The best Landing Page (LP) is not what it is, but what it can do. A good Landing Page should provide a customized sales pitch to the visitor.

Improve conversion rate by applying the Continuity and Congruence concepts

When visitors land on your landing page, are they able to find what they were looking for? If they are not getting the right mix, or if the content is incomplete, it affects the effectiveness of your landing page and you could miss a potential customer.

Many landing pages fail because the products’ value proposition is not communicated effectively. Here are some steps that will help reverse this effect.

Continuity

By ensuring that each step in the conversion process either states or supports the value proposition preserves the continuity.

It is all about the keywords - the Ad-to-LP relevance. To increase this relevance, create a dynamic landing page. Dynamic landing pages help increase the continuity and the Ad-to-LP Relevance.

By inserting a token in your ad, you can automatically replace the content with the search term a searcher would search for – this is dynamic insertion.

Or, Dynamic Insertion + Landing Page = More Conversions

Dynamic Insertion helps in the following ways:

•    Achieve more relevancies and increase quality of a landing page.
•    To  target your landing page content to your visitors for greater conversions and ROI
•   Saves significant time by using just one template with huge volumes of search terms, rather than creating separate landing pages for each search term

Relevancy is an important part of a landing page. Being relevant to what visitors are searching for gives a much higher chance of success. A visitor converts into a customer if you offer him what he is looking for.

For Instance,
•    You sell Mobile phones and one of your search terms is ”Nokia mobiles”
•    A person types in “Nokia mobiles” as the search query
•   Your ad appears, and it is relevant to his search, i.e. it includes the terms ”Nokia mobiles”
•  She clicks through to your ad, which mentions and continues the theme “Nokia mobiles” in the landing page. You could also display the Nokia logo or Nokia phone images from a database by adding some parameters in the destination URL.

Using this Dynamic Insertion technique, we create a landing page that loads the headline and the images from the database, based on the campaign name and passes the URL parameter.

Take another case; we create a landing page that loads the headlines with the region name on the landing page, based on the campaign name and the IP. Here is how the result could occur:

Keywords searched for: Foreclosure in Alabama

Ad says: Stop Foreclosure: AL
Save Your Home. We Negotiate With Your Lender. Free consultation

The landing page contains the headline: Get the better of foreclosure in Alabama

If you see, this helps in continuity and increases the keyword (Ad-to-LP) relevance, which in turn helps increase conversion rates.

Now, the main problem is that one does not have complete control over search terms that a person inserts in a search query. Dynamic Insertion does not make sense for misspelled keywords.

Best practices for Dynamic landing pages:

1.    Enter all the keywords you want to bid.
2.  Use variations for search terms within a landing page to dynamically insert the broader keywords, specific search phrases, or a combination of both.

Congruence

Congruence refers to the act of ensuring that every element of your page either states or supports the value proposition, in terms of:
•    Design
•    Copy
•    Images
•    Colors
•    Logo

If the flow of the landing page’s elements is not right, visitors may not find what they were looking for and will not convert. The performance of the landing page depends on how well the elements drive the point home and facilitate conversion.

Contributed by Rajasekar Ragavan

Social Media has evolved into a powerful online tool in today’s world. Companies now specially employ people to handle various aspects of their social media campaigns. However, we still see many companies that have still not leveraged the efficiencies of social media.

The ones that are successful in this regard are sure about whom they want to target, how they should react to online conversation and how they can measure their online presence. These initiatives have helped them further strengthen their brand presence, both online and offline.

So, for companies that are still contemplating entering Social Media, here are a few things that could help you decide.

Are you aware of your current online reputation?

Your customers could be using different forums to talk about your product and these conversations could be positive or negative. Here are some things to think about:

•    Do you know where on the web they are talking about your brand?
•    Are these conversations affecting your brand?
•    Do you have a plan to defend your brand in case their opinions are negative?

If your answer is “NO” to any of these questions, then you are “Social Media challenged”. You need help to get yourself Social Media protected. Moreover, your action now can pave the way for your future growth, as Social Media is here to stay. Twitter, Facebook and MySpace are going to be your new playground. Your customers are already there, and they are waiting for you to talk to them.

Companies that have taken steps in this regard are already way ahead of you, and are reaping the fruit of their labor.  They know what their customers want and can change their products accordingly.  Their products are sure to be a success as they provide what their customers want. Their customers are ready to evangelize for them.

By entering this arena, no matter what you do, you will lay the foundation for your Social Media activities.

Contributed by Sherin Jacob