Increasing your landing page’s conversion rate is one of those tasks that never gets signed off of your marketing team’s Trello board.
While most blog posts discuss landing page optimization, or how to build a high converting landing page focusing on structure and Unique Selling Proposition, I want to focus on how you can increase conversion rates by creating landing pages based on your social media and Google Analytics.
I’m writing this post assuming that you are already executing a content marketing strategy or planning to launch one soon. If not, you really should. Companies utilizing a content marketing strategy generate about 3 times more leads than traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less.
So, let’s get to work so can you start generating more quality leads.
More Landing Pages Can Mean 6X More Leads
Most companies don’t use landing pages as an ongoing strategy but as something you create for a specific project or a campaign. But this is a mistake! Creating multiple landing pages for your products and ad hoc offerings can dramatically generate you more leads.
According to Hubspot, they found that businesses with 400-1000 pages get 6X more leads than those with 51-100 pages. Of course, it doesn’t mean you have to go and create hundreds of landing pages, but the more you create, the more leads you will get.
Taking in consideration that in 2013, 61% of B2B marketers mentioned that generating high quality leads as one of their biggest challenges, creating multiple landing pages is an effort worth investing in.
To make your landing pages a quality source for leads and to then make sure they convert well, you will need to ensure their structure and formatting is optimized, but adjusting your core message to hit the right spot is just as important.
Taken from Demand Metrics Content Marketing Stats infographics
Your Best Content Will Drive More Conversions
Not surprisingly, people are most likely to visit your company’s blog or website after seeing quality and engaging content you’ve posted.
They are also significantly more likely to perceive your product as one that will provide them with real value and help them solve the challenges or problems they are facing, after reading content that has given them real value.
This means that when a potential user reads a high quality piece of content you’ve created that is relevant to them, the higher the likelihood that they will convert into a quality lead. Your most high performing content can also become your most valuable as it will be the trigger for your best converting landing pages.
While almost every successful blog tries to capitalize on this knowledge by adding their product’s call to action in the blog (see Buffer for example), most companies don’t take it far enough in terms of optimizing their content into a full fledged landing page.
The starting point of this method is to find your content that is already highly engaging, then getting a lot of shares and backlinks, and finally converting into a landing page that you can fully dedicate to more product signups.
How to Find Your Best Content to Turn Into A Landing Page
The best part about this method for creating high converting landing pages is that it’s based on what already works, and not on assumptions based on keyword research. This means you can easily target a topic and value proposition more efficiently from day one.
But how can you find what is your best content? Metrics will always tell the story.
What I love about metrics, is that they keep you honest. They show you exactly what is working and what’s not. No sentiment, ego, or opinion takes the place of giving you the best result.
There are 3 great tactics to figure out which content should be used for landing pages:
- Know your analytics
- Social proof
- Based on previous conversions
Using Google Analytics To Find Your Best Content
If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, you can start your journey here or here.
There are 2 ways you can use Google Analytics to find your best content:
1. Discover your best performing landing page:
Step 1: Log in to Google Analytics
Step 2: From the sidebar click on Behavior -> Landing pages
Step 3:
On the top-right of the page you will have the option to change the dates that your analytics currently covers. You’ll want to select the last three months (depending on the frequency of your posts).
The reason you want to set the date for the last 3 months is because if you only look at the past week, or even month, your analytics will most likely reflect a recent content promotional effort and not its overall performance. It is more likely that in the most recent content you published and promoted, you will have better performance metrics distorting your data, than your long tail keywords that have been published a year ago.
On the other hand, you don’t want to exceed the last 3-6 month period because you want to make sure the topics are still relevant and performing well. To find your evergreen content, which can be just as valuable, set the analytics frame to show you the past 12 months and see what remains popular over time.
Step 4
On the second half of the page under the graph, you will find a list of webpages (blog posts for that matter) through which people entered into your website, ranked by popularity. Choose the top 10-20 performing blog posts, and turn them into landing pages (keep reading here to learn how).
Use Google Analytics To Find Your Best Landing page
2. Your Current Best Landing Pages Based On Social Media
For this discovery, you need to simply need to go through the same steps, with only a few small differences:
Step 1: Log into Google Analytics.
Step 2: From the sidebar click on Acquisition -> Social -> Landing pages.
Step 3: Set time frame for the last 3-6 months back.
Step 4: Choose the top 10-20 performing blog posts the drive the most traffic based on social media. Those landing pages will resonate best and are most likely to get high engagement on your social networks.
The Social Proof
So we’ve established which content is driving most traffic to your blog, this is the content that most likely bring visitors to your new landing page, but is it the best content for conversions? We can’t rely on it yet.
The fact that someone clicked on your link means you’ve hit the right topic, but to improve their conversion rates you also need to be sure the content was valuable enough to be effective for conversion.
By knowing how many people like or share your content you can get a benchmark or at least a slight idea if your content was valuable to them. To discover how well did your content perform and how many people shared it, you can use Buzzsumo.
Here’s how:
- Go to Buzzsumo.com
- In the search field, enter your blog’s URL.
- After the results appear, see which posts got the most shares. (They are represented in the numbers within the coloured circles. See image below).
To begin with, you can cross between the most popular landing pages found in the first step with your most shared content and create landing pages around the top 10 posts that appear on both steps 1 and 2.
To take this method to the next level, and for all your future posts, read and implement the 3rd step.
See what posts are performing best on social media
Based on Previous Conversions
When you setup your Google Analytics account you can create goals and track their funnels and sources. This will tell you what posts convert the best.
While the other two steps I’ve described will tell you what content resonates best, this method will highlight which content converts the best.
To set up goals that indicate which content page works best follow the next action steps:
- Go to your admin panel in Google Analytic and under the “View” column, click on “Set Goals.”
- Click on the big red button that says “New Goal.”
- On “Goal Setup,” choose “Sign Up” and click “Next Step.”
- Under “Goal Description” you should already see “Sign Up” as your goal description.
- Under “Type,” choose “Destination.”
- In “Goals Details,” keep the “Equals to” selected, and fill in your destination landing page.
Notice that you should only enter what comes in after the “.com/“ and not the whole link.
That’s it.
To see which posts drove more signups, go back to the analytics dashboard. In the sidebar click on Conversion -> Goals -> Reverse Goals Path”
Google Analytics Funnel VIsualtaion explained by Kissmetrics
This table will show you the reverse funnel attached to your goals. This means you will see which posts got you the most conversions, which makes them a perfect candidate to turning them into successful landing pages.
After we’ve learned which content performed best, we can turn start producing new landing pages.
Final Step:Turn Your Content into Landing Pages
You already have your “sign up” CTA in all your blog posts. So what can you do to turn those posts into great landing pages? Simply reframe you content utilising some of the best practices known for landing pages:
- Turn your post headline to your landing page’s headline. You can tweak it a little bit to be more actionable.
- Eliminate all navigation options from your page – so they can’t navigate away.
- Dedicate your entire sidebar to your “sign up” Call to action.
- Add “sign up” boxes within your text and relate your Call To Actions to the content written in the post.
- You can add “no-follow” tags so Google won’t recognize your content as duplicated. Another option is to alter the text enough so Google won’t recognize it, or simply adding a “previously published on” at the beginning of the post.
- If your content is very long, then you can block about 50% of it and ask for a newsletter sign-up to read the rest of the text. That way you can offer a lower entry point and still get their email.
- Add a last Call To Action to sign up for a demo of your product or a free trial in the footer of that post.
- Add social shares buttons.
Yes, this is far from being the typical looking landing page. It might even be super long. But it will more valuable than any other landing page you create.
You should then spend some time A/B testing your CTA’s but your next step will be to focus on distribution.
How many ways can you think of to distribute a regular landing page? Not much, I’m assuming.
How many ways do you know to promote a blog post? I know there are at least 30 ways.
Also, if you think of it, people are okay with you heavily promoting your content but not as cool when promoting a landing page. So why not mix the strength of the clear directed landing page with the viral and effective essence of a great blog post?
Promote It Like A Blog Post
I’m not going to go into “how to promote a blog post” because it’s a whole other topic.
The important thing to take from this suggestion is that you can promote your new landing page the same way you are used to promoting posts. Share it on different Facebook, Linkedin and G+ groups. Post it on reddit, share it on GrowthHackers.com, Inbound.org, various industry forums, your social media outlets, and so on.
Because you know it’s a piece of content that was widely shared on social media before, you already know it is worth promoting using Facebook ads or as a promoted tweet and it should perform relatively well.
Conclusion
When planning your product’s landing page, you can put your focus on the “easy and fast to understand” scale, which using the common best practices will bring you most conversions. In addition, you can also choose to go on “value based” landing page, which will look very different than the popular structure.
To create a “value based” landing page, you will need to really understand what content works best for your readers and leverage it to increase signups by utilizing some of the direct approaches we know from more traditional landing pages.
What is your most unique way to find landing pages opportunities?
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: How To Create High Converting Landing Pages Based on Your Best Performing Content
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