Landing pages as part of the online marketing strategic landscape

I was on a call with a large online advertising/creative shop last week and someone on the call said something that floored me. I believe the exact quote was “No one here wants to touch landing pages with a ten foot pole. They aren’t sexy and the creative teams don’t think they matter.” Picture my jaw dropping to the floor with a bang.

No wonder so much online marketing is still ineffective and unmeasured. When an award-winning, global online agency who plans and buys media and creates “sexy” online experiences can only think of landing pages as a below the line tactic, two things happen:

1. Landing pages will suck, continuing their heritage of POLP.
2. Online marketing will be less effective than it could be.

No brilliant media buy or ad creative is complete without a corresponding place to land the user who responds. Let’s reframe landing pages as a fundamental part of the strategic online marketing landscape. Let’s rethink the landing page and its role in online marketing. Here are just a few reasons why:

• Results will be better. Sending users to a message-specific experience yields better conversion results.
• Greater visibility into spend. When you send users to specific destinations you can track the effectiveness of the spend at a far more granular level. What’s actually driving results?
• You can control the levers. When you send users to specific destinations you can also fiddle with the levers in real time to ensure you maximize the effectiveness of the experience. That’s much harder to do when you have a million respondents from 50 ad sources all funneling into the same place.

These are just a few reasons why landing pages must become a part of the strategic online landscape. Scott just posted a great post on strategic landing pages, check it out.