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Guess who used landing pages first?


Venu Gopal Nair

Venu Gopal Nair

June 6, 2024


Guess who used landing pages first?

 

They’re now part of every marketer’s arsenal, but the brand that first used them to drive up sales dates back to 2003. It seems strange that it’s almost a couple of decades old right now. Microsoft first used standalone web pages to drive sales of Office. If a global titan can rely on a simple technique, it stands to reason that every brand looking to gain some traction and traffic needs them.


It starts with a promise—and that can be from a paid ad on a social media platform or search. The important thing is that the promise should be strong enough to get action. That’s precisely why it makes sense to test out several approaches to getting people to click on the advertising. Each of us has a pet theory on what will work, but data is agnostic. When several people respond to a certain visual or message, there’s no doubt that it’s working at the first stage.

That’s just half the battle won. The landing page that people land on after clicking should also have multiple versions sharpened from the first stage. It is eliminated by design, and the fact that millions of brands use it successfully is indicative of the strength of the core idea.

Why do landing pages work?

For one thing, no distractions. Users are presented with facts they can act on, and the benefits are stated in ways they can easily relate to. There’s no navigation required, in most cases. That also helps people to decide how they want to respond and react.

HubSpot Content Hub helps you create multiple landing pages with minimal effort. They can be deployed quickly and linked to campaigns being run. But the best part is that HubSpot determines which landing page is getting the most traction and drives traffic to it automatically saving you the trouble of making this assessment based on the data. It is available to you, but it helps save both – time and the allocated budget.

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Even if your website is not on HubSpot, you can run landing page ad campaigns and social media scheduling through HubSpot. It’s a good way to see how well HubSpot integrates into the workflow and how you can see the results of multiple campaigns presented in a single dashboard or decide what parameters you wish to track.

You can automate multiple stages

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On HubSpot, having a form filled out is just the first step. Whether the next stage is an ebook to be downloaded, a thank-you email sent, or a drip campaign initiated to nurture leads, it all begins with the interaction on the landing page. The idea is to give marketers options to explore the market and customer intentions.

The faster lead response can be managed, the better the results. If you’re in a market where speed is of the essence, a new lead generated can be directed to the right response mechanism – whether it is a call centre or a sales resource. In lead generation, understanding customer behaviour is an essential aspect of success.

Here’s where the automation from HubSpot kicks in. If the traffic to the landing page is high and multiple touchpoints have to be created, it can be managed. Rather than customers waiting for the company to get back to them, a chain of command can be set up for responses to be delivered as soon as a prospect fills out a form or provides contact details.

Scaling up response is critical.

In the early stages of managing a site, traffic generation is one of the biggest problems. Once it hits a certain level, response management becomes key. As the company hits an upswing in growth, managing response becomes critical. And hiring or scaling the team may not be an option for products where margins are thin.

That’s precisely why landing pages have the potential to become a key aspect of executing marketing strategy and scaling it when required to just about any level. For example, contact centres found that most queries were for things that could be automated, and only 20% of the queries needed human intervention.

It’s important to understand where lead management should go. Once the decision trees are put in place, moving leads along the branches into the right action points is eminently possible.

That’s exactly where HubSpot’s flexibility and interaction workflows come into play. A lead can be directed to email, or ebooks, webinar registrations or a human source for additional information. It makes sense for mid-sized companies to consolidate rather than spread themselves thin over multiple marketing channels.

Seeing the patterns of customer journeys helps to build paths that other customers can traverse. And while they come from different directions, there is a point where the paths converge. HubSpot is built to identify those paths and get more customers to buy in. The strongest point of this is that they are all built around the brand or company’s website – where the marketing head has complete control to experiment and develop long-standing relationships with customers without having to follow the diktats of prominent social media platforms.

Talk to us, and our consultants will advise you on the next steps.

 

Venu Gopal Nair
Venu Gopal Nair

Advertising and Branding Specialist, CEO - Ideascape Communications, A professional journey through the tumultuous years of advertising and communication, starting in 1984. Started out in the age of print, saw the changes with the entry of satellite TV and the momentous transition to digital. Advertising and branding today is vastly different from its practices in the 20th century and the last two decades have seen dramatic changes with smartphone domination. As a Creative Director turned CEO, making the transition personally and professionally has been a tremendous experience.