How to Apply Brand Marketing Principles to Your Landing Pages

Your website is an exploratory experience for potential customers in the consideration phase looking to learn more about your company or product as a whole. Landing pages, on the other hand, generate the most ROI when used as a natural extension of your digital advertising. When done correctly, these dedicated pages create a focused message aligned and personalized experience for a target audience with a single call to action.Brand marketing matters. Whether your target user is exploring your website, stumbling upon a post in their Facebook newsfeed after liking your page, or first exposed to your company in a Google search result, brand development maintains its importance throughout the customer journey.

Landing pages are not meant to replace your website, though. Your website is for people to learn more about your product in a generic way without addressing their specific needs, while a landing page is for someone to take action.

Among the fundamental differences between landing pages and a website is the act of conscious and direct personalization to create more context around a particular promotion. Landing pages also help illustrate the unique value proposition of your product at the moment someone first engages with your brand.

Brand strategy and landing pages

Authentic brands don’t emerge from marketing cubicles or advertising agencies. They emanate from everything the company does.

@Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks

Legendary copywriter David Ogilvy defines a brand as “the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” In the context of brand marketing, the attitude and voice of your brand are determined by the totality of experiences across all of your digital properties, including landing pages.

While it doesn’t need to be identical across the entire web; product branding needs to reflect core values of your company to manage perceptions, take ownership, and drive authority, trust, and evangelism.

Brand development opportunities in landing pages

The power behind personalized landing pages is tremendous. By giving every promotion it’s own landing page, you can articulate the unique value proposition of your product to the specific persona.

Most of the opportunities for personalization exist within the qualitative variables on each page such as text, images, video, and other creative assets.

Once you lock down your branding, there are some standard consistencies to use across all of your digital properties, including your personalized landing pages. These include:

Typography: Using custom fonts across your website, ads, and all of their corresponding landing pages can increase conversions and helps keep your pages on-brand. Instapage makes this easy to do with Google Fonts and Adobe Typekit integrations.

Colors: increase brand recognition by up to 80%. Once you identify the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors for your brand, build those colors into all of your pages.

Logo: Your logo is essential to your brand identity. Create a few on-brand versions to use in different situations depending on color, size, file type, etc. Also, make sure to use the same high-quality favicon on each landing page.

URLs: Brand consistent can start and end with using custom domains. Whenever possible, always publish landing pages to a sub directory or subdomain on the root domain of your brand. Additionally, this is essential to making your landing pages SEO friendly.

Page structure: Provide a similar conversion experience every time. You’ve already trained your users where to click. Help them engage by keeping things consistent with your call to actions across all of your pages. However, always remember to A/B test your pages, especially if you want to experiment with a new page layout.

Landing pages, brand development, and the customer journey

Wouldn’t it be great if your target users discovered your high-value product through an ad, ended up on the subsequent landing page, purchased immediately, and become brand advocates forever?

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

WordStream reports that the median conversion rate of AdWords campaigns is 2.35%. However, even among the top ten percent of AdWords accounts with an 11% conversion rate; a one, two or three-touch customer journey from discovery to purchase is elusive, if it ever happens at all. Couple that with the fact that Salesforce states that it takes 6 to 8 touches to generate a viable sales lead and it can seem like it’s an impossible feat to close sales from PPC ads.

So how do you increase your chances of driving new sales from AdWords and PPC? Creating personalized landing pages consistent with your branding because they’re an excellent way to optimize your brand development throughout your customer's journey.

Regardless of the specific path, landing pages function as a centerpiece of brand development for users across all of your digital properties, while they move farther down the road to conversion. The intersection of brand marketing and landing pages is especially important because landing pages are the impetus for your target personas, segments, and customers to take action at every stage of the nurturing and onboarding process.

A tremendous part of your customer's journey takes place on personalized landing pages. Much of this lead nurturing also occurs within email marketing, in-app messaging, and other marketing automation.

For more information, contact us at info@dentallabsupport.com or DentalLabSupport.com 

Online Marketing Ideas for Dental Labs: Bypass the Landing Page

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Dental Labs trying to generate leads digitally can be a complicated process. You need outlets like social networks or digital ads to promote your content, but that content generally only sends your audience to your landing page - where your users can sign up and become leads.

Those additional steps often mean that some of your potential leads drop off somewhere in the process, losing you potential leads. So here's an online marketing idea for your small business: bypass your landing page, and generate leads straight from your social efforts.

Social Media Lead Generation

It may sound like a pipe dream, particularly if you're used to the multi-step process we explained above. But in reality, social networks like Facebook and Twitter have realized the increasing number of marketers using a lead-generating inbound philosophy, and adjust their marketing opportunities accordingly.

As a result, you can generate leads directly using Facebook and Twitter ads, feeding them directly into your CRM for your nurturing efforts. Let's examine in more detail how the individual networks can help you generate your leads

1) Twitter Lead Generation Cards

Dental Labs that already advertise on Twitter, you likely know the 'cards' that the network offers to marketers. Essentially add-ons to your regular advertisements, they allow you to add additional, rich content to your sponsored tweet that exceeds the usual 140 character limit.

Typically, these cards are used for advertisements on which marketers seek to generate clicks to their website (and landing pages), because they allow marketers to add a visual image along with a descriptive link and even a call to action button, increasing the possibility for click-throughs.

As it turns out, Twitter offers similar cards specifically for lead generation. These cards also allow marketers to add an image and headline, but the call to action button is slightly different. You can entice your audience to 'sign up' or a similar lead-generating prompt.

Once a user clicks on the button, Twitter automatically draws their name and email information form their public profile, and shares it with the marketer. As a result, you can generate leads without your users ever having to leave the network.

Early studies of these lead generation cards have been overwhelmingly positive. One company saw their leads increase by more than 900%, along with a significantly lower cost per lead. Eliminating the extra step of sending users to a landing page where they can sign up means maximizing the amount of leads who land in your CRM.

Facebook's Lead Ads

For two years, Twitter's lead generation cards gave the network a significant advantage over its major competitor Facebook, which did not offer marketers a similar opportunity. That changed this summer, when Facebook began to offer its own version of lead ads.

The general concept is strikingly similar to its Twitter counterpart. By eliminating the extra step of sending users to a landing page, the network hopes to improve lead conversion rates and appeal to inbound marketers.

But the ads themselves are slightly different. Like Twitter, the network draws form a user's public profile information once they click the call to action button. But unlike Twitter, the options on Facebook extend beyond mere name and email; indeed, as is the case on a 'regular' landing page, you can ask for any information you'd like. Facebook automatically fills up the information it can find, and the user can individually fill in the rest right on the network.

Facebook major advantage over Twitter, of course, comes in its targeting opportunities. While the latter 'only' allows marketers to target based on geographic location and stated interest, Facebook options go further - from educational level and age all the way to list-based targeting and remarketing options.

In the end, both Facebook and Twitter offer intriguing advertising options that should simplify your lead generation efforts. And of course, the more information and leads you can bring into your CRM for nurturing, the more successful your business will be. To learn more about online marketing and lead generation, contact us.

DentalLabSupport.com  1-888-715-9099

By:  David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Any inbound marketing effort depends on effectively capturing leads. If you focus your energy on using your dental lab website to generate leads, you should be absolutely sure that the process you have in place maximizes your resources in capturing them as well as it possibly could. Over the next few weeks, we will look at the various factors that influence this process. Today, we'll begin with best practices for the core aspect of capturing leads on your website: the landing or conversion page.

Dental Lab landing pages, of course, are the pages to which your visitors navigate - from a social media post, email, or call to action button on your website - when they're ready to make the leap and become a lead. A variety of factors play into the success of this page, and we'll discuss all of them in the post below.

The Landing Page Content

As you can probably imagine, the content of your landing page can make or break its success in capturing leads. You want to be convincing enough about the value you can offer your visitors that they're compelled to fill out your form (more on that later) and become a lead, without being so pushy that they bounce off your page.

Another danger in writing your dental lab landing page content is to become too exhaustive; more quickly than you can anticipate, your well-intended copy can turn into a wall of text that no mobile user will read. Instead, keep it short, use bullet points and subheads where needed, focus on the benefits of signing up, and include plenty of visuals to keep your audience engaged.

One type of content is so successful, it deserves its own section:

Social Proof

Social proof on your landing page means testimonials of past users that your visitors can relate to and add credibility to your claims. You can add these testimonials as short paragraph or, even better, as videos that show your visitors the claims and success stories come from real customers.

Social proof from peers is so successful and important in capturing leads because it appeals allows you to verify your claim from an independent source. Of course, that also means you should be careful not to include testimonials that are so positive, they seem unbelievable. Instead, tell the story of your customers and include images at the very least to make them seem as real as possible. 

Attention Ratio

Web visitors are easily distracted, so including multiple opportunities for them to click or take action takes away their attention from what should be the main goal, which is to get them to fill out a form and become a lead.

So Gardner proposed the following idea, which has since been verified in multiple studies: the fewer opportunities you have for your users to do anything but fill out the form, the greater the chance they'll take the desired action. In other words, you should not include links to other pages, your social media profiles, or even your site's navigation on your landing page. Instead, the only way to take action for your visitors should be to fill out the lead conversion form, which is exactly what you want them to do.

The Conversion Form

Speaking of which: as you can imagine, your conversion form is a major factor in whether your visitors do or do not become leads. A wide range of factors go into creating an optimum conversion form that maximizes your lead capturing success. Stay tuned for a post that discusses this topic in more detail.

For more information please visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1-888-715-9099.