Landing pages are an important part of any pay-per-click campaign, the trick is to maximize the potential of those landing pages to “sell” the user on your product or service. Depending on the focus of your business and campaign, the focus of your landing page will take on a different tone. If you operate in the business to business world, your landing page is probably but not always used to generate interest in your product or leads for your sales team.
It is a generally accepted practice that landing pages should be kept simple and provide enough content/information to help the user convert (take whatever form of action you hope them to take). One such tool is the idea of adding a video clip to your landing page which illustrates what your product/service is about better than some text and images ever could. Here are a few points to keep in mind when adding videos:
1. Don’t be intrusive - Try to stick to “click to play” videos rather than auto play. Users may have their speakers turned up to loud or are at work and shouldn’t be watching videos. Utilizing click to play gives the user the option to engage your video on their own time.
2. Keep the size appropriate - Don’t make the video the focus of your page, you don’t want the user to only interact with the video and not fill out the form - your ultimate end goal
3. Make it fast - Consider load times and creating a positive user experience. It makes a lot of sense to host your video on places like Google Video or YouTube, the play back quality is very good and you don’t have to worry about hosting.
4. Keep it Short - Keep your video to under 20-30 seconds. Users don’t want to sit on your page for hours watching a long, boring corporate video that extols the virtues of your product. Your video should focus on what value your product ads, a clear explanation of your product/service and reinforce the focus of filling out the form on your page (or whatever conversion action you hope they take).
5. Always… Test and Measure - A wise man once told me, when in doubt - “test and measure.” If the video is working well, it may not mean it is working at its optimal rate. Perhaps a shorter video improves conversion, or a video with no sound… test, measure, rinse and repeat.
Our last post was about some recent success we’ve seen with one of our clients regarding landing pages. To continue on this theme, I thought I’d bring to your attention a particulary interesting interview with Matt Fuller - an expert on developing landing pages in the Ring Tone affiliate marketing industry. In this podcast episode of Net Income - host Jeremy Schoemaker interviews Tom and asks some terrific questions about the power and influence of landing pages, and how to create effective ones.