Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Talking to people and potential customers is useful for learning but not validating. To validate your idea you need really need both acquisition and activation data. These are the first two metrics that matter when determining whether you have a product or business. Acquiring users through advertising channels and activating or converting them shows real validation.

Because building a landing page requires less effort than starting a business or building a product, this can be an easier way to validate or invalidate an idea. By using learnings from customer interviews and basic market research one can look at setting up a landing page for further validating or invalidating your idea....

One of the most commonly asked questions for digital marketers is: how can I grow my email list? When so much of a marketing campaign’s success hinges on your ability to capture a prospect’s email and nurture them to sale, how can you get more potential customers into the sales funnel?

Simply asking people for their email address won’t provide stellar results. Understandably so. Why should they willingly give up personal information without receiving anything in return? Instead, marketers are increasingly turning to lead magnets as part of their inbound and content marketing strategy.

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a valuable offer that you provide to your prospects in exchange for contact information such as name and email. The best way to promote that offer is with a landing page. Therefore, a lead magnet landing page encourages a reciprocal relationship between a company and prospect. They provide their personal information in exchange for what is behind the form.

There are plenty of lead magnet ideas to draw inspiration from on the web, and it’s important to note they do not have to be a content download (PDF file or otherwise). We’ve compiled 15 lead magnet examples that demonstrate the various ways marketers use gated offers to maximize leads and drive sales....

There is no perfect landing page design, but there are proven design best practices. In our latest Landing Page Design Best Practices guide, we help you answer all of those questions and many more.

With this guide, you’ll learn:

- Why landing pages should be focused on a single goal and best practices to convert visitors into leads and customers

- How to use Cialdini’s principles of influence and other psychological techniques to your advantage

- Specific tips on how to design each landing page element to achieve your conversion goals

- Why the visitor’s post-click experience is just as important as the pre-click experience and how to optimize each component....

LandingFolio offers an organized collection of landing page screenshots that can be used for design inspiration.

For each landing page there is a full page screenshot, assigned to one or more categories and the possibility to comment below it.

That's it.

My comment: Excellent design and marketing resource to find ideas, solutions and alternative approaches to the creation of an effective and professionally-looking landing page.

Free to use. Try it out now: http://www.landingfolio.com/...

If converting traffic to subscribers is high on your list of priorities, you won’t want to miss today’s episode of the ProBlogger podcast, where I chat with “Conversion Educator” Tim Paige of LeadPages.

Getting better conversions on our websites is something I think bloggers really need to know, and Tim certainly doesn’t hold back! Even if you don’t use LeadPages as a landing site for your blog, you can really get something out of this conversation. Tim discusses what he calls his “Reverse Value Bomb” and strategies to get more opt-ins on your site (including a section about content upgrades – one of the best-converting strategies you can have).

From emerging trends in online marketing we need to be paying attention to, to creating an optimised landing page in five minutes, there is a ton of value in this episode, including a special offer for ProBlogger readers....

Landing pages are sort of like Lays chips, once you pop you can’t stop.

Remember that first time you drove PPC traffic to a dedicated landing page? The power of being able to customise your page headline based on your keywords, the flexibility of being able to customize your offer based on your segment?

That’s the greasy goodness that keeps you coming back for more. But what happens once the chips run out and you’re all out of landing page use-cases?

Luckily, we have you covered. If you're craving a new landing page fix, we’ve compiled 6 new use-cases for your website landing page to satisfy your hunger....

This article will give you three complete examples of ad audiences and the corresponding landing page I've built with specific traffic in mind:The first is a general squeeze page for a webinar on SEO, targeting marketing professionals. The second is for a B2C outdoor activities business, running guy's weekend getaways. The third is for a nonprofit organization, targeting (with this specific campaign) women interested in environmentalism....

How do you convince your visitors to take the plunge on your website?

There are so many elements that a top-notch landing page needs, and making those elements the "best" they can be often depends on what your landing page goals are. Take form length, for example. It's just one of the many components you need to optimize, but best practices will tell you that both short and long forms perform well -- it all depends on whether you want to generate a lot of (potentially) lower quality form submissions, or a smaller number of higher quality submissions.

So if you're looking to up your landing page game, it's helpful to know what goes into a great landing page and see a few examples of these nuanced elements in action. Surprisingly, when I started doing research into the latter, I realized there are hardly any sites out there with examples of modern, impressive landing pages that are more than just a sign-up form on a homepage. So we decided to compile a list of landing pages we love ourselves....

When car shoppers visit a dealership, they aren’t necessarily looking to buy right away. A car salesperson must nurture the relationship, answer their questions, offer a test drive, and relieve their doubts before a purchase is made. Marketers take their online prospects through a similar journey as they move from the awareness stage to the decision stage.

In the decision stage of the buyer’s journey, prospects already know they have a problem, have evaluated their options, and are testing out who they should purchase from. Marketers know this well, as an estimated 93% of web-based companies and startups offer a free trial at the bottom of their marketing funnel. That percentage is overwhelming because a free trial offer is the best way for prospects to experience the product and sell themselves on using it.

Now let’s examine how businesses are using free trial landing pages to convert prospects....

When you’re building a landing page for the purpose of converting leads into customers, you must take bold steps to eliminate all potential credibility killers.

Landing pages, in general, are effective tools for building your business. According to MarketingSherpa, “landing pages are effective for 94% of B2B and B2C companies.”

In this in-depth article, I want to show you 4 landing page credibility killers that you should eliminate right now....