3 MIT-inspired landing page strategies

With the release of our book, Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers, I’ve been reflecting back on the start of the post-click marketing movement.

Our vision for post-click marketing as a new discipline — elevating the concept of landing pages into a more a holistic and strategic online marketing practice — was born in the spring of 2005. At the same time, I began a graduate program at MIT Sloan, and over the subsequent 2 years, interwove many of the latest management and marketing ideas from MIT’s best professors into our post-click marketing best practices.

Here are my top 3 “landing page secrets from MIT”, and who inspired them:

1. Segment your customers deeply.

My strategy professor, Dr. Arnoldo Hax, had two sayings that resonated profoundly with me. First, “strategy is love, not war” — that instead of focusing on competition, most companies would do far better to invest their energy in customer bonding. The center of strategy is the customer.

Second, “don’t commoditize your customers” — understand the unique value proposition for the many different segments (and there are many!) within your market and address them specifically and deeply.

From this, I came up with the mantra: clicks are not a commodity, and audience segmentation became a central theme of post-click marketing. Landing pages don’t have to be generic, and they don’t have to be passive. Use message match principles to have landing experiences tightly pair with the Long Tail ads that attract particular groups of prospects. And use conversion paths to behaviorally segment traffic and engage in conversations that are tailored to their specific interests and perspectives.

I can’t emphasize this enough: segment your traffic and speak to individual slices of your audience as specifically as possible. Again and again, this has proven to be the biggest source of lift when upgrading your post-click marketing to the next level.

2. Manage your post-click system dynamics.

System dynamics, invented by Jay Forrester, is a quintessential MIT subject. It’s all about finding the patterns that exist in a complex environment — such as online marketing! — and understanding how to efficiently leverage them to your advantage.

One of the tenets of system dynamics is that outcomes are rarely the result of one thing, but rather the product of many interaction effects of different positive and negative feedback loops. Most people look at business processes and market strategies in a somewhat linear fashion: if you do X, then Y will follow; if you do 2X then 2Y will follow, etc. But such oversimplification often misses the other factors that cause unexpected outcomes, such as you do 2X and end up with -1Y.

So what does this have to do with post-click marketing? Most people think of landing pages as one-off initiatives, focused entirely on the in-the-weeds tactics of that one particular page. You can give your organization a tremendous competitive advantage by looking at the entire ecosystem of post-click marketing: how do you conceive, produce, test, analyze, and optimize all of your landing pages? How can the overall process be improved and optimized?

Getting one landing page to perform well is good, but building the capabilities in your company to manage dozens or hundreds of landing pages that perform well, in an extremely agile and efficient manner, is the goal of a system dynamics view of post-click marketing.

For 36 concrete recommendations that can help your company master these dynamics, see our latest report on landing page management.

3. Unleash your entrepreneurial energy.

Professor Rebecca Henderson is a leader in technology strategy, especially in scenarios involving disruptive innovation. (It probably goes without saying, but online marketing is currently overwhelmed with disruptive innovation — as well as disrupting offline marketing and business models itself — but that’s the stuff of which great opportunities are born.)

One of her observations that I found particularly interesting was the trade-off that generally exists between entrepreneurial energy and large-scale coordination in organizations. Entrepreneurial energy is about enabling individuals with passion and talent to take a ball and run with it, as fast as they can, unencumbered by red tape. Large-scale coordination, on the other hand, is how companies of significant size align all their pieces to work together, with maximum synergy and minimum risk — albeit at a slower pace, as coordination takes its own time and effort.

The punchline is that in situations involving disruptive innovation, entrepreneurial energy is usually a more valuable asset than large-scale coordination. This is certainly true in online marketing, where anyone can buy a keyword in a matter of minutes, permitting competitors of any size to target your customers one niche at a time. To stay ahead of the pack — and opportunistically make your own raids into virgin or competitive territory — you need to be able to move fast.

Regardless of size, you can’t afford to take weeks to launch new ads and landing pages — you need to be able to act in a matter of days, if not hours. Coordination is still important, especially for larger teams, but use software and smart processes to reduce the overhead and manual touchpoints as much as possible. This means: reusable designs and content elements, standardized data sharing, streamlined proofing and approval workflows, and minimal dependencies on other departments — most especially IT.

Speed and agility — combined with mechanisms to test new, experimental ideas with minimum risk — are the keys to unleashing entrepreneurial energy in your online marketing. Invest in the tools and the culture to make it happen.

Time to take post-click innovation and do some market disruption yourself.

Comments

[Josh Lewis]

Thanks for the great insight. In the "Age of the Internet" it's absolutely imperative that a company or organization be nimble in their strategic online marketing tactics. The concepts of message matching, segmentation, and conversion paths are all instrumental to the challenge of internet marketing optimization. This need to be nimble would seem to benefit agencies that can manage a comprehensive online marketing program vs. having to manage multiple people and organizations in order to get things done.