MarketingSherpa Blog

Originally published on B2B LeadBlog

The most important factor to keep in mind when creating your landing page is your prospects’ motivation.

Highly motivated prospects can make for highly motivated leads if your landing pages deliver the right message to the right prospect at the right time.

However, it’s the prospects who are not highly motivated that you need to worry about. They will quickly deter from your page unless you can convince them your product or service will provide them with more value than they need to exchange for it.

In today’s post, I wanted to share with you two questions to ask yourself about your prospects’ motivation, which will help you match your landing page content to your visitors’ motivation and ensure their expectations are met.

Who are my prospects?

First, you must ask yourself, “Who are my prospects, and where are they in the purchase cycle?”

Generally, your site will see three types of visitors.

• The window shoppers – These are prospects who are very early in the sales cycle. They aren’t completely sure about all the details behind what they are looking for, so they are browsing to gain a general sense of the market and the options available to serve their needs.

Window shoppers may have little to no motivation and need greater convincing that they have a need for your product or service.

• The researchers – These are prospects who know what they are looking for and are most likely comparison shopping.

Researchers have moderate motivation. They are interested in your product, but are looking for that extra boost. What sets your product apart from the competition? You could solve for this by providing an incentive, or guaranteeing a price match.

• The patrons – They know what they want and are just looking for the next step in the purchase cycle.

Patrons are just looking to complete their transaction. Streamlining the purchase process to make it as clear, quick and easy as possible should be your main goal.

Recognizing which types of prospects are frequently visiting your pages is the key to appealing to those who need the biggest push.

Also, using copy and images on your landing pages that directly support the value proposition of your products or service is a big step toward helping you communicate and appeal to all prospects.

Does our landing page deliver on the expectations we are setting?

The second question to ask yourself is rooted in how your visitors arrive to your landing page.

Did they click on a highly incentivized banner? Or do you have targeted PPC ads on social media or a very specifically themed blog? The point I want to stress here is that whatever you promise in the prior step of the funnel is what they want to find in the next.

If most of your traffic is coming from banners that promise a $100 gift card incentive, then immediately address that incentive on your page; that’s what your visitors will be looking for because it is most likely what motivated them to click on the banner. If a large portion of your traffic is coming from PPC ads, consider what page that ad is on.

For example, if your visitors are coming from an ad on a blog specifically about a review of analytics platforms, they are most likely perusing analytics platforms or some other relative software to try and find the right one. Use this knowledge to you advantage.

Again, most prospects are not sales ready, so it’s your job to convince them that when they are ready, your product or service is the perfect fit for their needs.

As you will find, getting millions of visitors to your page will be insignificant if it doesn’t match their motivation for going to it. Always, always, always think about what your visitors wish to achieve by visiting your page, and how they got there.

Remember, you can always make multiple landing pages to match the different motivations of your unique visitors, but you only have one shot at a lasting impression.

Related Resources

Email Marketing: How do you create excitement around the content you have?

B2B Marketing: 6 essentials for testing your teleprospecting

B2B Marketing: 3 simple tips for creating PPC ads

Google AdWords campaigns are a terrific way to target specific audiences.

Unlike advertising on television or billboards, which tries to convince consumers they have a need for the product, search advertising tries to fulfill a need the customer already has.

The only problem is figuring out exactly what searches your customers are performing to express the need your product is the answer to.

Answering the following three questions is a great start to understanding your customers a little more, and will help you fulfill their needs and provide them with solutions.

Question #1.  What phase of the sales funnel are our targeted customers in?

Understanding where your target customers are within your sales funnel will help you know how they are searching for your products and what kind of queries they will be using to find them.

Here are a few points to consider when creating a Google AdWords campaign based on what stage of the purchase decision process a potential customer is in before they buy:

Initial – Very early on in the funnel, your potential customers may not even know your product exists. It is up to you to make them aware of your product, and to let them know what the benefits are of using it. For example, if a customer is just beginning their search for a new computer, they’ll probably start with general keywords like “laptop deals” or “cheap desktops.”

Intermediate – Even if your customers have a good understanding of what your product is and are interested in it, they are going to do more research on your product and compare it to similar products. This is where search queries will become more specific for products like “lightweight laptops with dual-core processors.”

Also, keep in mind at this stage, customers may begin to query brand names in their search efforts as well. This is where your keywords should become more specific about the details of your products.

Advanced – This is the stage where a customer has done their research and has reached a decision. In keeping with our computer example, it’s where search terms will likely be brand or name specific as the focus has now shifted to buying.

So if you are aware of what stage in the purchase decision process your customers are in, you can alter keywords to meet their specific needs.

You can even create different ads to match specific keywords customers will search for during each of the different phases as shown above. This will also help you discern which phases you should focus your paid search marketing efforts on.

For example, if most of your keywords are targeting customers in the early stages, you may want to concentrate on adding keywords they would use later in the funnel to make sure they follow through with the buy as ultimately every phase has the potential to turn into a buy.

Question #2. How are customers searching for us?

Potential customers generally search the Internet to find answers to questions or solutions to problems.

So, how will customers search for the answers and solutions your products can provide?

There are an infinite number of possibilities considering their queries may be an actual question, a symptom that they have a description of their problem or the cause of their problem.

For example, if someone’s air conditioner is broken, they may search “broken ac” or “how to fix a broken ac,” “why is my ac freezing over?” or  “ac repair in [anytown USA].”

Your ultimate goal is to answer those questions and solve those problems.

And, in order to do this successfully, your AdWords campaign should consider as many of the different search possibilities that relate to your products as possible.

It’s also worth mentioning whichever search terms customers use will also set certain expectations that your landing page or process needs to deliver.

So, when conducting your keyword research, you should list as many search query possibilities customers would likely use to search for your products, and match those searches with keywords that offer the most relevant solutions and answers.

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