Game Changing Marketing Technology

As ion begins its Fall 2008 post-click road show next week, I’ll be heading down to New York City for SMX East (and hopefully a bite to eat at OTTO while I’m there — ah, I miss living in NYC). I’ll be speaking on the Landing Pages & Multivariate Testing panel at 3:15PM on Tuesday, October 7.

The panel will also have a couple of great optimization specialists from agencies ZAAZ and Page Zero Media, as well as a representative from Google. Gordon Hotchkiss of Enquiro will moderate.

For my section of the talk, I’ll be focusing on why 2 clicks are better than 1, demonstrating how both B2B and B2C marketers have successfully leveraged multi-step landing pages to significantly boost their conversion rate and ROI in search marketing campaigns.

After walking through a few specific examples, I’ll wrap up with a bit of theory about why 2 clicks are better than 1. After all, conventional wisdom is that the fewer steps you give respondents, the better your campaign will perform. That’s true other things being equal. But, as is often the case in marketing and life, other things aren’t always equal.

Here’s a sneak preview of 5 reasons why an extra step or two in your landing experience can dramatically improve your campaign — and give you an unequal competitive advantage:

1. Proportional engagement. Clicking on an ad is a 5 second proposition. Shifting immediately into a jam-packed landing page can be overwhelming by comparison. A multi-step landing experience enables respondents to proportionally engage with you, maybe 5-10 seconds on your first page, 10-20 seconds on your second — building trust and relevancy at each step. In a way, this is essentially contextual navigation that helps people get to what they want more easily.

2. Self-identification. Every company has multiple audience segments. The spirit of Long Tail marketing is to address the particular interests, needs, and desires of each segment as specifically as possible, using language and examples that resonate with their frame of reference. When you offer respondents a choice on a landing page to explicitly choose their segment — in exchange for receiving details and offers most relevant to them on the subsequent page — you’re tapping into the powerful psychological response of self-identification. If a respondent see a choice that calls to them by name, you’ve made a good first impression that your company cares specifically about them. You just have to be sure to fulfill that expectation when they clickthrough to the next page.

3. More focused content. It’s hard trying to cram everything for everyone into a single page. With multi-step landing experiences, you can break out your content into several different buckets — delivering the most relevant content to each segment on page two, without muddying the water with content that’s geared to other segments. This helps with the conversational flow of your engagement and eliminates conceptual and visual clutter. And, as you know as a marketer, subtle shifts in language can have a big impact. By knowing who your audience is on a particular page, you can speak specifically and authentically to them — and that’s what really boosts conversions.

4. Signaling. Investment reflects commitment. When a respondent arrives at a quick-and-dirty landing page, it’s often pretty clear that the marketer who created it didn’t invest a lot of time into it. A respondent could logically infer — consciously or subconsciously, rightly or wrongly — that the marketer doesn’t think their particular search intent is that important. Now consider the alternative: if a respondent clicks through to a more substantial landing experience, with more focused content and higher production values, they are given the impression that the marketer cares a great deal about what they were searching for. The logic is that marketers invest the most effort in places which they believe have the best match for prospective customers — so when a respondent sees such investment, it’s a signal from the marketer to the respondent that, yes, they’ve come to the right place.

5. Market research. Perhaps the biggest problem with single-page landing pages is that they’re so often a take-it-or-leave-it proposition: the respondent either converts or goes away. If 90% of your respondents go away at that point, you know almost nothing about them or why they left. With multi-step landing experiences, you gain the benefit of behavioral feedback that lets you learn about your audience. If the first page of your landing experience is a segmentation choice, then seeing which respondents segment which way reveals which ads are attracting which segments. And, if conversion rates differ from segment to segment — and they will — you learn which segments you’re winning with and which ones you’re not. Even experimenting with different segmentation approaches (several of which are described in Justin’s great post on post-click innovation and iteration) can provide tremendous insight for the marketer.

For those of you at SMX East next week, I look forward to meeting you.