Better brand advertising with landing pages

It’s time for a revolution in brand advertising online.

eMarketer’s latest report, Online Brand Measurement: Connecting the Dots, offers some colorful insight on the state of branding in online marketing:

In the informal poll eMarketer conducted among industry insiders, we asked them, “What single word or phrase would you use to describe the current state of online advertising measurement?” The answers were telling — strongly reinforcing the idea that the online ad industry has a long road ahead.

They included the following tag cloud of those answers:

Not exactly a glowing report card.

One of the obstacles that the report identifies is “too much focus on direct response”. Indeed, probably the #1 metric in online marketing is conversion rate. And while that’s great in many ways, the brand people have a point: there’s more to marketing than conversions. More accurately, there are important marketing opportunities that precede a respondent being ready to convert.

Even die-hard direct response search marketers will concede that there are factors that influence the outcome of a “conversion moment” other than the much vaunted “last click”. In that context, the challenge is framed as determining proper attribution.

But they’re essentially the same issue.

And landing pages and other kinds of post-click marketing — while they have a great legacy in conversion-driven direct response — also have a huge role to play in the improvement of brand marketing online.

Every click is sacred, every click is good

One of the conundrums that has plagued brand advertising on the web is, frankly, the click.

Almost every other kind of brand advertising known to world is blissfully action-free: an iconic TV ad, a scoreboard sponsorship at a stadium, a full-color spread in Wired magazine. The recipient isn’t expected to do anything at that moment, other than let the brand message embed itself into his or her neurons. In fact, the recipient can’t interact with the advertiser at that point, even if they wanted to.

(As an interesting aside, this is one of the fascinating things about social media, such as Twitter and YouTube, as it provides a back-channel by which audiences do interact with all those heretofore one-way branding mechanisms.)

But with brand advertising online, you have to contend with the click.

What do you do with it? Build out an elaborate microsite? That’s expensive and time-consuming. Send them to your web site’s home page? That’s quick and cheap, but it’s a bit like brushing someone off when they walk up to you and ask, “What can your company do for me?”. Sending them to your home page is like responding to that question with a rote, “There’s a big directory over there, go figure it out for yourself.”

After all, a click is a non-trivial signal of interest. Just because it’s not a conversion-ready click, doesn’t make it less valuable in the long run. It’s on the road to being conversion-ready, and this is the first scenic point along the way where the audience gets to reflect on the advertiser. It is a quintessential first impression scenario.

I dare say it is the most important branding moment in online advertising.

If you want to improve the effectiveness of brand advertising online, you must incorporate the post-click experience into the branding concept and creative from the very start.

Landing pages as brand ambassadors

Sending people to your home page is too dismissive. Building out major microsites for $50,000 a pop is overkill. You need something in the middle, something agile and affordable, and this is the role landing pages can play in brand advertising.

A landing page — even a short, multi-step path of two or three pages — can be the perfect way to segue the interest from a specific click into a deeper, more resonant brand-building experience with the respondent.

The key feature of landing pages for brand advertising is connecting the dots. This is what previous brand advertising campaigns didn’t have to deal with, leaving the connections of the advertising and its context in the fuzzy subconscious of the audience. But online, a person sees your ad in a particular context — maybe in response to a particular search, maybe on a story about a particular topic, maybe as a function of some kind of behavioral targeting — and when they click, they expect you to tell them why.

A landing page lets you answer that question, quickly, simply, and affordably. Here’s what we do. Here’s how its related to what you just clicked on (and where you just clicked from). Here are options of how you can engage with us further.

In military terms, it could be called a proportional response.

You want the landing page to have visual and message continuity with the advertisement and its placement. You want it to leave a strong brand impression — which is a function of content, relevance, look-and-feel, offers, and next steps. These brand-building landing pages do not have to be — in fact, shouldn’t be — plain, old, boring landing page templates. They should be creative, engaging, differentiated. They should exude the emotion and positioning you want respondents to associate with your brand.

But they should communicate that emotion and positioning with a concrete explanation of relevance, a genuine and context-specific introduction of yourself to the respondent.

Landing pages can both brand and convert

Branding and direct response can no longer live in separate silos. The reason? In online advertising, you can’t reliably distinguish between a respondent who’s merely interested in an introduction to your brand versus someone who is ready to convert.

You need to be ready for both.

(It would be nice if you could instantaneously seduce everyone in the former category into the latter, but that’s unrealistic for most products and services. Most things in life aren’t unbranded impulse buys at the checkout counter.)

What this means is:

1. When someone responds to a branding ad online, in addition to providing a contextual introduction to your brand, your landing page should provide a call-to-action for people who are ready to convert (or least ready to be seduced into being ready to convert).

2. When someone responds to a direct response ad online, you want to make sure they receive a positive, brand-building experience, even if they’re not ready to convert at that moment.

It’s not just brand advertisers who need to learn how to employ landing pages to achieve their objectives. There’s also a strong need for direct response advertisers to make sure that their landing pages are good branding experiences, even when they don’t convert.

If you’ve been building landing pages for direct response, how much time have you spent thinking about the experience for people who won’t convert (regardless of how much you tweak the experience)? Usually, the thinking is more focused on “how do we get more of them to convert?”.

Yet what would be a heroically magnificent conversion rate? 20%? 30%? More? Let’s say you consistently hit a 40% conversion rate. You’re a direct response demi-god. Still, that means there’s 60% of your audience who consciously clicked on your ad, but weren’t ready to convert. What did you give those respondents as a brand takeaway?

Don’t leave your non-converts on the table as wasted ad dollars. Make sure that you’re delivering an experience to them that is an investment in future conversions.

Measuring brand advertising after the click

The final point I’ll make is that landing pages can provide a great way to measure the effectiveness of brand advertising.

Click-throughs on brand advertising are one metric. But it’s pretty shallow.

What’s more interesting is what people do when they click-through to your corresponding landing page. Are you able to successfully engage them in a dialogue? Can you entice them down a path where you share more and more relevant information to them, while learning their profile through behavioral segmentation? Do you connect them to low-hurdle permission marketing vehicles, such as following your Twitter account or becoming a fan of yours on Facebook?

These metrics reveal a lot more about your audience and the effectiveness of your brand advertising — and how those two things affect each other. Once you have a baseline, you can start experimenting with different kinds of brand advertising, different placements, and different post-click marketing follow-through to learn how it changes.

This can give brand marketers access to the tremendous power of experimentation that the direct response folks have enjoyed for years — without sacrificing the core principles upon which brand building is rooted.

To be sure, this is a new kind of brand advertising. Post-click brand advertising.

But as you already know, people experience your brand in every touchpoint you have with them — whether you consciously craft the experience or not. Isn’t it better to embrace them warmly with a smile?