Guide to Driving Traffic to Your Landing Pages
In this blog post, you’ll discover ways you can start driving traffic to your landing pages, and learn about the five most important landing page traffic sources.
Some of the traffic sources described in this article will likely be familiar if you’ve been part of the digital marketing community for quite some time. Others could be less trivial and more relevant to the current situation in the world as a result of COVID-19.
Regardless of how awesome your landing page’s looking, which landing page builder you used to create it, or what call to action you have put on the lead capture form, your landing page can’t be serving its purpose without a decent amount of traffic that you’re pouring on it as the result of your marketing activities. For your landing pages to start bringing you leads that you’ll be converting into paying customers, you’re going to start by bringing relevant audiences to those landing pages. In digital marketing, there’s virtually an endless list of campaigns you could be running and marketing channels you could be engaging to generate traffic to your landing pages. Luckily, they can all be grouped into five primary sources of traffic that you may want to consider driving to your landing pages.
Driving organic search traffic to landing pages
The rule of thumb is the better your content is, the more engaging your blog posts and product pages are, the stronger connection you build between the search engine optimization (SEO) best practices and the content readability, the better organic search rankings your website will have eventually. The organic search traffic is such a critical part of your marketing mix. Across the majority of the industries, the organic search traffic demonstrates the highest conversion rate from the visitors into leads and from the leads into paying customers. Perhaps, the best explanation to this is that when people find your website or landing page through Google search, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine, your content, service, or product offerings are being considered legit and trustworthy.
When it comes to organic search traffic, there are two schools of thought as far as where you should be directing it. Many marketers believe that it’s the corporate website and not the landing pages that you should be used to direct the organic traffic. Our recommendation, however, is always to be considering the buyers’ journey. There are many reasons as to why landing pages usually convert visitors into leads better than websites, so we’re encouraging you to make a thoughtful decision about where you should be pouring the traffic to on a case by case basis.
Organic traffic demonstrates the highest visitor-to-lead and lead-to-customer conversion rate compared to other sources of landing page traffic.
Driving traffic from paid search to landing pages
When it comes to spending the marketing budget, there are usually two teams that are spending a total of 60% of it. These teams are Events/Trade shows and Pay-per-click. While physical events are likely not going to be part of the marketing mix for a long time as the result of COVID-19, both B2B and B2C marketers keep spending the most significant portions of their demand creation budgets on paid search campaigns, thus pointing a substantial amount of traffic to your landing pages. Unlike in the case of organic search traffic, we strongly recommend pointing your paid search traffic to the dedicated landing pages. Not only will you be able to increase your Ad rank by doing so, but also increase your visitor-to-lead conversion thanks to the landing page content tailored to a specific search query or a group of queries.
Another exciting aspect of the paid search traffic is that it’s while it’s the most expensive sources of all. It’s also the fastest to scale. You can spin up a new campaign, create a landing page with a landing page builder in a matter of minutes, and start generating traffic quickly.
Paid search traffic must be directed to your landing pages that can give you higher Ad ranks and help eliminate distractions.
Driving advertising traffic to landing pages
Except for paid search, the advertising or paid media traffic source typically comprises a variety of different marketing channels of traffic sources. Here are just a few of them:
- Webcasts
- Online Trade Shows (NEW)
- Podcasts and Videos
- Social Networks
- Media Outlets
- etc.
Depending on your industry or business model, your marketing team could either be utilizing all of them to an extent or some of them. A few of those traffic sources, such as Webcasts and Media Outlets, have been around for years, and others, such as Online Trade Shows and Podcasts, are reasonably new. These channels have a moderate potential in terms of the amount of time it takes to build and start scaling them. The reason for that is unlike with Paid Search, you’re dealing with an advertising partner on the other side and need to conclude contracts, work out the dates of the campaigns, prepare tons and tons of content, etc. Webcasts are, perhaps, the most common source of landing page traffic source out of all paid media. If you’re running many webcasts, you should consider investing in a proper landing page creation tool and follow the landing page best practices to maximize the visitor-to-lead conversion rates.
Driving retargeting traffic to landing pages
It happens to all of us every day – you went to the ACME website, then went to another website, and before long, you realize that you’re being chased by ACME ads just like paparazzi are chasing Brad Pitt. Does this sound familiar? Surely it does! That’s what retargeting campaigns are. The trick is until you make a target action, i.e., request a free trial, register for a demo, request pricing, ACME will keep chasing you as long as they can afford to spend their marketing dollars on you. Retargeting campaigns can be beneficial as far as traffic volume in both B2B and B2C marketing, yet they’re quite expensive. Thus, our recommendation is always to be directing traffic from retargeting campaigns to your landing pages to maximize the ROI.
If you’re being chased by the “Brand X” ads like Brad Pitt is being chased by paparazzi, that’s what we call successful retargeting in B2B marketing.
Driving email marketing and nurturing traffic to landing pages
If you own an email marketing tool, such as Mailchimp, or perhaps a more expensive and sophisticated marketing automation solution like Marketo or Pardot, you acknowledge and appreciate the traffic potential of email marketing and nurturing campaigns. Inexpensive yet extremely effective, these have been delivering exceptionally high ROI to the B2B marketing community for years now, becoming one of the most reliable sources of landing page traffic. Even better news is that the costs are minimal. Our recommendation is always to point the traffic from email marketing and nurturing campaigns to your landing pages.