7 reasons for social networking on landing pages

For several years, we’ve been advocating a Long Tail strategy for landing pages. In our experience, one of the keys to highly successful post-click marketing is to have distinct landing experiences assigned to each of your niche marketing campaigns.

Eschew generic, one-size-fits-all landing pages. Get specific.

The reason this works is straightforward: people respond better — much better — to content and offers that speak directly and authentically to their particular wants, needs, interests. When Long Tail ads are matched with Long Tail landing pages, you engage these niches in more relevant dialogues right from the start, framed from their perspective. The result is a higher conversion rate.

Recently, we had an epiphany: the targeted audiences of Long Tail landing pages could unleash tremendous value and synergy if they could connect with each other, à la social networking.

Social networking on landing pages could serve as a gateway to unique Long Tail market communities.

By executing a Long Tail marketing strategy, you as the marketer are already doing the heavy lifting of finding a particular audience, placing ads to win their clicks, and launching niche-specific landing pages as a destination for them. You are assembling congregations of people bound by specialized, shared interests.

All you have to do is tear down the paper walls between them.

Instead of simply communicating with them one-on-one, you can — at your discretion and theirs — introduce them to each other. In the language of The Tipping Point, your niche-specific landing page can become a kind of “connector”, bringing together people who — despite a particular shared interest — may have had a difficult time finding each other elsewhere in the social web.

Take for example our case study on Citrix, who successfully used Long Tail landing pages to promote their remote application software to the health care industry. They launched landing pages specifically aimed at hospital IT administrators, and then further segmented them by large hospital or small hospital environments.

Now, if you’re a small hospital IT administrator, grappling with HIPAA-compliance issues on your software infrastructure, would it be helpful for you to get in touch with other small hospital IT administrators wrestling with the same challenges?

Absolutely.

Not just to vet, ratify, or extend the specific presentation being made by Citrix — although that unto itself is immediately valuable as a core benefit. But also to discuss broader issues that surround such a decision, like financing, training, legacy support, legal implications, and so on. And even beyond that particular topic, such a peer group remains an ongoing resource for advice, suggestions, references, and more.

Companies can deliver enormous value to their market by serving as the nexus by which their customers discover their professional counterparts and kindred spirits.

But why should you do this? And how?

The how is easy. Recent announcements of Friend Connect by Google, Facebook Connect by Facebook, and Data Availability by MySpace have unveiled a wave of new widgets that can be plugged into any web page to interface with people’s existing social networks. According to Google’s announcement, “Web sites that are not social networks may still want to be social. Friend Connect provides you the ability to add social features to your site, without writing code.”

All you need to do is cut-and-paste these widgets in your landing pages. (In the case of LiveBall, our latest release makes it a breeze to drop widgets into the flow of designer-created templates that adhere to your brand standards.)

What’s great about these widgets from Google, Facebook, and MySpace is that they leverage respondents’ existing social network accounts, friends, and profiles — in a two-way exchange that is centered around your page and its specific content and purpose. Any social features you put on the page, such as discussion threads, reviews, and recommendations need not be isolated pools of social interaction — such as comments on a blog — but rather tributaries to larger streams and rivers in people’s broader social networks.

As for why you should do this, here are 7 reasons to consider adding social networking features to your landing pages:

1. Because niche-specific social networking can deliver value to your respondents, they will be inclined to view your brand more favorably in light of the beneficial connections you’ve enabled for them. Reciprocity is a good thing.
2. Engaging respondents immediately after they click on an ad is one of the toughest challenges in post-click marketing. Social interactivity — particularly if it has a low hurdle and promising upside — can be an effective hook to pull people into active participation with your marketing campaign.
3. Participants’ social networks become a vehicle for additional referral traffic, as they share their discovery and related conversation with other potential prospects in their sphere of influence. This can be a force multiplier on your original advertising spend.
4. Social landing pages can also serve as your invitation into prospects’ social networks, a channel to develop relationships that can persist beyond the immediate topic.
5. Particularly when people are exploring new purchases or services — which is typically how they arrive in one of your marketing campaigns — they find it reassuring to be able to talk with others in their shoes. Helping respondents help each other in this context can further your agenda.
6. Your willingness to facilitate open discussions between your prospects and customers radiates a strong position of confidence, signaling that you genuinely believe in what you do and are eager to talk about it and have others talk about it.
7. Social interactions on your landing page are an excellent way for you to get real-time, qualitative feedback. Statistics such as bounce rates, conversion rate, segmentation, etc., show quantitative response, but social media mechanisms let you hear first-hand what people are thinking — even people who might not “convert” (which may be some of the most valuable feedback of all).

To be sure, social networking may not be effective on every landing page. It very much depends on your campaign, your company, and the particular niche you’re trying to engage. In some cases, social features can significantly enhance the experience — as described above. In other scenarios, they may be a distraction.

The best way to find out is to test.

One of the great things about landing pages is that they are relatively low-risk propositions that are fast and easy to change — far less inertia than your primary web site. You can test new ideas like this quickly and painlessly. If it works, awesome, expand the idea further. If it doesn’t, your exposure was small, you learn from it, and try another variation or something entirely different.

Particularly given the wide spectrum of social applications and interfaces — with new, innovative ones appearing every week — this is a category of online marketing ideas that can be deeply mined for a long time to come.

In fact, beyond serving as an enhancement to content-oriented or offer-oriented landing pages, we expect to see Long Tail campaigns that drive traffic to pure social networking-oriented landing pages. In those cases, the “conversion” goal won’t be a lead or a transaction, but rather a social interaction — friending or following the company, contributing to a discussion, adding a review, making a referral, etc.

A new generation of widgets that combine social APIs from Facebook, Google, and MySpace with APIs from landing page management systems such as LiveBall for segmenting, grading, and converting respondents will enable marketers to measure the social networking factors of their Long Tail marketing campaigns.

At some point along the way, social media marketing blends with direct marketing. We think that’s going to be awesome for marketers and respondents alike.

Comments

[Eric Brown]

Wow, powerful article. I am glad you are mentioning Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect. These types of apps are revolutionizing the way the web works even as I type this.

One thing I am unfamiliar with that you mention here is LongTail ads. I am not sure what that is. Probably some marketing term I would recognize if I paid attention in college. Thanks

[Scott Brinker]

Eric, thanks for the comment ! I agree, these latest announcements from Facebook, Google, MySpace to open up their walled gardens -- at least enough to be useful on web pages that live outside their domain -- is a game-changing move. And it's still just at the very beginning of that process, likely to improve a lot over the next few months.

Funny you should ask about "Long Tail ads". We were just having a debate around the office as to whether or not that's a well-known term. It appears that I may be losing the debate. :-)

Check out thelongtail.com for more info about the original Long Tail idea, article, book that Chris Anderson wrote.

In the context of search marketing, Long Tail ads are often described as a strategy for purchasing less popular keywords that target a very specific niche -- rather than going for the generic (and often overbid) terms. For example, a generic keyword might be "landing pages", while a Long Tail keyword might be "iPhone landing pages" or "social networking landing pages".

With a Long Tail strategy, you run many different ads, each of which targets a particular niche. These niche ads (and the landing pages that follow) are then able to speak very specifically to the ideas and issues of that niche, rather than muddling around with more generic marketing. This gives you a higher conversion rate within each niche. And the aggregate of all those niches adds up to a large audience with a high conversion rate.

In the context of social networking, it's the very fact that some of these niches are particularly unique or exclusive that makes the potential value from networking with other respondents so significant. In our example above, if I'm putting Flash on landing pages, it's far more valuable for me to connect with other people doing Flash on landing pages than it is to connect with anyone doing any type of landing page.

[Ramona]

Your information will be very helpful to new people to networking.Thanks for sharing your knowledge

[gwen]

Just had an experience my blog today that changed my perspective on social networking.

[Will Fleiss]

Just the article I was looking for to further discussion of word of mouth marketing measurement.

Thanks!

[Mark]

I love this idea and plan to share it with other landing page strategists.

[Anna Talerico]

Great article on making social media accountable, and all the more reason for social networking on landing pages!

http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=128110

Says the author, Jonathan Salem Baskin, "Conversations, whether one-way or ubiquitous, need to yield the immediacy of actions that are measured in dollars."

Love it!

[Scott Brinker]

Which ties in nicely with the concept of "social conversions":

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=84916&Nid=44002&p=941778

[Suz]

Great article - thank you for all of the valuable information, Scott. I'm sad to have been a few months late to this discussion!

In the hopes that reader, Gwen, visits this blog frequently or subscribes to track-back comments, I was just curious in hearing more about the experience she had on her blog that changed her perspective on social media/networking?

Best,
Suz

[Marcos Nobre]

Great article Scott. Very thoughtful ideas. Congrats.
I've started reading worried about distraction in landing page but rewards from this strategy might but much bigger.
Hope you stress that concept much further in coming posts.
Regards
@marcosnobre