a new AdWords ad, then there’s room for improvement.

Landing pages should have the advantage of being quick, nimble, and inexpensive—a lightweight way to address niches across your market. As you build long tail (or even mid-tail) search campaigns, you want to follow through with message matched post-click marketing. But to achieve this, your per-page overhead needs to be low. If it’s not, track the time at each step along the lifecycle of your next landing page and start brainstorming: how could we speed this up?

7. Non-conversion value. How well do you do with the respondents who don’t convert on your landing pages? This may seem counterintuitive at first, but if your conversion rate is 20%—which would generally be quite good!—then what are you doing with the other 80%? After all, if they clicked on your ad, they demonstrated non-trivial intent. Just because they weren’t ready to convert on that specific offer at that exact moment, doesn’t make it a throwaway experience.

There are several ways to increase your value to non-converters. Maintain good brand standards—this is your chance to start building up neural pathways. Deliver useful content before the conversion point, telling people something meaningful that is relevant to their search. Always provide an “escape hatch”, even if it’s a subtle link at the top or bottom of the page, to let people jump to your primary web site. (These are good principles for conversions too.) Have them leave remembering you in a good way.

You can also derive value from non-converters by analyzing what they do. For instance, in the context of multi-step landing pages, you can track which choices people click on as a simple type of behavioral segmentation. Learning which segments aren’t converting gives you the insight to make targeted improvements.

8. Boldness. Do your landing pages charge forward with bold, new ideas—or are they tepid and formulaic? Landing pages can be a fantastic sandbox in which to experiment with gutsy offers, spirited language, and vivid presentations. Since any given landing page handles only a sliver of your traffic—and because it’s usually easy to do A/B testing in this context—you can push the envelope without taking big risks. If a daring idea doesn’t pan out, you can quickly pull it down. If it catches fire (in a good way!), then you can expand its reach.

The case for boldness—aside from the timeless proverb that fortune favors the bold—is two-fold. First, in a competitive situation, where respondents are also clicking on rival ads, you want to stand out from the crowd. Not in a freakish way, mind you, but in a confident and creative way. Second, as you move further down the long tail, you end up outside your company’s well-worn messaging. The only way to discover what resonates with new market segments is to try some new ideas. Don’t be afraid to be creative—be more afraid of being dull.

How good is your wheel?

Now that you have your self-assessment scores, mark them on the wheel on each corresponding spoke, moving outwards for higher scores. So a 1 would be placed near the center of the wheel, while a 10 would be placed on the outer rim.

Next, connect the dots. What does it look like?

If your connected wheel doesn’t look very round, or if it’s rather small, then you should at least have a clear idea of what you can do to improve your landing pages. If you’re committed to tackling those challenges, then you can redo the wheel in 30, 60, or 90 days to see your progress—and correlate it with your conversion rates.

Might not hurt to do this exercise on some of your competitors either.

I hope this helps you launch some wonderful post-click marketing.

Over the past year, the term “post-click marketing” has come up more frequently in search marketing discussions, especially in the context of improving conversion rates and overall search ROI. At SMX West earlier this month, Gordon Hotchkiss of Enquiro unequivocally declared that post-click marketing moves the needle for their clients more than any other aspect of search marketing.

So what exactly is post-click marketing and how can you leverage it in your search marketing program? Here’s a brief introduction.

Post-click marketing > landing pages

The simplest definition of post-click marketing is this: it’s how you engage with respondents after they click on your ads.

Of course, since the entire customer lifecycle happens after the click, post-click marketing is usually narrowed to mean the experience a respondent has between click and conversion—particularly an experience tailored to a specific ad and/or a specific group of respondents, rather than general site optimization. (Lead nurturing and re-marketing campaigns are good too, but they’re further down the funnel—call them post-conversion marketing.)

Landing pages are the most common kind of post-click marketing.

However, one of the motivations for coining the term post-click marketing was to encourage people to think outside the box of a single page. Traditional 1-page landing pages—I call them “plain old landing pages”—usually have a predictable, and frankly boring layout and structure. What a wasted opportunity, especially when you consider that text search ads are all pretty much visually homogeneous. The design and flow of the first few pages after that click are a marketer’s best—and often only—chance to establish a compelling brand and differentiate themselves from the pack.

Post-click marketing embraces a continuum of creative possibilities for the experience served to respondents: landing pages, 2-step landing pages, branching conversion paths, microsites, mobile nanosites, contextual applications, etc. These experiences can include Flash objects, videos, interactive widgets, social media interfaces and more. You’re constrained only by your imagination in crafting an experience that will “wow” your audience.

But post-click marketing is about more than any one great experience.

Post-click marketing emphasizes segmentation

If there’s one overarching strategy in post-click marketing, it’s audience segmentation: identifying the distinct strata of respondents in your market, with as much granularity as possible, and serving them post-click experiences tailored to their needs and perspectives.

The post-click marketing mantra is: all clicks are not created equal.

Unlike traditional landing page optimization, which usually focuses on testing which pieces of content work best across all respondents, post-click marketing aims for segment optimization—”determining how many different landing pages are optimal for a given campaign, and determining how each should be different from the other.”

Search marketers often thrive by using long tail strategies in keyword bidding. But if you’re not segmenting respondents to different post-click experiences, then the long tail of keywords and ad creatives ends up crashing ignominiously into a short tail of a few landing pages and deep links. This causes message mismatch, where the relationship between the ad and the landing page is unclear to the respondent—probably the single biggest reason for triggering the back button bailout.

Post-click marketing employs a variety of methods for segmenting respondents, ranging from the keyword phrase a user searched on, to geo-location and domain information implied by that user’s IP address, to behavioral choices made by the user on those first several pages after the click. Note that behavioral segmentation dovetails nicely with deploying multi-page landing experiences to engage in productive up-front dialogues with respondents, to quickly move from the generic to the specific.

Post-click marketing encourages systems thinking

In online marketing, we talk a lot about the funnel—how respondents start with impressions, then clicks, then engagement, then conversion, and so on. This progression has a clear directional flow, from the keyword to the ad to the landing page to post-conversion fulfillment.

However, this one-way flow of the user experience can cause marketers to overlook feedback loops in the opposite direction—using information revealed from later stages of the funnel to optimize activities at the top of the funnel. Good post-click marketing tracks and analyzes different conversion rates by segment, mapping conversion rates back to behavioral choices and then back to the original ads and keywords.

This helps identify which niche audiences are driving real ROI in a campaign, and it suggests specific ad/segment combinations that are ripe for improvement and experimentation. Instead of a one-way funnel, your search campaigns and corresponding post-click marketing become a circular ecosystem.

In the spirit of systems thinking, post-click marketing also elevates post-click experiences, such as landing pages, from being ad hoc, under-the-radar productions to being executed with a more efficient and integrated process. Instead of treating each landing page as its own one-off experiment, which tends to be slow and costly, an organization with good post-click marketing capabilities can rapidly deploy dozens or hundreds of segment-specific landing pages.

This scalability is achieved by putting in place a certain amount of post-click marketing infrastructure—or leveraging your web site infrastructure for this mission: content management, a digital asset library, re-usable page design templates, defined proof/approval workflows, standardized data collection and analytics, ready-to-roll testing frameworks, etc.

You know your post-click marketing is firing on all cylinders when your average concept-to-completion deployment cycle for a new landing page is less than 1 day—which is what it needs to be to be able to keep pace with the inherent fluidity of search marketing.

You’ve always known that landing pages and other after-the-click tactics were important. The reason post-click marketing has been gaining traction is because it’s a way to frame the discussion of those tactics at a higher and more strategic level.

If you don’t yet have a structured post-click marketing program in place, this could be one of your big wins for 2009.

My earlier article, A Completely Different Kind of Landing Page Optimization, discussed the rationale for delivering segment-specific landing pages to different niche audiences in your search marketing. Instead of having a one-size-fits-all landing page that you try to continually optimize ad nauseum with different variations of content (headline, body copy, image), segment optimization focuses on building separate pages for each distinct group in your audience.

Having segment-specific landing pages is straightforward when you can identify segment-specific keywords. But what if you can’t unambiguously determine the segment from the keyword?

The example we used was a hypothetical language learning company that might attract students, business travelers, and vacationers — where the real value proposition for each of those segments is actually quite different. In that case, they can probably assume that a search for [french exam prep] pulls in a student segment and give those respondents a student-oriented landing page.

But what about people searching for [learn french]?

When handling respondents from more generic keywords — or really any keyword that appeals to more than one audience group — there’s still tremendous value to be gained from segmenting them and delivering them more relevant content. However, to do this, you must segment after the click.

Segmenting with 2-step landing pages

Let’s carry on with our language learning company example, with its three key audiences of students, business travelers, and vacationers. It’s likely that [learn french] is a popular keyword phrase. Those ads garner a lot of clicks, but from the keyword alone it’s impossible to guess which segment a respondent belongs to.

One way to deal with such generic keywords, of course, is to simply drive people to generic landing pages — in this case, talk about learning French without targeting the pitch to any one particular segment. But, as we discussed last time, it’s hard for generic landing pages to reach their full potential because they try to please everyone and offend no one, a relatively low common denominator. These can easily become “milquetoast landing pages”.

An alternative is to use a 2-step landing experience, where the first page a respondent lands on is primarily a segmentation page: it gives respondents several one-click choices to let them pick what is most relevant to their search query. The second page then delivers on that promise by providing content and/or offers that are tailored to that segment.

In our example, a person who searches for [learn french] and clicks on a corresponding ad might receive a page that gives them the following one-click choices (usually presented as clickable images):

• French for college/high school students
• French for business travelers
• French for vacationing and pleasure

After a respondent clicks on a choice, they would be presented with more traditional landing page content — making a direct connection between the ad the respondent clicked on and the products/services that the company has to offer — but with the added benefit of being crafted specifically to that audience segment. So a French student learns how this product can improve his performance in class, a business traveler reads how to fit this into her schedule and observe proper business etiquette, and a vacationer is seduced with the lure of a very authentic travel experience.

But will they click?

Some old-school search marketers may object to this 2-step landing page methodology on principle, in the belief that respondents don’t like to click. If you ask people to take an extra step, you will lose more of them, so conventional wisdom goes.

However, that’s not necessarily true. Fewer clicks may be better — other things being equal. But other things rarely are.

The underlying dynamic here is that respondents don’t like to waste time or effort. If an extra click actually saves them time, by quickly navigating them to the content that’s most relevant to their needs — if you can properly set those expectations and then fulfill them — many will indeed make that click.

It’s about keeping people in a flow that serves their interests.

Empirical evidence from our experiments with hundreds of these 2-step landing experiences — in circumstances where they make sense — is that on average 60% of the respondents will take that extra step. Compared with the traditionally high bounce rates associated with landing pages in general, this is quite good.

The benefits of this approach can be significant:

• respondents are quickly routed to segment-specific content and offers that can directly increase your conversion rate — break free of the generic landing page trap
• respondents become incrementally more engaged with your site, moving from a quick click on an ad, to a relatively click on a segmentation choice, to targeted and authentic content — the extra cycle of setting an expectation and fulfilling it builds trust and indirectly can increase your conversion rate
• 2-step landing experiences can signal to respondents that the marketer cares explicitly about their segment, which can also indirectly improve your conversion rate
• even if respondents don’t convert, their segmentation choice tells you which ads are attracting which segments and how well you’re converting (or not) each of them

This format isn’t a panacea and should only be used where it makes sense. But when you have multiple segments responding to generic keywords, it can be highly effective — and is well-worth testing against the control of a single-page, plain old landing page.

A few real world examples

If you’re wondering what these 2-step landing pages can look like, here are a few examples from real companies that have used them to significantly increase their conversion rate.

A high-tech company that sells data management solutions to both small businesses and large enterprises:

A hotel group that caters to both business and leisure travelers:

A professional journal that attracts subscribers at different stages in their careers:

As you can see, these 2-step landing pages can be easy to engage with — a guide, not a barrier. And nothing makes it clearer to you (and your audience) that your customers are not viewed as a commodity, but are thoughtfully engaged with according to who they are and what they’re looking for.

What exactly is landing page optimization? For most search marketers, optimizing landing pages means A/B testing and multivariate testing (MVT). It means using tools such as Google Website Optimizer to experiment with different arrangements of a page – or different variations in the content of a page – to maximize its conversion rate.

We may ask questions about many different elements of a page. Which headline works best? Is the offer button better with “complimentary shipping” or “free shipping”? Does a picture of the product compel more people than an image of a friendly customer service representative, or the other way around? What about a blue color scheme versus a green one?

This is landing page optimization as most people know it. And for what it does, it is a good approach. Let’s call it content optimization – finding the best presentation of content on a particular landing page.

But content optimization is not the only way to optimize landing pages. In fact, when it comes to boosting your conversion rate, it may not even be the most effective method.

Segment optimization offers a new approach

Segment optimization is about determining how many different landing pages are optimal for a given campaign, and determining how each should be different from the other.

Instead of stretching one page to try to please everyone, which is quite hard to do – segment optimization breaks out several specialized landing pages that each focus on pleasing a particular segment of your audience.

For example, say you’re marketing language learning software. Although everyone who clicks on your ads wants to learn a language, there are different motivations among them. Students hope for better grades in their classes. Vacationers crave more authentic trips. Business travelers are most concerned about efficiency.

It would be difficult to have one page that speaks passionately to all of those distinct audience segments simultaneously.

Just consider the headline. If you were deploying one page to fit everyone, you might try lots of variations (content optimization) to discover that “Learning French is easy!” is the best headline (on average) for all respondents.  Let’s say it achieves a 5% conversion rate, not bad, but not earth-shattering either.

But if you had three different landing pages, one for each of these segments – you might find that “Ace your French exams!” works best for students, “Experience France as only a French speaker can!” works best for vacationers, and “Business French in 10 minutes per day!” works best for business people. These might achieve conversion rates of 12%, 11%, and 14% respectively for each segment, a tremendous success that more than doubles your overall conversion rate.

You could never achieve this using one page for everyone. “Ace your French exams!” would perform disastrously for vacationers and business people. If you tried that headline for all respondents, content optimization would throw it out as suboptimal because 2/3 of the audience would think it was awful. But when it’s presented to students (and only students) – it is the indisputable champion.

In that example, segment optimization was achieved by deploying three different pages instead of just one. Content optimization was then used to determine which headline was most effective for each separate segment.

How can you begin using segment optimization in your campaigns?

Start by making a list of possible segments within your audience. Who are the different types of people who look for you online – and why? Don’t restrict yourself to the way you may have segmented people in your database or your business plan. Brainstorm what’s important and relevant from the respondent’s point-of-view, by considering any or all of the following issues:

• the specific “problem” the respondent wants to solve
• the demographic/psychographic “persona” of the respondent
• the respondent’s stage in the buying process
• the role of the respondent in their organization
• the respondent’s geographic location
• the respondent’s industry or the size of their organization

These are your initial buckets into which respondents could be segmented. Don’t worry if there’s overlap between buckets, as these won’t necessarily be either/or choices.

Next, review the keywords and ad creatives you’re running in your search marketing campaigns. For each keyword/creative pair, ask yourself – is there a particular segment that its respondents would clearly belong to? If the answer is yes, add it to that bucket along with the number of clicks per month it generates. If there answer is no, leave a question mark next to it – perhaps with a handful of segments it might appeal to.

For instance, in our example above, the keyword phrases “french exam” and “college french” are obvious candidates for the student segment. Phrases like “business french” and “executive french” fall into the business traveler bucket. But “learn french” can’t be segmented just from the keyword.

Now, look over your segment buckets and see which ones have the most number of clicks per month. These are your best targets for segment optimization.

For each one, create a dedicated landing page that is focused on the needs, wants, and characteristics of that particular segment. Here you can use content optimization such as A/B testing or MVT to find the best headline, imagery, layout, etc. for each page.

You can almost be guaranteed that these segment-specific landing pages will outperform your more generic ones. With your first few big segment wins in place you can move further down The Long Tail, to less popular, but still easily identifiable keywords to meet each segment.

What about keywords that you can’t automatically associate with a particular segment? In those scenarios, you can use techniques such as multi-step landing pages and “directed behavioral segmentation”. But that’s an article for another day.

Scott Brinker is the president and CTO of ion interactive, a leading provider of post-click marketing software and services. He is also a co-editor of the Post-Click Marketing Blog.

Quick question: how do you think of your landing pages?

• (a) As part of your site.
• (b) As part of your ads.

When you reflect on it, the answer probably should be a little of both. For most online marketing campaigns, landing pages are transitional — a bridge from the ad to the site, or to some specific conversion goal, such as signing up for a white paper.

Yet in many organizations, the way landing pages are actually created and managed is more like choice (a), as if they were part of the site. They’re deployed in the same server environment, someone in IT must plug in any code for tracking or optimization, and the life cycle is processed like any other page of the site. It goes through different hands than the execution of a new search engine ad.

There should be coordination between the people creating the ads and the people creating the landing pages, but there isn’t always as much as there should be.

When landing pages are run this way—more like the site and less like the advertising—a natural drift occurs between what people see in an ad, or the context in which they see it, and what they experience after the click.

This drift happens because the cycle of new ads being created proceeds much faster than the creation and deployment of new landing pages. Companies end up with a large number of varied keywords, vehicles, and ad creatives, but a relatively small number of landing pages.

The Long Tail of online advertising collides into The Short Tail of landing pages.

The result: some ads might align with the landing page they point to, but others not so much. In those cases, where a respondent’s expectations from an ad fail to be delivered upon by the landing page, your online brand takes a hit and your conversion rate sags.

Trying to “optimize” those handful of landing pages—hoping to find the best possible headline, image, body copy, etc. on each—only helps so much. You’re still stretching, to paraphrase an old adage, to have a few pages please all of the ads all of the time.

The antidote to this “landing page lag” is to shift your thinking and management of landing pages to be more a part of your advertising. Choice (b).

There are two aspects to this shift: creative and operational.

Start with the creative.

Most ads on the web have a very small canvas. For instance, text ads in Google give you a 25 character title, two 35 character lines of description, and a 35 character display URL. Search marketers have done wonders with those 130 characters, but it’s still a mighty small box. Imagine if all artists were constrained to painting on 3-inch Post-It notes. No doubt you’d get some amazing Post-Its, but isn’t it better having more expressive formats in the world?

Display ads have more creative freedom, to be sure, but they’re still a relatively narrow slice of a presentation. Interactive ad formats keep appearing as one way to extend the scope of such ads. But it gets tricky because there are lots of good reasons to keep ads “under control” in the pages where they’re placed.

By treating the ad and the landing page—or even a multi-page landing experience—as part of the same creative whole, however, you can respect the boundaries of the original ad placement while opening the door to limitless possibilities after the click. The key is to change your perspective on landing pages: these are “advertising landing pages,” not “site landing pages”.

You create the pages when you create the ads. You match them very tightly—The Long Tail of ad placements now corresponds to a Long Tail of landing pages. And you view the ad as simply the first step of the experience, a window into one continuous sequence that has been fluidly designed and executed.

One analogy, albeit not a perfect one, is direct mail. The outside of the envelope—or the outer shell of a die-cut mailer—has limited creative real estate as well. Its mission is to compel you to look inside, sort of the physical world equivalent of winning the click. But inside and outside are almost always designed together. Physically they are part of the same marketing object.

Building landing pages as part of the advertising brings a similar kind of unity to the pre-click/post-click divide in online marketing.

Let your imagination run with ideas where the ads are starters to very specific post-click experiences, where the landing page doesn’t have to immediately rush for the close but can expand the dance with the respondent in more engaging ways. Rich media and interactivity are yours to employ in innovative ways.

To break from the conventions of the past, think of these as Landing Pages 2.0.

Operational Tactics

Operationally, what’s required is a structure that puts the power to create, deploy, test, and analyze landing pages in the hands of the people creating and executing your ads.

One approach is to set up a separate server environment just for your landing pages, controlled independently on its own subdomain such as click.yourcompany.com. This way your landing pages are still under your domain—important for Google policy, brand building, domain-level cookie tracking, and domain-based web analytics. This becomes your “landing page sandbox,” where new landing experiences can be built without interfering with—or being slowed down by—the operational overhead of your main site.

If an agency is running your search marketing or overall online advertising, they should be able to take over landing page production and deployment under their umbrella.

If your advertising is managed in-house, you have several choices. You could have your IT department partition a section of your existing site infrastructure or set up a separate “site” just for the landing pages. However, this may still slow you down with internal processes if you aren’t adamant about speed. An alternative is to use a software-as-a-service solution to outsource your landing page sandbox, which you can then manage purely as a marketing service through your browser.

Your goal: you want it to be as quick and easy to launch a new landing page as it is to insert a new Google AdWords ad. When you can create a brand new ad with a matched landing page in less than 30 minutes, you’ve attained the speed to execute an end-to-end Long Tail strategy.

Another way to accelerate your landing page creation is to have your graphic design team make a set of templates for different types of page layouts that you can quickly assemble together and plug in content. Share a library of logos and stock photography, forms for data collection, and legal fine print, so you can reuse common elements while focusing your energy on the bold ideas specific to new ad/landing page combinations.

Again, while you want to maintain high brand standards in your pages, you also want to make it fast and simple for a marketer who is not a designer to produce a quality landing experience for a new microcampign.

These creative and operational changes don’t seem too radical, do they? But they can transform your online marketing worldview.

Advertising landing pages—instead of site landing pages—are a fresh way to think about both your advertising and your landing pages. Once you have these two pieces running in closer synchronization, you’ll take both to the next level.

Scott Brinker is the president and chief technology officer of ion interactive, a leading provider of post-click marketing software and services. He blogs regularly at http://blog.postclickmarketing.com.