by Rita Baker | Jan 26, 2015 | Marketing
La page d’atterrissage (landing page) s’utilise lors de campagnes web. Il peut s’agir d’une page de votre site web mais souvent les circonstances demandent une page dédiée.
Dans ce billet je m’attarderai sur les pages d’atterrissage qui ne font pas partie intégrante de votre site web. Généralement, une entreprise utilise ce type de page lors d’événements dits uniques tels des concours ou des ventes qui ne touchent qu’une portion de l’offre de l’entreprise.
Puisqu’il est relativement facile et peu coûteux de faire des tests comparatifs (A/B Testing) sur les pages d’atterrissage on retrouve de plus en plus de données sur les éléments qui en augmente l’efficacité.
Voici trois bases qui vous aideront à améliorer le rendement de vos pages d’atterrissage.
Une proposition de valeur claire
Les chances sont que votre visiteur n’accordera pas plus de 7 secondes à la lecture du contenu de votre page d’atterrissage. Vous n’aurez que très peu de temps pour faire passer votre message.
Il est donc essentiel que votre texte soit concis, se lise facilement (tant au niveau des mots que de la police de caractère) et soit placé dans l’écran d’accueil. L’écran d’accueil étant l’espace sur l’appareil utilisé par le visiteur qui apparait dès l’ouverture de la page sans navigation aucune.
Des images qui parlent
Une page web dénudée d’images est non seulement moins agréable à regarder mais diminue aussi le temps passé sur une page par les visiteurs. L’utilisation d’images sur une page d’atterrissage sert non seulement à l’agrémenter mais aussi à accélérer la compréhension du message. Puisque vous n’avez que très peu de temps pour convaincre vos visiteurs, les images de votre page d’atterrissage doivent supporter votre argumentation et avoir comme objectif principal de faire passer votre message. Il faut donc choisir une image qui, même sans contexte, communique votre message.
Si vous utilisez une vidéo, assurez-vous que l’écran d’arrêt montre une image qui supporte votre message puisqu’une partie de vos visiteurs ne regarderont jamais la vidéo.
Il est préférable de ne pas faire jouer la vidéo automatiquement sur votre page d’atterrissage. Une proportion importante des usagers de téléphones mobiles qui ne sont pas en connexion wifi ferment ces pages sans les regarder.
Un message simple et concentré
Encore ici on comprend que le peu de temps dont on dispose pour faire passer notre message fait en sorte qu’il doit être très simple. Si votre message est plus complexe, tentez soit de le simplifiez ou d’utilisez un outil promotionnel qui sera plus approprié. Un message simple se résume souvent en un verbe d’action tel : regarder, acheter, voter, téléphoner, télécharger, visiter.
Les pages d’atterrissage qui ont le plus haut taux de succès concentrent l’attention des visiteurs sur le message. Il faut donc éviter toute distraction tel les menus de navigation, d’autres publicités (oui, j’ai vu des page d’atterrissage avec des espaces publicitaires) ou des éléments de style qui détractent l’attention du texte et des images.
Ces trois éléments font partie des bases à respecter lorsque vous créez une page d’atterrissage. Il est important de se souvenir par contre que la création de page d’atterrissage est une science encore inexacte. Les tests A/B démontrent fréquemment que des éléments aussi anodins que la couleur d’un icône ou l’emplacement d’une image sur la page peuvent augmenter l’efficacité d’une page d’atterrissage de façon dramatique.
Le succès d’une page d’atterrissage est fonction non seulement de son contenu mais également de votre clientèle cible. C’est pourquoi il n’y a pas un modèle unique de page d’atterrissage performante. Je vous encourage donc à créez vos pages d’atterrissage en respectant les bases énoncées dans ce billet mais aussi en testant différents modèles afin de voir lequel vous permet de mieux atteindre vos objectifs.
by Rita Baker | Jan 20, 2015 | Marketing
In many companies the marketing and sales departments are at odds. They often fight for resources and power.
Most often they are two separate entities reporting to the CEO. Sometimes marketing reports to sales and on some occasions, mostly in smaller companies, it’s the other way around.
Which is right? If you are starting your company should you set up a sales department or a marketing department first?
The answer lies in the product or service you are selling as well as in the market you wish to address.
When sales should trump marketing
If your product or service is highly complex and its benefits cannot be explained quickly then you need to have someone who can find the right way to do this and adapt the explanation to the customer in front of him or her. This is the case most often for industrial products. The product itself can be simple but it may come in a multitude of variations according to specific needs. An example would be windows. Everyone knows what a window is but when you start looking into it you will find they come in various amounts of layers, in hundreds of types of glass, with various types of gas in between layers, with multiple types of mountings, etc.
Another situation where sales should trump marketing is in the case where your target market has complex needs. Most complex needs, but definitely not all, can be traced back to emotional rather than logical responses. An example would be if your product or service is fulfilling a status need. If your customers need to feel important, they will require one on one contact and made to feel special.
In both these cases a marketing approach, as good as it may be, will not suffice to convince the buyer. He or she needs to ask multiple questions and make sure that his or her needs are satisfied with the right product and treatment.
This doesn’t mean of course that marketing is not necessary. Every company needs to understand their product, pricing, promotion, distribution, market knowledge and customer needs. It simply means that marketing should be under the responsibility of the sales department.
It is important not to confuse sales representatives with clerks or agents. The representatives’ job is to find customers, convince them and close the sale. Clerks and agents such as the ones in stores or technical agents that help understand complex technological customer needs are there to facilitate a sale not make it.
When marketing should trump sales
I imaging you get the gist of my argumentation by now. If complex products and needs make sales trump marketing then simpler products and needs make marketing trump sales.
If your company sells a widget or only a few variations of this widget, even if it’s in a B2B context, you don’t really need a sales team. You can make use of a call center with agents, if revenues justify the costs, but you don’t need representatives on the road. Sales agents become a marketing tool just as a web campaign or direct mail campaign would. Usually a marketer will find the customers and write the script that will be used by the sales agents to convince and close the sale. Call centers operate under the responsibility of the marketing department.
Sales representatives are significantly more costly, on a percentage of sales revenue basis, than marketers. Hence they should only be used when marketing alone is insufficient to convince your customers to purchase your product or service.
This is one of the most important staffing choices you will be making in your company in terms of sales revenue. Make sure it’s the right one.
by Rita Baker | Jan 13, 2015 | Marketing
It’s the beginning of the year. You are most likely hard at work planning your marketing for the next few months. Trying to see where you will be allocating your budgets. You are now convinced, probably because you read it over a hundred times in the last few years, that digital marketing needs to be an important part of your plan.
While planning, you should be aware of the following three hurdles that, if not cleared properly, will undoubtedly impede the returns you are hoping to get from your investments in digital marketing.
Lack of knowledge
Let’s face it. Digital marketing is evolving so fast in the last few years that it’s almost impossible to keep up with all the new techniques, tools and applications out there. Raise your hand if you feel you know all that you need to know about web analytics, programmatic, social media platforms, mobile advertising, email promotion and all the rest of the digital marketing world? My hand is not up and I spend a large chunk of my time reading on these topics and helping my customers plan for and implement them. At this time and point, keeping up with what’s new seems like a race to a finish line that keeps being pushed further every time you look up.
Marketing is no longer a one person job, even in the smallest of companies. Every resource in the company needs to keep up with market information and contribute to the planning. That still doesn’t mean that you will have the digital marketing expertise internally to execute your plan. It will however allow you to have a better idea of the tactics that you can include in your plan.
It also means that it would be wise to accept that your plan will be a very short term one. Chances are a new application or tool will come out in the next month or so that will give you better returns than what is currently available and you will need to adjust your plan. It could also be that Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or another social platform retires or changes a feature that you were banking on.
Lack of strategy
Lack of strategy for your digital marketing or any other business management aspect is the best recipe to shoot yourself in the foot eventually. You can have the most beautiful website or presence on the web but if it’s not tied into a good strategy it’s akin to buying the most beautiful and powerful car on the lot and having no driver. It won’t get you very far.
Sparse resources combined to the massive amount of knowledge to acquire in digital marketing make it more efficient to narrow down which of the tools you want to focus on to start with.
Your strategy will enable you to identify goals and market segments you will need to prioritise. This information will point the way to the right digital marketing tools to achieve your goals. As an example if you are a small B to B software firm and your marketing strategy identifies opening a new niche market in a restrained geographic area, investing in an Adword campaign although useful, may not be where you will get your best returns. Investing in an email marketing application may however be where you need to focus. Your resources time will therefore be better spent finding and learning an email application rather than learning how to run an Adword campaign in the first part of the year.
Dark traffic and dark social
This hurdle is at a higher level. This one will impact even the most advanced companies using digital marketing tools.
Dark traffic and dark social, a subset of dark traffic, refer to all the traffic that enters your website or mobile application that analytic applications cannot identify. It usually is lumped up in the Direct channel category in Google Analytics. It can come from anonymous browsing (not all but some), email links or simply from mobile applications (mostly Facebook and Reddit) or websites that don’t collect or transmit information on their users or visitors source.
How big of an issue is it you ask? Well according to Radium One (Dec. 2014) study, it represents 59% of all digitally shared content in North America and an average of 69% worldwide. That is a pretty big chunk. (1)
In practice what it means is in order to get decent returns from many of the marketing digital tools that are based on segmenting analytics data (retargeting for one) you will need a significant amount of visible traffic to compensate for the dark one.
As with any good runner these hurdles should not discourage you from running the race. Hopefully knowing about them and planning accordingly will help you turn in a better time.
(1) Facebook’s mobile app is responsible for the largest part of this dark social traffic. Once analytics applications find a way to count this traffic the importance of dark social will go down dramatically. Increase in popularity of fully anonymous browsers such as Thor may however re-ignite the trend upwards.
