R.E.M. – Keeping Your Audience Engaged

In yesterday’s blog, R.E.M – The 3 Must Haves for Paid Acquisition Landing Pages, I mentioned the three core requirements for any paid acquisition landing page – Relevance, Engagement, and Mobile (R.E.M.). Here are some great tips on “E” – keeping your audience engaged with your brand and increasing brand recall:

1. Conventional wisdom of Paid Ads tells us that we should have dedicated landing pages. This has worked for many years and for many marketers. We support this approach and recommend it to our clients. With that said, there are still valid benefits to sending users to site pages too. For example, if you are an e-commerce player, site pages can offer a depth of product information that dedicated landing pages cannot, especially if the search term is generic like ‘digital cameras’. If you are B2B or a business looking to capture leads, and you need to share a lot of information to assist decision making, you have two main options:
   1. You can build a dedicated page with all the information you want to share. You can also create a single or multi-tab page. Users landing on this page will either do what you want them to do, or will leave because dedicated pages do not typically have links to the main site.
   2. You can also send them to a relevant site page. If they like what they see, they will do what you want them do (fill a form etc.), or they will navigate to other parts of the site. This strategy increases time spent and pages visited — it increases the engagement with your brand and can lead to better brand recall in the future.

   The decision to go with a dedicated page or a site page is very important. It has to be planned well with thorough data analysis and should be driven by objectives. Pick your final strategy after doing statistically significant A/B testing. Our recommendations for which landing pages our clients use typically depend on the client goals, data, and larger Demand Acceleration objectives.

2. When users are about to leave the landing page, engage them one last time by offering them content similar to what they were consuming. You can also try and collect an e-mail to nurture them in the future.
3. Often times marketers forget the all too critical component of marketing- “build trust and entice customers to take an action.” How do you do this? Share a video testimonial from your customers or show them a series of text testimonials on the site or share case studies. The more you have others vouch for you the better. No better way to win additional business than from referrals.

The final blog in this series will be posted next week and focuses on the last component of successful paid acquisition Landing Pages, “M” – optimizing your site for mobile.