Creating a landing page is an important step in converting your incoming traffic to actual leads and eventually, paying customers (we’ve discussed this extensively in this blog post). But hang on. Where is all this traffic supposed to be coming from? That’s an excellent question – read on!
Drive Traffic to Your Page with Paid Advertising
Paid advertising, also known as PPC (Pay per Click) traffic is still one of the most effective ways of bringing traffic to your landing page. The main channels of paid advertising today are Facebook and Google.
Keep in mind the difference in user mentality between Facebook and Google users.
People that are using Google are looking for something right now, which is why they are searching for ‘dog food’, ‘Justin Bieber’ or ‘the best way to create a landing page’. Advertising to these people brings people who are already in the right state of mind to sign up, or pay for a service, when they come to your landing page. They know they need the service or solution, and now they are just looking for the best option.
Start creating your own landing pages with Pagewiz
Facebook is a different matter. Paid advertising on Facebook is far more passive, as you advertise constantly to people (via the Newsfeed, or via ads on the right-hand-side of the website) who you believe to be your target audience, for example, pet owners, or dog lovers. When and if they are in the right mood, and they see your ad, and the image and text are eye-catching enough – then they might click the ad.
(We’re not saying that paid advertising on Facebook is inefficient. far from it. In fact, their revenue from ads continues to soar. Simply that paid advertising on these two giants is done in a different manner).
There are other paid advertising channels which you can use to bring in traffic – LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and banners. Remember, when you define your target audience, you also define the best places to approach them, and from there send them on to your landing page.
What Do Keywords Have To Do With Paid Advertising?
Keywords are SEO-marketing lingo for ‘the words that people use when they search Google’. For example, if you are looking for some dog food to buy for your dog, chances are you’ll type in ‘dog food’, or ‘dog food for a Labrador’, or ‘dog food for my pooch’. Dog, food, Labrador and pooch are all keywords. If your landing page is for a dog food company, then you should be looking at those keywords to start off with.
A commonly used (and free) tool that can be used to research relevant keywords that you want to target is the Google Keyword Planner.
Let’s take a look and see how it can help us find the right sort of keywords we want to target in our PPC campaigns.
To access the Keyword Planner, create a Google Adwords account if you haven’t got one already, click ‘Tools and Analysis’, and select ‘Keyword Planner’.
I entered ‘dog food’ in the product category. Of course, if you have your landing page all set up, you can enter that into the relevant field, and Google will analyze it for the keywords that are in it.
When you look at keywords, there are two main things to take into consideration.
- Competition – Or, how many other advertisers are already investing in those keywords. The higher the competition, the more the keyword costs you, and the harder it is to appear in the ads.
- Avg. Monthly Searches – In other words, how many times people search for this term.
Of course you should be looking for keywords that have a medium (or lower) competition rating, and a significant number of monthly searches, so that you know there is a potential market out there that you can advertise to, and drive a lot of traffic to your landing page. For example, ‘pet food direct’ is a good keyword to advertise for, as it has over 8,000 monthly searches, but only medium competition.
As we said, Facebook doesn’t use ‘keywords’. Facebook uses interests, so paid advertising there is managed a little differently. More on that later.
Once you have the list of keywords that you want to advertise, use Google Adwords to build your paid advertising campaigns. Keep in mind that you should also have those keywords in your landing page – not just lumped into the header, of course, but as a part of the natural flow of the page. If we continue with the same example as above, part of the service description on your landing page can be:
“..and with our amazingly fast service, you can order a pet food direct delivery from our Facebook page, and have it land on your doorstep in half an hour, guaranteed!”
See?
What Was That About Facebook Again?
When you bring in traffic using Facebook Ads, you can target your audience with pinpoint accuracy. This makes up for the fact that paid advertising on Facebook is passive (as opposed to the active ‘I am looking for my dog food NOW’ advertising on Google).
When you create an ad on Facebook (which is becoming an easier and more user-friendly process all the time), you can choose the result you want from your ad – page likes, website clicks, app installs, and more. The possibilities are virtually endless, as, for example, you can create a Facebook page, offer your fans coupons that are redeemable via your landing page, and promote the offer via the ‘Offer Claims’ option, but we will focus on the ‘Clicks to Website’.
In the ad itself, you can define the exact audience who will be seeing your ads. As an example, here is an audience that is 20 to 30 years old, who live in the state of New York, in the US, who are interested in Dog Food. Facebook figures that out, by the way, from the pages that they like, and from their profile interests.
In this case, the ad will be seen by 52,000 people. If the creative is compelling enough, and the text inviting enough, then your landing page can be visited by over 50 THOUSAND people. And that’s just in the state of New York.
Facebook paid advertising is an amazing source of traffic, is what I’m trying to say here.
What about Paid Advertising in Social Networks?
Another way of attracting traffic to your landing page is by sharing the link with paid advertising on social networks. Now, that sounds simple, but it is a little harder than that. For example, there are lots of social networks. Everyone knows Facebook, Google+ and probably LinkedIn and Twitter, of course, there’s Twitter. But there’s also Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, Quora, StackOverflow, StumbleUpon, Steam Forums, and more.
As I said before, it depends who your target audience is, and what is the product or service that you are trying to get users signed up for in your landing page.
In any case, it isn’t just a matter of copy/pasting the link into a generic ‘Facebook’. Of course not. In Facebook, you have to do some extensive research of the right groups (again, those that are relevant to your target audience), and start a discussion there – not just a ‘click this link’, but a little more, explaining what the link is, and why people should click it. The same goes for LinkedIn. As for Quora, which is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community members, sometimes you may find that your landing page answers a question (and then you add it to your answer) and at other times you may find that it is best to ask a question and add the link to your landing page as a natural part of the question.
The rest of the social networks and forums are no different. You can find many places that may require your services, and just need to make sure that when you paste the link into your landing page, that you are doing it as a consistent part of the conversation, and not just jumping in, shouting CHECK OUT MY LANDING PAGE and leaving. Because that won’t have the desired effect.
And that’s it?
Well, no. As a matter of fact, once you bring a consistent stream of users to your landing page via paid advertising, your work is only half done. The other half is analyzing what that traffic does on your landing page, and adjusting accordingly.
Check out our Optimize Me articles series to learn how to optimize your existing landing pages using some very useful techniques.
Avi Kaye is a social media marketing consultant for software startups. In addition to PageWiz, he also writes for himself on his own blog, in between numerous cups of coffee.
