In September of 2007 Marketing Sherpa conducted two surveys in an effort to learn what challenges in-house marketers have designing a landing page program, and what challenges Agencies have managing a landing page campaign for their clients. Notice the common frustrations in each case:

Frustrations of In-House Marketers round analysis of Landing Pages

The biggest obstacle to in-house landing page optimization is by far is the lack of resources. In mid-sized companies the marketing department is typically overloaded. In smaller companies without a marketing department, the owner of the staff, even if they had the right credentials is (or should be) too busy minding the core business.

Frustrations of Agencies in Providing Better Analytics to Clients

Resources: It is tempting to try and do it yourself or assign it to existing staff. Take into consideration the true cost of doing it in-house. Are you diverting staff members from other necessary duties? Are you paying them to learn on the job when an agency or consultant may have already cultivated that know-how? You may indeed have the talent under your own roof; just consider carefully the true costs.

Aptitude: Most individuals are either left brained or right brained. That is to say technically or creatively inclined. Since a landing page campaign is a combination of creative and analytical, a technical oriented team or individual is not likely to come up with the compelling creative, and the creative team may not be able to interpret the data. That applies to agencies as well as you and your staff.

Experience: Agencies may have strengths in either creative or analytics; however they may not have the full array of skill sets necessary to do it any better than you can do in-house. If your current levels of web traffic are insufficient, make sure you work with a consultant that can deliver everything that you need, either in full or in part with your in-house team.

Summary

The limited scope of this white paper covers only some industry best practices. Virtually every element on a web page has some effect…positive or negative on the actions that a visitor takes. Ultimately only testing will determine what works and what doesn’t.

Whether you are working with an Agency, a Consultancy, in-house staff, or doing it yourself, this paper was designed to help you avoid costly mistakes and wasted effort.   Use the information in this paper to help you implement, or manage others to implement best practices. There are however other considerations:

Traffic: If you are not driving enough traffic to your website, no amount of landing page best practices will help. There is still a common misconception that if you build a website your customers will automatically find it. Before you can gauge how your visitors react to your landing page, you need to have visitors.

Testing: It’s easy to say that you will test the results, but do you have the mechanisms in place to capture the data? Do you know how to interpret the data?

Implementation: Who will implement these best practices?  Should you hire professional help or task you in-house staff? If that is a budgetary decision, what is the true cost of re-taking your staff?