Q4 shopping is over, so unless you are in the aftermarket business like liquidation, post gifts, B2B Marketing Tools or Lingerie and Valentine’s, next week should be downtime. You’ve earned it and can relax so that you are ready to kick butt in 2014. However, with that said, to be successful in 2014 you need to ensure you have cleaned, fixed and prepped your landing pages for this next year of innovative visitors. Here are 3 things you can do over the next two weeks while everything is calm to prep your landing pages for PPC, Affiliate, Social Media or any other channel’s traffic.
1. Make your landing pages responsive.
You have about two weeks. Change the designs over to ensure that they work with mobile devices of all sizes and can function across different brands. If you have a phone number on your landing pages, make sure it is able to be clicked to generate a click to call action on multiple phones and devices. Make sure live chat is working and if you use code or scripts that mobile devices cannot access, now is the time to rip it off and replace them with mobile friendly layouts, tools or graphics on the new, responsive templates. Remember, if you are a local business or using social media, many people check Facebook and Twitter or find your pages when searching from mobile devices. If your landing pages are not responsive, they may not be able to sign up for your newsletters, contact you or even have a good experience since the design doesn’t work on their devices.
2. Check your social sharing buttons.
There are a couple of things you’ll want to look at with your social sharing buttons before 2014 starts and busy season comes around again.
1. Do visitors leave the site when sharing? – If you click to share on Facebook, Pinterest, etc… and a new tab opens, you have now let the potential customer leave the landing page to be distracted. You have two weeks (including Christmas and Christmas Eve) to be able to find icons that open a small window that closes after it is shared. The other option is to use an icon that allows the action to take place directly within the sharing button. Unlike your main site, you paid for and/or brought targeted traffic to these pages. Don’t distract them and encourage them to leave by opening their favorite social media site and forget about you.
2. What is actually being shared? Click on the icons from multiple devices and look at how things are being shared. Did you include your twitter handle and what message is delivered? Is there a proper image that shows up for their Facebook newsfeed? Is there an image that is large enough or descriptive and engaging enough for Pinterest? By changing out images, filling out the copy that is shared, and having great images, you can help to get better engagement with the people who see the shared page on their favorite social media sites. Since you are in a slow time, now is the time to put in custom descriptions for shares, etc… into place.
3. Add video to your landing pages with Viewbix.
If you uploaded video to YouTube and have been trying to figure out if it’s working or not, now is the time to test something new that also has a free option. Viewbix. Viewbix lets you take any video (that the user has enabled sharing on) from YouTube, your own video stock or on your own website, VimeoPro, etc… and add a 100% customizable skin.
The skin includes clickable calls to action in numerous places including a button on the top right corner of the player. After you finish customizing the skin, you get to add more than 20 interactive apps to the skin.
The apps turn the video into a fully interactive experience because they allow the viewers to take actual actions within the video and be able to return to watch again during or after. Some of the ones I use on my blogs are the Aweber (They are my newsletter provider, but Viewbix offers almost every major ESP) app so people can sign up for my newsletters while watching the video, shopping lists so I can sell products through the video using Affiliate or direct links, RSS so people can see the latest posts I’ve done and come visit my blog or subscribe and follow me on social sites so they can find and follow my accounts. That isn’t all this tool does.
When Viewbix is shared on Facebook and Twitter, the functionality stays in-tact meaning that every news feed it falls into is a new potential shopper/customer, newsletter subscriber, follower or fan, etc… When I combine the apps with the analytics package and other options, I am able to increase my reach, measure the actual effectiveness of my videos and I have been able to generate sales and revenue, as well as increase newsletter sign ups by using Viewbix. They offer a free version here so it doesn’t hurt to try them out.
You always want to and probably wish that you could optimize or change things on your landing pages for PPC, social media, affiliate, etc… but never have enough time. Starting now and up to New Years, it is usually fairly calm for many companies so this is the perfect time to start making the changes that you know can help you provide a better user experience and convert more sales for your company.
