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Land­ing pages would seem to be a fairly tedious topic of con­ver­sa­tion; how­ever they can often make or break cam­paigns. And all too often, it’s the lat­ter. Many clients have sep­a­rated mar­ket­ing and web teams, leav­ing the IT-driven web team to pro­duce the land­ing page. This can cause issues with the link­age between the cre­ative and land­ing page con­tent, less than ideal land­ing page struc­tures with call-to-actions hid­den below the fold and nav­i­ga­tion bars divert­ing the users from the key action com­pa­nies want them to take. Alter­na­tively, it could be that the client has out­sourced their land­ing page con­struc­tion to an exter­nal agency that like to build pretty Flash-driven sites that are a night­mare from an SEO per­spec­tive and addi­tion­ally, exter­nal host­ing exposes the site to poten­tial secu­rity attacks. It seems that due to the rel­a­tively short shelf-life of cam­paigns and thus cam­paign land­ing pages, the think­ing and atten­tion needed is not being given to the pri­mary way of con­vert­ing poten­tial customers.

Changes are afoot though, dri­ven by social media. Coke has announced that they will stop cre­at­ing cam­paign sites in favour of dri­ving peo­ple to their social media com­mu­ni­ties on Face­book and YouTube instead.

Unilever is fol­low­ing suit and the likes of T-mobile with their Life’s for Shar­ing cam­paign last year were already dri­ving peo­ple to their YouTube com­mu­nity as the main call-to-action. And the social media sites are gear­ing up towards the trend: the lat­est news from Face­book is an Omni­ture part­ner­ship to pro­vide (among oth­ers) cor­po­rate Face­book com­mu­ni­ties the web ana­lyt­ics expected before for cam­paign sites. Why the change? Well, mar­keters have had enough of cre­at­ing dis­pos­able cam­paign sites (which I whole­heart­edly agree with) that are dumped after the com­pany has moved to the next quar­ter or the next big push they are focus­ing on. Sec­ondly they want to drive peo­ple to exist­ing com­mu­ni­ties where their audi­ence is already, in a mind­set ready to share and engage. I get that too, how­ever am in a quandary about dri­ving the organic rank­ings of social com­mu­nity site as opposed to the client’s own site. In my mind, only brands that are of cer­tain size and don’t nec­es­sar­ily sell online would want to do that.

We are test­ing a best of both worlds approach instead with one of our clients (cam­paign due to launch in a cou­ple of months, will keep you updated on the progress!): instead of the usual cor­po­rate land­ing page, we are cre­at­ing a socially super­charged aggre­ga­tor site. The site com­bines client and user cre­ated social con­tent from YouTube, Face­book, Slideshare, Scribd etc with the client’s cor­po­rate con­tent (trial down­load offers, reviews, webi­nars and tuto­ri­als). This way, the expe­ri­ence for the user com­ing to the site is much more valu­able, the social back-links are build­ing the SEO rank­ings for the client, not for social sites and hope­fully, with the improved expe­ri­ence, the con­ver­sion rates are improved as well. I believe the future of cam­paign sites is social and that long-term, “green” think­ing needs to be inte­grated into marketing.

Related posts:

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2. Nav­i­gat­ing Mar­ket­ing 2.0 (part 1): social networks
3. B2B social media mar­ket­ing map
4. Con­tent comes before communication
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