If you are doing Google Pay-Per-Click or other advertising or even print advertising, be sure to use specialized landing pages for those ads, so you can make the most out of every visit. No sense paying to have people click thru to your site if they are lost/turned off by what they see when they get there.
What is a Landing Page?
In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link. Landing pages are often linked to from social media (Facebook, etc.), email campaigns or pay per click (PPC) campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements. The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales leads.
So for instance, if you ran an ad in a local paper for a band playing at your pub, the link in the newspaper ad might be myrestaurant.com/bandnight instead of just going to your home page. That “bandnight” page would probably talk up the band, and hopefully have some call to action, like a link for people to sign up for reservations that night or buy tickets. You could include some sort of promotion — 10% off for web visitors! — to sweeten the deal.
By analyzing activity generated by the linked URL, marketers can use click-through rates and Conversion rate to determine the success of an advertisement. Code can be placed on this landing page to keep track of visitors, making it possible to gauge the effectiveness of any ad – even a print ad! This way you can see if advertising in that particular newspaper is even worth the money, or if your money might be better spent elsewhere!
- Who are your customers? Are they young? Old? Hip? Traditional?
- What do they like? Do they want to know there is live music – or will they be relieved to know there isn’t? Are they all about specials or all about haute cuisine?
- When you’ve established what your customers want, how are you going to give it to them?
- Who are you targeting? Remember your current customers and your target customers might not be the same people anymore!
- What’s your story, style, theme or message? Are you all about luxury or comfort? Style or value?
- What do you stand for? What are your values? For instance, should you be pointing out your ingredients are local?
- Do you support your community? In what local endeavors are you involved?
The answers to these questions will help you decide the appropriate look and feel for your web site, as well as help define your marketing message.
Put a “join our specials/newsletter” box on every page of your site, making it easy for people to join. Offer an incentive for them to do so. (i.e. coupons for special online clubs.) You’ll be more likely to get people signing up, and that grows your captive audience for newsletter and special updates.
This idea works especially well for restaurants and businesses that can offer a free quote.
What Is Google Places? It’s been called Google Maps, Google Places, Google Local, Google Business… but no matter what you call it, it is VERY important to your business! Get one of the top 7 spots and it is like getting PAID placement in the free listings. What most business owners don’t realize, is the importance of creating the right listing to be sure you’re taking advantage of all this marketing has to offer.
Maybe your site is already on Google Maps, but are you getting impressions? How many keywords do you come up on the first page?
Just ask and we’ll let you know!
Before you create a web site for your restaurant be sure to ask yourself some important questions:
- Who are your customers? Are they young? Old? Hip? Traditional?
- What do they like? Do they want to know there is live music – or will they be relieved to know there isn’t? Are they all about specials or all about haute cuisine?
- When you’ve established what your customers want, how are you going to give it to them?
- Who are you targeting? Remember your current customers and your target customers might not be the same people anymore!
- What’s your story, style, theme or message? Are you all about luxury or comfort? Style or value?
- What do you stand for? What are your values? For instance, should you be pointing out your ingredients are local?
- Do you support your community? In what local endeavors are you involved?
The answers to these questions will help you decide the appropriate look and feel for your web site, as well as help define your marketing message.
Search engines love keywords in URLS. So if the path to your contact page is:
http://www.mysite.com/contact.html
You could be missing an opportunity. For instance, ours is:
http://www.vansantcreations.com/web_designers_maryland
Giving us some good keywords in that page URL for Google Searches. Now if someone searches on Google for “web designers maryland” we have a greater chance of showing up.
If you have an HTML site, this can be accomplished by how you name the pages that make up your site. If you have a database driven site it can sometimes be a bit tricker, but can still be done!
Not sure how to do it? We can do it for you! Just contact us.
