Boost Landing Page Conversion Without Changing Your Landing Page At All!

How about increasing the conversion on your sales / landing pages without changing a word, photo, video, graphic or anything else on the page itself?

Wouldn’t that be interesting?

Landing pages are where you begin to close a deal. They are the end of a process, not the beginning as most people think. The journey a prospect takes TO a landing page makes all the difference in the world in their decision to take the action you wish them to take on the page itself.

Yes, the journey is the experience. The landing page is just details if you take people on the right journey to the page.

Try to guess which journey below is going to end up converting better when it ends at your landing page:

Journey #1

1. Prospect types in a search phrase in Google.
2. They don’t like anything they see in the regular results so they look over at the Adwords ads and click on yours.
3. They hit your landing page cold and the page itself has to do all the warm up, reputation building, relationship building, and accomplish the action you want taken, or not, by the prospect.

That’s a mighty big job even for the very best landing pages.  Conversion depends on one page and one moment in time.

Journey #2

1. A prospect types a search term in Google and finds you in the top 10 results.
2. They don’t come to your landing page or your site, because the result they found was your Google Profile.
3. They read all about you, your stuff, your interests, and see some links to learn more about things they’re interested in.
4. One of the links they click on is your Twitter profile.
5. They read some Tweets and decide they like you and follow you.
6. They go back to your Google Profile and do some more digging. You seem interesting, accomplished, and like someone who knows their stuff. (or is funny, a character, or well connected)
7. This time they click on another link which isn’t your landing page or your own site.
8. They click on your StumbleUpon profile link and check out the stuff you’ve been reviewing there.
9. They find some really helpful links to resources they were looking for, but couldn’t find the other day. All the sudden, a problem is solved. You’re now giving them results and this all started with a search in Google!
10. They bookmark some things you commented on and linked at StumbleUpon and go back to your Google Profile.
11. Again, they don’t click on your landing page link or your site link.
12. They see you use something called FriendFeed and, being impressed with your savvy about the links they found on StumbleUpon, check this link to see what this tool is all about.
13. Once there, they find that you are feeding all kinds of comments and links you track from your Google Reader (RSS feeds), your Twitter account, Facebook, and tons of other places. “Pay dirt!” Your prospect thinks to herself. “There is so much here that I’ve been interested in learning more about, I am bookmarking this and coming back later!”
14. She then signs up for FriendFeed herself and starts following you there.
15. By this time you are a Rockstar in this prospect’s mind. You’ve sent her to all kinds of information she finds fascinating, interesting, educational, or otherwise engaging. She’s loving the result of this Google search so far!
16. Prospect then finally goes back to your Google Profile and hits the link that appears to be some kind of product you are selling which is all about how to use the things she’s interested in professionally. She clicks and hits your landing page.

So, which scenario above do you think would convert this prospect to a buyer better?

#1? or #2?

The journey you take people on is everything in web marketing today. People aren’t stupid. They want far more than they ever have before from us. They want to know the people behind the products. They want far more than a paid link and a landing page.  That is, if your goal is to get a 5-10% conversion rather than a 1% conversion.

Surfers can now easily find out for themselves, based on your social footprint, whether you are legit or not.  And they’re doing that in a big way these days.

Who needs high conversion the very most?

People who don’t have a lot of traffic. (most sites on the web!)  When every single visitor counts, you’d better have a high-converting offer. And you simply MUST take every prospect through a similar journey to the 2nd one above.  Your offer starts with a Tweet, not a paid ad.  It starts with a discovery on StumbleUpon, not just a JV email.

When you don’t have money to burn on pay per click advertising along with paying someone to run it for you, which 99% of people do, you have to do something different. Vastly different.

You’ve just seen how social marketing works to make sales. That’s why it’s such a big deal. That’s exactly how surfers turn into die-hard fans and customers on today’s web for people who smartly use social media to build relationships on auto-pilot.

Someone is on my Google Profile right now getting ready to start their journey to one of my landing pages.  And conversion for my products has never been higher.

Tagged as: landing page conversion, landing pages, social marketing, social media