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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.