Why Landing Pages and Facebook Ads are the PB&J of a Successful Ecommerce Strategy

Our agency has spent a good chunk of our 8 years in business managing and optimizing paid ads with a focus on lead generation. Carefully, we treaded the ecommerce waters until we felt we could offer something most couldn’t. It’s been about 4 years since we decided to embark on the ecommerce journey and I have to say, it’s been quite an exciting one.

It always struck me as odd how the lead gen community understood, way better than their ecomm counterparts, the power that landing pages can have on their conversion rates and, ultimately, their bottom line. This is despite the widespread gap between the lead and the sale.

Let me explain my confusion. This is stating the obvious, but lead generation is a strategy used mainly by offline businesses in the service sector. These businesses usually have a diversified media mix, ranging from radio, TV, print, mail, digital, and the list continues.

Ecommerce businesses on the other hand are operated fully online. The marketer’s media mix is (usually) mostly spent online and is 100% measurable. Every dollar of every sale can be attributed to its exact source. The slightest lift in conversion rate results in an immediate lift in sales.

Why is it then that ecommerce marketers never took landing pages as seriously as they should? I don’t mean to generalize, so I’ll be specific. I’m not referring to the “starter” landing page created as a bridge while you build a stronger, better store or as a replacement to the store entirely. I’m talking about landing pages being used as a tool for testing, measurement, conversion rate optimization and hyper-targeting.

This brings me to an analogy I thoroughly enjoy talking about. Pretend for a moment that you operated a retail store. This store is located in city centre, on the busiest pedestrian intersection in town.

Better yet, you get tons of foot traffic into your store daily. Amazing isn’t it? You might be inclined to say that sales would be through the roof. Wrong.

If your store doesn’t have the right music playing, intelligent displays, well-organized shelving, or salespeople to advise your customers and to create a connection with them, you might be in trouble.

Whether a shopper is browsing online or in a brick and mortar, buyer behavior and the fundamental principles of sales still apply.

Your online store is your brick and mortar. You can’t replace it. It must exist.

The only issue is that your store is static. It can’t adapt to your individual users and audience segments.

A landing page on the other hand can take many shapes and forms, depending on the audience you’re targeting. It’s an opportunity to adjust your “sales pitch” to the user.

What does a great salesperson do? They adapt. They match your energy, your tone, and most importantly they relate to your interests. They point you in the right direction.

Sadly, you can have the most beautiful website, but it simply isn’t enough without a good salesperson.

That’s where landing pages come in. The best websites are still static. A landing page is dynamic. In a world of hyper targeting, you can’t afford not to give your customer exactly what they’re looking for.

Landing pages are your opportunity to make certain your content is as relevant as possible to your customer’s search query, their interests, their demographics, their objections and so much more.

In ecomm, the slightest lift in conversion rate equals dollars. You need to find out what your audience responds to best. Relying on intuition and even experience can be a dangerous trap. What image leads to more conversions, what colour CTA should you be using, what headline is better, are some of the many tests you can be running. Split testing leaves it up to the numbers to tell you what you should be doing. As our slogan goes, “Numbers Don’t Lie”.

Make checking out as easy as possible. In many cases, skipping the cart and all the nonsense in between reduces a whole lot of friction in the user journey, leading to better conversion rates. A landing page with on-page checkout allows you to bypass all the distraction.

Ecomm stores are notoriously the most crowded websites out there. In a busy store, the user gets lost (or even turned off) browsing products, categories, and subcategories. A landing page reduces all the noise. In most paid campaigns, you know what your user is looking for, so why not give them just that. Want to up-sell? You can do that throughout the checkout experience.

We’ve seen countless stores in very (very, very) bad shape. Re-building an entire store doesn’t only take lots of time, it can also be costly. Before you completely re-build your store… test. Find out what works best for your users and, at the same time, get better results.

Pages aren’t just for selling, they’re for learning. Market search is just as important as selling. If used properly, landing pages that are segmented for your different sets of traffic allow you to pull more insight from your analytics. Since a page gets its traffic from one main source, unpolluted from organic or other sources of traffic, you can hone in on who your audience is and how they behave online.

Adapt your landing pages to fit your target markets. You can do this by creating persona-focused landing pages. Your store is static but your landing pages can be dynamic. Targeting mothers? Then make sure you send that traffic to a page that speaks directly to mothers. Targeting martial artists? Then create a page with imagery and copy they can relate to.

Theory is great, but seeing is believing. Here are a few examples of what landing pages could look like up against their in-store counterparts.

These are pages that are hyper-targeted to the user’s interests, demographics, and behaviors. The imagery in the following page focuses on a well-known martial artist that supports the brand. We decided to focus on that due to the fact that we were targeting a martial arts audience in Facebook. This is a great example of a page dedicated to a segmented audience.

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Created on Nov 27th 2019 19:42. Viewed 420 times.

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