FieldTest FAQ Deep Dive: How Can My Landing Pages Accommodate the Sales Funnel?
Here at FieldTest we are dedicated to providing our clients with all of the tools and resources they need to build successful digital ad campaigns. We receive a lot of similar questions when new brands sign up for the platform and that’s why we started our FAQ Deep Dive series. Here, we aim to answer some of the questions we hear most and provide key insights into how we think about these crucial issues.
Today we’ll be tackling a question we receive a lot, but not exactly unprompted. In many of our content guides we discuss several key pieces of content to promote with FieldTest digital ads. Some of these you might already have (like press hits or blog content). Others, such as marketing-specific landing pages, are in shorter supply. Brands often ask our advice on how to make a landing page successful and how to build it to best suit their specific marketing strategies. While these questions are not exactly one size fits all, the good news is there are several main points we can make to point you in the right direction. Today we will be discussing this topic and setting the record straight on how to enrich your digital ad campaigns with custom landing pages designed to help increase engagement at each stage of the sales funnel.
Awareness
Let’s start at the top of the funnel with Awareness. If you’ve read any of our funnel strategy guides you’ll understand the purpose of this stage is to make new intenders aware of your brand (see how that works?) using your best imagery and marketing copy to present yourself in the best possible light. Many brands will use this stage to send people to their company homepage. There’s nothing wrong with that strategy so long as your homepage is properly optimized and utilizes your best creatives and product shots. Still, building out custom landing pages to help support your awareness marketing is never a bad idea.
Given the nature of the Awareness stage, you can feel free to be light on the details in your landing pages for your upper funnel. Since the goal here is to connect with new potential customers, don’t feel burdened to tell your brand story from top to bottom just yet. Instead, focus on the broad strokes of what makes you a quality product. We’ve seen brands achieve huge success by building landing pages that focus on their flagship product, complete with info on what makes it great and beautiful product shots. Others mine awareness marketing from an interesting brand/founder’s story. Some of our CBD clients have achieved huge marketing wins by promoting landing pages that focus on the particular way their founder discovered the benefits of CBD. At the Awareness stage any piece of what makes your story compelling will go a long way in providing consumer confidence and help fuel conversions down-funnel.
Consideration
Now that you’ve informed your new potential customers who you are, it’s time to tell them what makes you special. In the Consideration stage, you will use your traffic data from Awareness to show your most interested intenders what sets your brand apart from the competition, while convincing them you are the clear winner in this vertical. This stage is intended to provide your intenders with information that will compel them to purchase, and your landing pages should facilitate that goal.
So what exactly does a landing page in consideration cover? Again, the answer is not one-size-fits-all. It will rely heavily on what makes your brand special and what sets you apart. That said, this is your time to show off and showcase every compelling detail of your product. For example, we’ve had CBD clients use this stage to focus on and promote athlete testimonials on the efficacy of their product. Likewise we’ve seen DTC brands build out landing pages that promote their special manufacturing process, their dedication to environmental sustainability, and their special care for the safety of their products. Each of these might feel like a niche subject or even a distraction from the ultimate goal (getting your intenders to your product pages to purchase) but by focusing in on something so specific you are free to present it as its own piece of marketing content, one that feels organic while still remaining true to your brand and pushing intenders to convert. Promote these landing pages with custom editorial display ads and you’ll find your intenders engaging with your content as they would any other piece of sponsored editorial, all while leading them down to the final funnel stage.
Action
If you’ve built out custom introductory pages for awareness and original content pages for consideration there’s a good chance that by the time you get to action you may be burnt out on building custom pages. Luckily for you, you likely already have the “landing pages” for the action stage built: your product purchase page. That isn’t to say there aren’t design considerations to take into account here. Nothing can put the brakes on campaign performance quite like an unoptimized product purchase page, so in many ways they are among the most important landing pages you’ll create.
What makes a good product purchase page? In a word, shoppability. Many brands will use website templates that appear attractive and well-designed but do not take into consideration the ease of use of their shopping pages, or are confusing to navigate. Your shopping page should have a clear hierarchy, with the product name first, its key features and info next, and finally a clear option to purchase with a defined CTA button. Nothing makes us cringe quite like seeing a shopping page where “purchase” is too small to see and gets lost. Or, equally as bad, sending your customer through a complex menu system to reach checkout. When designing your shopping pages you need to keep in mind that this is likely their first time experiencing your checkout process, so helping them keep their purchase as simple as possible should be your number one priority.
Another issue we see with some brands’ product purchase pages is visual inconsistency. Your marketing images may be as experimental as you please, but when it comes to the purchase landing pages your products should all be photographed consistently and in brand-new condition. You can of course throw some more interesting product photos into the mix, but we cannot recommend enough that all of your shoppable products have at least one or two images that appear consistent across your entire inventory of products. This small gesture to maintaining a consistent level of quality lends a huge amount of customer confidence in your product.
Finally, it is always a good idea to have some form of “recommended products” section on every product page, complete with selected products that make a nice pairing with the current one. The upsell factor is very real, in fact some studies have shown that upsells account for 10-30% of digital retail revenue. Do not pass up that opportunity, make sure that every product page has some form of cross-link to other products you offer.
You are cleared for landing
We know that creating custom content can be a challenge for many brands, but with a little bit of creativity we’re confident that you’ll be able to come up with high performing landing pages for every stage of the funnel. We hope that this guide illuminated to you not only why landing pages are important at every marketing stage, but how to effectively choose a subject that works and eventually converts.