1. Think like your audience

You know your product. You know what you are working on or the services providing. In fact, you have been eating, sleeping, and breathing your business longer than anyone else. As a result of your personal involvement you have come to identify with certain terms, keywords, and a distinct way of thinking about your business, your product, and the needs your solution meets. This is the first problem you will face. Rather than thinking as the person who has created this amazing business you must think like your audience. When you think like your audience this affects your entire marketing strategy. Everything from the keywords you use in your content marketing to the flow of your campaign workflows within your marketing automation will be affected by the thinking of your target audience.

2. Go where they go

But let’s step back even further. Before you can think like our target audience you need to go where they go. You need to find those locations online (and on social) where your potential customers like to visit. There are several reasons why this step is important. First, by finding and visiting those places where your audience lives you will learn what interests and motivates them. Second, this will help you think like them (see the first point above). When you live a day in someone else’s shoes you have a much better understanding what they are going through, and what they are thinking. You must go where they go. And be mindful that this is not the same for every business. You may find a great audience for your business on Twitter while someone else may find that LinkedIn is their ideal social network hangout.

3. What does tomorrow hold

As a business owner and someone who knows their product and potential market you must do more than just create something your target audience wants today you must create what they will need in the future. You must identify how your market will evolve and do more than just provide a feature set or product that meets their needs today. You have to anticipate what the future holds. Henry Ford has been credited with saying something along these lines:

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
More details via HBR

The veracity of the quote aside, the sentiment is true. Often your target audience is unaware of what they will desire in 6 months, 12 months, the future. Your job is to find your target, identify their future desires, and market towards this goal. Obviously this is a challenging task. While you cannot predict the future you should be consistently innovating and pushing the boundaries in anticipation for what will be required in the future.

4. How big is your audience

One of the most important questions you should ask as you seek out your target audience should be how big the potential market is. If you incorrectly identify your audience, if you overestimate the potential you will find your business is producing more than the demand and you’ll fail to be successful. You should look to well-known and respected sources regarding the potential market. As a business owner or marketer you are undoubtedly optimistic. You believe your product is needed by everyone everywhere. This is not the truth. Remember, you can’t be too cautious about believing your own stories. Do the digging, look at the cold hard facts. There are numerous reports and surveys carried out on most potential markets. Some of these reports may require you to purchase them. Do so. It cannot be stressed enough that you understand the true size of your potential market. Failure to accurately identify this metric will leave you standing in an empty room, alone, with an amazing but unneeded product.

5. How big is the room

In addition to the audience but somewhat related, you should also do digging into the size of the room. This means looking beyond the existing audience but the empty space where your audience may expand. This point ties the previous two points nicely together. You need to seek out what the future for your target looks like as well as how big that audience currently is. Then once you have this two metrics you can massage them to forecast the potential future market and ultimately the size of the “room”. In this case you’re looking at the negative space. Where will your product be able to expand and grow and add market share. Within different verticals where are the walls (or ceilings) what are the limiting factors for your audience? Don’t fall into the trap of believing your target is too perfect and beyond the constraints of any room – every business, every product has limitations and boundaries. Identify these early.

6. What does your competition see

If you are in a market where your competitors existed first you have a distinct advantage. Dig into their marketing strategy, their keyword targeting, their landing pages and their email marketing campaigns. Don’t blindly attempt to reinvent the wheel. Look around and see what’s been done already. You can gain an infinite amount of wisdom by learning from the mistakes of others. Just because you are doing something different, something revolutionary, or something never seen before does not mean there is no value in what others have done previously. Learn from what your competitors see. What have they identified as the potential target audience or what leads have the most potential. This is smart marketing. This is smart lead generation. Use the countless hours of others to better find and market to your target audience.

7. Plan smart marketing

This step is listed last because you should complete the first 6 steps first. While you should put a first priority on finding and relating with your target audience this last step is quite important. Once you have found your target audience you need to create a plan to market to them. This smart marketing involves how you create your marketing landing pages, the format and structure of your email marketing campaigns, and the keywords you should focus on when crafting your content marketing strategy. When you know your target audience you will be fully equipped to prepare a marketing plan that meets your potential leads where they live. Mautic has a powerful marketing automation platform capable of organizing multiple campaigns based on your target audience, but perhaps an even greater feature exists. Mautic allows you to test landing pages, keyword strategies, form conversions, and as a result better identify your potential leads. You should be marketing smarter. Mautic helps.

The act of finding and marketing to your target audience is a fundamental building block for a successful business. Following the above 7 steps will help you to have a clear picture regarding your potential audience. Clarity on this aspect of your business will give you unmatched opportunity for growth. Armed with this knowledge you will be able to make informed decisions on future strategies, advanced marketing opportunities, and more. You’ll make the most of your marketing dollars and you’ll be fully equipped for growth and success.

One of the cornerstones of any good marketing automation system and an integral piece of creating a good system for lead nurturing is the landing page.

Landing pages are those special pages you create on your website to collect the users information and in return you provide them with some “reward”. This reward can take the form of a download, a PDF, a white paper, or any number of other resources which the user is interested in. Maybe you have an awesome video that demonstrates how to perform a task. Before the user is able to watch the video they must fill out a short unobtrusive form. The form may ask just for their name and their email address, it might ask them a few other pertinent questions if it relates directly to the item they are interested in. This landing page is gold for you. It allows you to collect relevant information directly from users who are genuinely interested in what you’re offering. There’s a level of commitment the user must be willing to make to fill out a form in exchange for what you give them. This page which we’ve just defined is a landing page. And you may begin to see already why I refer to it as gold. Landing pages are golden opportunities. But if you’re not careful and if you don’t construct a good landing page then they will be wasted opportunities. Let’s look now at those things which make a strong and highly engaging landing page.

1. A Single Strong Focus

The focus of the page is one of the first things to consider when creating a landing page. Your landing page should convey a clear, easy to understand purpose. Why do you want the user to visit this page and what is the reason they are here. Answer this question and only this question. This may be the hardest part of the entire process. Do not overcomplicate the purpose for this page. Take your time and determine what the single most important reason for the page. When you come up with other ideas (and trust me you will) write them down somewhere else as other potential landing pages. Once you have defined your focus write out your page content. Remember the goal here is to keep it simple, concise and to the point. Keep your sentences short and a minimum number of paragraphs. Here’s some good examples.

RightSignature does a great job of focusing the purpose of a page to a single form. Good graphics and a simple form drive the user to a single action.

Wistia gives a great video overview (which is good since they’re a video company) and a very easy one form field button.

Acquia may ask for a few more fields but you can easily understand the purpose of the page and what you would receive in return for filling out their form.

2. A Simple Call to Action

As you write your content you will want to keep in mind what is the action you want the user to take? In most cases you’re probably going to want them to fill out a form so you can collect some information about them. But that’s not always the only call to action. Maybe you want the user to sign up for a newsletter, or schedule a meeting. Regardless of the specifics of the action your landing page needs a simple call to action. Don’t overcomplicate the call to action, don’t obscure the call to action. You don’t want your user to be confused with what they should do when they arrive on your landing page and a clear call to action will keep them comfortable that they are in control and they know what they should do. Here are a few great simple call to actions.

It doesn’t get more simple than a single button. Zoho has simplified their call to action all the way down to a single button on their landing page.

Shopify lets you create your online store with only an email and your name. Again, the focus on a very simple and yet effective call to action.

3. A Low Commitment Level

This third tip for showing your landing page some love involves making your page have a very low commitment level. You want the user to complete the call to action. If you make the page easy to understand, give the user the steps they should complete and provide them a means to do so without taking too much effort you will have a much higher conversion rate. The user may have just met your company, they may not know you or what you offer and they don’t want to jump immediately into an intense relationship. If you think about your landing page as a commitment then you want to make that commitment as easy and as simple as possible. This will reassure your user and make them more comfortable with introducing themselves. Take a look at these low commitment landing pages.

The process of shopping for car insurance can be a bit overwhelming. Geico makes their landing page simple with a very low commitment by only asking for a zip code on the first page to get you started.

Podio also makes the experience very easy by only requesting an email address. They reiterate the fact that your sign-up is completely free emphasizing the fact that the commitment is minimal.

4. A Quick Reward

Once your user has read your landing page, followed your simple call to action and made that initial commitment then they need to be rewarded and rewarded quickly. This reward is the original resource, asset or item the page originally promised. In the example given above this is the video the user came to the page to view. Providing an immediate reward is the best way to reinforce the commitment the user has made and reassure them to be confident in their decision. When you create your landing page keep this end result in mind. Be sure you are rewarding those users who are completing your call to action. This one is a bit harder to show real examples but I believe it’s rather self-evident as well.

Landing pages are a powerful resource to generate new leads for your business. Landing pages provide valuable information to you but also to your users. They receive something and you receive something. It’s a wonderful start to a potential long-term relationship. Don’t neglect this opportunity and show your landing pages some love. I hope these 4 tips will give you some ideas to help you create amazing landing pages.