Last week I attended the Design West trade show in San Jose. The exhibit floor was packed with design engineers looking for new embedded technologies and solutions (attendance looked to be up from the previous year), however I was utterly astonished at the ways in which some exhibitors wasted their marketing dollars. Care to join their ranks? Here are top ways to waste money exhibiting at a trade show:

Fail #1. Have a lousy company website. Trade show attendees, especially engineers and scientists, research exhibitors’ websites ahead of time to determine which booths to visit. If your website does not immediately communicate what you do, how it is relevant to your site visitor, and provide a decent impression of your brand, you are very likely to be passed over on the show floor.

Fail #2. Place a big trade show logo on your home page.  Unless you combine the logo with a headline or copy with a direct tie-in to your company’s value proposition, accompanied by a meaty show landing page, this logo does absolutely nothing to influence a potential booth visitor (or web prospect, for that matter). Instead you’ve wasted prime web real estate, which could have instead be used to promote something compelling, such as a software demo or case study.

Fail #3. Sit on a stool, frown, and play on your smartphone. Your lack of enthusiasm and engagement gives me a very poor impression of your company. While I am combing the show floor for a solution to my engineering challenge, you seem to be tired and are clearly not interested in talking to me.

Fail #4. Blow off social media. “Engineers don’t use social media,” right? WRONG! Events are one of the best times to engage in social media, especially Twitter and LinkedIn. There were very active Twitter threads, using the event hashtag (#designwest), about the conference and expo. Exhibitors show attendees, and the trade press were all engaging together virtually. The reach extended well beyond the walls of the show, as others following Design West who could not attend were no doubt interested in the buzz and could follow through their social media accounts.

Fail #5. Use Twitter as SPAM. There were a select few exhibitors who drove us all CRAZY by posting banal messages, such as “Stop by booth xx for a free recycled shopping bag,” which don’t add real value or help show attendees learn or find solutions. The worst offender would send the exact same message 10 times in succession to fill our newsfeeds with this garbage. Marketing FAIL!

Fail #6. MIA. I have two categories of MIA. 6a. Put some literature and a demo board on a table, and then leave the booth unstaffed. This approach guarantees you will bring home a full box of lit and no leads. 6b. Forgo the booth backdrop, relying on the show organizer’s small stencil sign to serve as your banner to the world. This sends a “my company is broke and does not really care about this trade show anyway” vibe. And since the stencil signs are too small to read, you are almost guaranteed that no one will know that you were at the event anyway.

Ok, so now that you’ve heard my list of how to waste money, I’ll leave you with a few images of smart trade show tactics from my time at Design West.

Synapse Wireless created CapNet, the “world’s largest wireless network of propeller beanies,” and heavily promoted this in their booth and social media. The beanies created much buzz and had big staying power on the heads of attendees during the show. Synapse did a great job tying in another exhibitor, Altium, whose software was used in the design of the beanies.

Not only did the Silex booth staff know their stuff, they were so friendly and energetic I just had to jump in a photo with the group!

Stonestreet One did a great job of demonstrating their partnerships with bigger companies, such as Texas Instruments, through hardware on display.

Rohde and Schwarz held short product seminars inside their eighteen-wheeler, parked on the show floor

TREW can help you create a smart event strategy, from planning promotion, design execution, and post-show lead nurturing. Contact us today for more information on trade show marketing.

Related blog posts:

Trade Show Media Relations Do’s and Don’ts

TREW’s Top 5 B2B Trade Show Items & New Ideas to Boost Your Booth Traffic

6 Smart Trade Show Tactics Seen at Design West 2012

TREW Co-Founder Wendy Covey recently sat down with Michael Aivaliotis from VI Shots for an interview titled “Why Engineers Should Love Marketing.”  Michael Aivaliotis, founder of VI Shots, records audio podcasts targeted to scientists and engineers who use LabVIEW. The podcasts include interviews, discussions, and ideas centered around LabVIEW development and growing a successful technical business.

In this interview, Wendy discusses how to approach B2B marketing to technical audiences and provides practical advice encompassing a range marketing topics, from planning and positioning to conferences and social media.

Highlights from the podcast include:

• Planning– what are your business goals?
• Messaging – how are you truly unique?
• Branding – it’s more than pretty colors and a creative logo
• Website and Content – your virtual storefront and the #1 marketing investment you should make
• Conferences – personify your brand, capture leads
• Thought leadership – it’s a marathon, not a sprint
• Social Media – start with a blog, listen first
• Email – stay top of mind

Listen to the podcast at VIShots.com.

Related blog posts:

New eBook: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website

Infographic: B2B Marketing in 2013

How to Create a B2B Marketing Plan that Drives Results

Looking for additional insight? Check out our checklist: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website

I attended the Inbound 2012 conference by HubSpot, and one of my favorite sessions was on blogging. The session was called Getting 100K followers to your Blog. As an author to this blog, they had my full attention – who doesn’t want 100,000 people reading their blog?

We’ve already established that increased, quality traffic fuels growth in leads, and that blogs are great traffic-generators. So how do you increase traffic to your site through your blog?

In reality, just like anything with marketing, there is no silver bullet. It takes consistent investment of time, creativity, and ideas to develop a successful blog and reach an increasing percentage of your target audience. Here are four ways that you can get more blog traffic from quality readers:

This graph shows the relationship between the number of blog posts TREW Marketing published in 2012 and our website traffic, with a strong increase in traffic over time.

1. Understand The Potential of Your Blog

Is your blog just another communications channel in your marketing efforts? Or do you have a defined marketing strategy just for it? For those who answer “yes”, and “no”, to these two questions, consider a mind-shift to think about your blog as much bigger. In the Inbound session, they used the analogy of galaxies. For example, when you first start a business, the business is the center of your galaxy, and all of your marketing efforts (e.g., email marketing, PR, website, and SEO) are the planets that revolve around and support your business.

A good marketing strategy includes a variety of efforts to support your business. Image: HubSpot.

In this same way, think of your blog as the center of its own galaxy, using all of the same “planets” as supporting planets.

The same marketing activities that support your business can be used to promote your blog. Image: HubSpot.

By making this shift, you see how your blog can be bigger than you imagined. If you start to think of your blog as such an asset, you’ll be able to grow and scale it. Case in point – the TREW Marketing Spotlight blog now brings in 49% of our monthly traffic.

2. Get Discovered

In the session, the HubSpot bloggers talked about creating “big hits”. That is, creating fresh content fueled by new ideas and data that make your content compelling for potential readers to ultimately find your blog. Here are some ideas to create big hits.

• Publish original data and findings. Create your own surveys and case studies and showcase this original data on your blog. If you created it, the content is sure to be new and fresh for your readers.

Create your own surveys to get firsthand data that you can share through your blog.

• Give your take on relevant topics. If there’s news topic that’s already popular in your industry, write a blog post about it so that when readers are searching for the topic, they come across your site. For example, if a prominent engineering school was granted $10M for its robotics program and your company makes robotic medical devices, talk about how you think that university could spend its grant to further medical advancements. Or, if you’re a software integrator and one of the platforms you integrate has a new release, write a post talking about how customers can use the features in that new version to better their businesses. This tactic is called newsjacking, capitalizing on the popularity of a topic to boost your sales and marketing success. Be sure to use the news topic in your headline for the best search results.
• Be one of the first to talk about a new trend. Is there a new idea in the marketplace? A new product? A process once used in another space that could be applied to your industry? Share your thoughts and best practices on the topic first with a blog post.
• Be interesting and use catchy headlines. It seems like a no-brainer, but it’s important to write about topics that would interest your potential customers. Think outside the box. For example, your customers may be manufacturing test and measurement equipment, but they’re also hiring experts to use that equipment, so consider, for example, writing a blog post about hiring the best engineer for the types of applications your customers are creating. And, a quick, eye-catching headline will draw a reader in to read the “must-see” material, such as “XYZ”.
• Continually promote your post. Is your blog auto-synced to your social media channels? While this is a great time saving tool, if you’re not careful, it can also be a trap. Twelve percent of HubSpot’s blog traffic comes from social media, but this doesn’t happen with just one auto-published post, they continually share their blog posts on both big and small social networks. Your audiences may not see your blog post the first time you promote it in your e-newsletter or social media, so make a note to promote it again via social media a few weeks later. Or, if you wrote in the past about a topic that becomes a buzz topic in the future, promote that post in social media and point people back to your thoughts on the topic.
• Use images and graphics in your posts. You can’t deny it – we humans love pictures. Pictures power social media. Visual content is revolutionizing social media and how web content is consumed. As an example, on average, links on Facebook with photos generate 4 times more shares than links without photos. Therefore, to grow the reach and sharing of your posts, use compelling images that showcase the points you’re making.

TREW Marketing’s 2013 B2B Marketing Infographic is informative and engaging for readers

3. Convert Readers to Subscribers and Keep Them Coming Back

If you can convert your readers to subscribers, you’re creating a base of potential customers who will likely keep coming back to your site, and share your blog with others.

To earn subscribers, make a subscription option available on your blog page above the fold so that it’s easily noticeable. In addition, consider sending an email to your contacts, encouraging them to subscribe to the blog.

To keep your readers and subscribers engaged, we recommend you blog at least once a month, and more frequently if possible. The more frequently you blog, the more often you’re giving those subscribers a reminder to come back to your site, and share your information with others. 

4. Empower Subscribers be Your Advocates

Speaking of sharing, how can you make it as easy as possible for your blog subscribers to interact with and pass on your quality content? The easiest way is to use social sharing buttons to for readers to share your content via LinkedIn, Twitter, email, and other outlets.

Include social sharing icons and a subscription form on your blog, above the fold.

In addition, seek guest blogging opportunities, and offer your expertise to other bloggers. If you post on their blogs, there’s a good chance those readers will come back to see the rest of your ideas on your site. And, have guest bloggers write content for you. It’s likely their loyal readers will come to your site to see what their familiar author penned, and then become engaged (and hopefully even subscribe!) to your content.

There’s no silver bullet to growing blog traffic, but by making your blog the center of its own galaxy, careful planning and idea-brainstorming, you’ll be able to attract the readers most relevant to your business, and convert them to subscribers and advocates.

Looking for additional insight? Check out our checklist: A 15-Point Checklist to Evaluate Your B2B Technical Website

Related Blog Posts:

Content and SEO Fuel Inbound Marketing Results

4 Ways Pictures Power SEO and Social Media

Agency Chosen for Collaborative Approach in Marketing to Technical Audiences

AUSTIN, Texas – December 4, 2012 – Crank Software Inc. of Ottawa, Canada announced today it has selected Austin-based TREW Marketing to lead its company awareness and lead generation campaigns. Crank Software chose TREW Marketing for their experience in developing integrated marketing programs that target embedded design engineers. The partnership entails brand and product-level messaging and positioning, PR, content development, partner co-marketing management, search engine optimization and advertising, social media and email marketing.

Crank Software specializes in embedded user interface (UI) solutions that enable R&D teams to more quickly develop rich UIs for resource-constrained embedded devices like in in-car graphical displays and animated GPS systems. Their product, Crank Storyboard™ Suite, manages the entire UI lifecycle, bridging the gap between UI design and embedded systems by streamlining the development process from months to minutes, helping their customers get products to market faster, with higher return on investment (ROI), and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

 “Crank Software has proven how collaboration during product development results in higher quality at a lower cost, and they sought to find similar advantages in their marketing efforts,” said Wendy Covey, Principal and Co-Founder of TREW Marketing. “The marketing programs TREW developed for Crank fully leverage both companies’ unique expertise, and will grow demand for Crank’s graphical user interface solutions.”

The new partnership includes the following marketing programs:

• Marketing communications strategy and integrated activity plans
• Marketing collateral and content development – case studies, webcasts
• Product launch media relations
• Search engine optimization and advertising programs
• Social media strategy and execution
• Database marketing with quarterly e-newsletters and email nurturing
• Partner co-marketing campaign and activity plan

 “TREW’s marketing expertise and knowledge of the embedded space make them a trusted advisor to help us drive awareness and demand, as we continue to grow our business and market share,” said Jason Clarke, Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Crank Software. “They have a proven track record developing and executing strategic marketing plans that focus on results and we’re excited to have them as an extension of our team.”

Click to Tweet: New from @TrewMarketing: @Cranksoftware Selects TREW Marketing for Embedded Industry Outreach http://ow.ly/feA6c

About Crank Software

Crank Software is an innovator in embedded user interface (UI) solutions that bridges the gap between UI design and embedded systems to deliver a competitive advantage by streamlining the development lifecycle so their customers can get their products to market faster, with higher ROI, and lower total cost of ownership. Today, time is wasted in the development lifecycle because the design goes back and forth between UI designers, user experience designers, and embedded systems engineers. The Crank Storyboard Suite enables stakeholders to work in parallel. Storyboard manages the entire UI lifecycle—from UI design to simulation to being optimized for the device.

About TREW Marketing

TREW Marketing, headquartered in Austin, Texas, is a full-service B2B marketing firm uniquely serving leading engineering and scientific companies that target technical markets. TREW uses decades of specialized experience to create custom marketing programs that help customers efficiently and effectively achieve their business and sales goals. With goals and objectives defined, TREW then takes an integrated approach using a wide array of marketing services, including brand identity, positioning and messaging; website strategy and design; content development and publishing; search marketing; public relations and social media strategy and execution.

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Did you know that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text? (HubSpot, 2012)

You can’t deny it – we love pictures. Visual content is revolutionizing social media and how web content is consumed. Facebook recently reported that their users upload an average of 300 millions photos everyday, and the rise of photo sharing social media sites like Pinterest – now the third largest social networking site, behind Facebook and Twitter, and Instagram – bought by Facebook for $1 billion this year, tell us that there’s real power behind pictures.

So what does this mean for B2B marketing? It means that pictures are a viable content opportunity for your marketing mix of web pages, white papers, videos, webinars, case studies, and blog posts.

Read on to learn 4 quick ways to optimize and effectively integrate photos and visuals in your B2B marketing activities.

1. Name the file appropriately. Pick a related keyword for your web content and use this in your file name. Many users will name their image as “image1” or “logo.png” or “screen-shot 2012-10-22.” Is this you? Search engines, like Google, rely on textual cues to understand what the image is about. So if you leave your image file name like the examples above, Google will not know what to do with them.

2. Add alt text. Use keywords in the “alt tag” text box when you upload an image to your blog or website. By adding descriptive alt tag text, search engines can better identify what the image is about and how it relates to your content.

The image below shows how a blog, dynamometermanufacturers.com, found an image of TREW client, Wineman Technology’s dynamometer system via Google search and used it for a blog post. The blog attributed the image to Wineman Technology by linking to winemantech.com, which generated web traffic that spent more than 11½ minutes on-site and viewed an average of 6 pages per session. This cyclical effect of posting and tagging images helps increase your backlinks, gain third-party credibility, and generate highly engaged web visitors.

3. Add context for the image in the page text. In addition to naming the file correctly and adding keyword rich alt text, Google also recommends you add text on the page where the image is located. Referencing the image in the page text ensures that Google understood your alt text correctly. See tip #2 above for an example of referencing an image in your page text.

4. Use rich visual snippets for Facebook posts. Using visual content for Facebook helps increase fan engagement with your page. The more engagement you receive on your page, the more positively Facebook’s EdgeRank Algorithm will favor your posts, thus expanding your reach.

TREW Marketing tracked our Facebook page content metrics to learn what content generates the most engagement. The results are very telling of engaging visual content on Facebook. Updates with photos receive 2X more total impressions versus posts with just a link. Additionally, our photos receive 12X more engaged users (people who like or comment on the image) over the link posts.

So here’s what you can do. By snapping a quick shot of a chart or image used in a blog post, you can upload it as an individual image and link to the blog post. This makes your Facebook post stand out more in the newsfeed and in the timeline. Below is an example of this, from Rand Fishkin’s presentation at Inbound 2012.

Contact us today to learn more about TREW Marketing social media and search engine optimization programs.

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Content and SEO Fuel Inbound Marketing Results

Lasting SEO Results, Part 1: How PR Affects SEO

Inbound marketing strategies are fueling growth in conversions and leads for the savvy companies who adopt and implement them as part of their integrated marketing plan. However, there are holdouts in B2B marketing who still aren’t convinced that inbound marketing tactics are worth the effort. So let’s look at how two key inbound marketing activities, content and SEO, make a big impact in driving marketing results.

First let’s define inbound marketing. Wikipedia defines it as the concept of earning the attention of prospects, making yourself easily found and drawing customers to your website by producing content customers value.

1. Content — it’s probably our favorite word at TREW marketing and with good reason. Having quality content on your website is a staple for inbound marketing. And it’s not always for selling or marketing, it’s also for educating and/or establishing thought leadership.

One piece of well-written, well-placed content can have multiple uses. You can blog about it, use it as a call-to-action on social media sites, and repackage it in the form of a video, webinar, or white paper.  Just think about how that one piece of content used in multiple ways and channels can drive your search marketing efforts.

2. Search — Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about tweaking your website to make it more search-engine friendly and earning inbound links through stellar content. As our culture becomes increasingly digital, search is now one of the largest channels for demand generation. Ranking in top positions on generic search terms has a large impact on your brand and gains in customer mind-share vs. your competitors. How do content and search impact each other and how can you leverage them to drive your results?

Let’s consider blogging. One of the main benefits of business blogging is the rewards it delivers to SEO.  Having your SEO and blogging strategy aligned is key to ensuring that you are optimizing blog content with keywords for which your business is seeking to rank high in natural search. If you are pushing to rank for a specific keyword, your blogging strategy should support that. For example, let’s say you are a software developer; by creating content about best practices for software development, the best tools to use when developing software, etc. and working in using specific keywords about your software, you will optimize that blog post and earn higher SEO results.

3. Measurement. Now that you’ve created content, and are optimizing SEO to your advantage, how do you measure results? The most effective way to make sure you’re getting the most from your inbound marketing efforts is to regularly analyze data across all of your marketing channels so you can see how your integrated campaigns perform, and make adjustments to your marketing programs on an ongoing basis. Key inbound marketing metrics include web visits, time on site, leads, and sales conversions.

Need help building your inbound marketing strategy, or managing your integrated marketing efforts? Contact TREW Marketing or explore our services, including:

• Marketing audit
• Virtual marketing manager
• Search engine marketing
• Content development

Don’t be a hold-out — join the inbound marketing revolution. You’ll not only see an increase in awareness and conversions, but you’ll build a cohesive customer experience that will lead to long-term loyalty, and bottom-line results.

Last week, the TREW Crew headed to Boston for a full-court press of training on HubSpot software and inbound marketing best practices. This follows over 50 hours of training by the team this past summer, culminating in TREW being named a HubSpot Certified Partner just two weeks ago. Here are our top takeaways from the week – look for lengthier posts to come diving into these and other topics from the conference.

1) 1+1=3

During Inbound 2012, HubSpot announced their latest 3.0 software release themed around cool new features combined together for a greater impact (or the more catchy articulation of 1+1=3).

Dharmesh Shah on stage at Inbound 2012 showing off the features of the 3.0 release

Of these new features, there are a few stand-outs that the Hubspot-Certified TREW Crew is excited to implement right away. (For illustrative purposes, we will discuss these features using a fictitious TREW prospect named Larry).

• Smart Calls-to-Action (CTAs) – Larry has already visited TREW Marketing and downloaded the Smart Marketing Guide for Engineers, so the next time Larry visits the site, he would see an offer for our white paper, Inbound Marketing: 5 Keys to Generating Leads on Your Website.
• Smart Forms – When Larry returns to the TREW site for more fantastic TREW downloads, we will remember his information and not ask for the same personal information again.
• Contacts timeline view – Not only can we learn about Larry from what he has shared with TREW, as well as by viewing his social media activity, the new HubSpot timeline view provides us with a visual story of the actions Larry has taken on the TREW site and lifecycle status.
• Social media management – HubSpot 3 makes social sharing easier, providing us with the ability to post to multiple accounts and platforms. It has built-in scheduling (and timing suggestions) so that we reach Larry when his is more likely to be plugged into his social accounts.

These are just a few of the many new cool features in Hubspot 3. For more about this new release, visit the Hubspot website.

2) Marketing Math – Calculating Visits to Leads to Sales

We all would like to formulaically know how many visitors to our website it will take to convert the right number of leads to generate the revenue our business needs. Up to now, that has been difficult, but with HubSpot’s automated and highly analytical inbound marketing tools, it gets a lot easier.

Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of HubSpot, shared his process for doing just this, using an example revenue goal, sales data, and analytics from his HubSpot marketing tools. By knowing his average revenue per customer, and historical data on his lead-to-customer and visitor-to-lead conversion rates from HubSpot, he gladly signed his marketing team up to do their part to support sales.

Look for another post to come that goes into much greater detail about this example, including formulas and real numbers. In the end, his marketing team needed tens of thousands of leads to generate less than one hundred more customers for sales – and the key to marketing doing this job is a continuous flow of new content, distributed across marketing channels. To read more about this and whet your appetite, check out our new Inbound Marketing white paper.

3) Content is Still King.

We’ve said it in blog posts, we’ve said it books, and we’ve said it in probably every client meeting over the last five years:

Content. Is. King.

According to everything we learned at Inbound 2012, content is still king. But, marketing best practices have to adapt, because as Gary Vaynerchuk said (with much more *colorful words), “As marketers, we take every good idea, every great new technology, practice, and tactic, and we ruin it. We use it and we squeeze the life out of it until no one likes it anymore.”

Drastic statement? Think about traditional mail. Surely our grandparents were excited to get mail. Are you excited? Probably not, because it’s full of junk and ads. Marketers ruined it. We use a spam blocker to filter our marketing emails and a DVR to skip commercials. Mass-produced, generic content has been squeezed pretty hard, but content is still important.

So how is content evolving? With context. Content is still king, but it needs to be in the right context for the audience. Marketers have to understand what their customers and potential customers want, what their interests are, and provide content that will appeal to those customers best in order to succeed.

4) Try again.

The slide above is from Rand Fishkin’s, CEO of SEO software company SEOmoz, keynote speech on SEO tactics. In this new age of inbound marketing, we feel a sense of duty to constantly pump out content and make it go “viral” – to reach new audiences by blogging and sharing via social media.

Rand’s example of his guide, “SEO: The Free Beginner’s Guide From SEOmoz” was a great case study of how he launched and re-launched this guide. On the first try, it did not generate much traffic nor did it capture the top spot on Google’s results page. He then revised and re-launched it two, three, and even four times to finally earn the top ranking spot on Google, which now effectively drives traffic back to his website.

The lesson here is that you can launch a revised white paper year over year at the same URL. With each new version, Google will see the new signals accruing at this URL and will increase its ranking in the search engine results. Also, don’t be afraid to blog about the updated version, and post it on social media multiple times. If your first attempt failed, no one will care if you revise and repost it…because no one saw it to begin with.

TREW Marketing now offers a free webcast discussing how engineers and professionals in B2B technology seek information and use different media sources, and what companies must do to market to these technical audiences.

We’ve found that more than 50 percent of technical companies plan to increase marketing budgets in the next 1 to 3 years, and this new webcast gives insight as to how companies can best maximize their marketing spending to reach a technical audience.

Our data for the webcast came from a recent survey targeting engineers, scientists and technologists and addresses marketing media topics ranging from web search habits to use of industry publications and social media. We surveyed more than 100 engineers and professionals in the B2B technology market to gain insight on marketing to technical audiences, media choices, news, the latest communication platforms and industry trends.

In the webcast, we share information about respondents’ use of web sites to gather information, search habits, and social media preferences. The webcast, along with a downloadable white paper on the topic, is freely available on demand and has three parts:

• Part 1: How Engineers Stay Informed
• Part 2: Search Marketing for Engineers
• Part 3: Social Media – Relevant or Not?

Watch the 3 Must-Do’s When Marketing to Technical Audiences webcast now!

Related Posts:

Smart Marketing for Engineers – a Free Guidebook

The TREW Approach- Goals and Smart Planning

Landing pages, also called “lead capture pages,” are the gateway to your web conversion offers that create leads for your company. This is often the first page a web visitor sees when arriving to your site from a social media link, email promotion or paid search ad. At TREW, we are asked many questions around how to create a landing page that generates leads, thus the following post outlines some of our tips to guide you through the process of crafting an effective landing page.

When should I create a landing page?

Landing pages should be created to house high-value content for a targeted audience. Good examples of content that visitors are willing to give you their personal information for are:

• Technical white papers
• Webcasts/webinars
• Tutorials
• E-newsletters

The more valuable the content is perceived to be, the more personal information a web visitor is willing to give. For this reason, creating a compelling landing page is critical to generate leads.

What are the key ingredients to a great landing page?

With one piece of content to house, and one main call-to-action, “to download,” landing pages should be quick to develop. Avoid wasting time by creating a “kitchen sink” of call-to-actions on the landing page. Instead, follow this checklist of landing page content and wireframe example below:

• Lead capture form prominently placed above the page fold
• Page title and detailed sub-title highlighting  offers
• Brief 1-2 body paragraphs followed by bulleted reasons why the reader needs your content, and how they will benefit from it
• Company contact information
• Bonus points: embed a short video that further explains the content

Is less really more? What fields should be on the lead capture form?

Just like the page itself, lead capture forms need to be clear, simple, and concise. Studies have shown that companies with longer page descriptions and forms have a lower conversion rate than those with simple landing page descriptions and forms. By shortening the landing page text and form fields, one company saw their landing page conversion rate go from 32% to 53% (Hubspot, Webinar Redesign Strategy, 2010). If possible, develop the lead form with 4 fields:

• First and last name
• Email address
• Company name
• Open description box

My landing page is live, now what?

Consider your landing page as a living document. Allow it to run at least a month before making changes to it, while tracking visits and conversion rates. Based on its performance, you will need to decide how to make changes to improve the page.

Are lots of visitors landing and then not converting? This could mean that the page content needs tweaks to better explain your offering and compel the visitor to download, or it could mean your offer is not compelling enough for your target audience to leave their name. If the landing page seems to not be reaching its expected web traffic, try to increase reach with an email campaign, pay-per-click ads, or use as a next step after a trade show.

Overall, the purpose of landing pages is to help you convert a faceless web visitor into real sales opportunities for your business, and is an important component in your marketing strategy and website design.

For more advice on website design, see these related blog posts:

Microsites: Effective Marketing or Bad Idea?

Maximize your Online Impact with a Winning Web Design