1. Avoid “message mismatch”.  Many a times a user clicks on an ad that appealed to him or her due to specific usage of words but when he actually lands on the landing page the user forgets just why was the ad clicked on because the specific idea or concept that was made available in the ad is not clearly visible in the landing page. Ideally, the user should get the delight of ‘that was exactly what I was looking for when I clicked through that ad’. So landing pages have to be designed around that concept. This essentially brings the webmaster to the concept that the webmaster needs to deploy as many landing pages as there are ad variations – or at least a vary a part of the landing page content to reflect the ad variation that brought in the click.

2. Harness fast feedback about your audience. Social media is a wonderful gauge for putting ideas out and quickly testing reactions. User interactions with landing pages and resultant actions can be easily benchmarked, measured, tracked and compared with little additional investment which can often lead to big insights worth several times the investment value (like real time BI scores). An ongoing feedback loop that continually evolves itself – it doesnt have to be perfect during the first stages – will help a lot to accurately categorize data into multiple streams by proper usage of A/B tests.

3. Open up a dialogue or conversation. In keeping up with the spirits of social media, a landing page can be a good source of discussion and a generator of dialogue, option and feedback. Instead of offering a static, bland web page the landing page designer can provide options – are you interested in Option A, Option B or Option C. This can provide further inputs for multivariate testings down the line. This technique has been tried before and is also known as multi-step landing pages or conversion paths.

4. Authenticity and transparency is better than artificially crafted hype. People using social media have become used to authentic and plain, raw, and simple feedbacks and reviews. They can easily see through hype and gimmicks. So landing pages need to present facts and verifiable facts and play down on hype and gimmicks for customers can easily think ‘yeah I KNOW thats a gimmick’. The webmaster is supposed to avoid exactly that kind of opinion formation in the surfer’s brain. The trick to win more mind share and possibly converts from your landing pages is to be genuine, creative, original, open and enthusiastic. Thus here we have seen how the parallelism concepts can be visualized and perceived between social media and landing pages.

Michael R Roberts

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