WTF: Outreach, Landing Pages & Bananas (1)

When you do any kind of outreach, be it an ad or a guest post, you are creating content for the specific purpose of bringing people into your website; there are two components to this process:

• The copy
• The landing page

For purposes of this newsletter I’m going to deal with ad copy but the same rules apply to the short bio that is appended to any guest post that you submit.

The wrong way

The typical approach would be to create an ad and just send them to your front page. So for example if you were a Banana seller – you might run an ad along the lines of:

We are banana sellers
We have awesome bananas.
http://banana.com

Why is this wrong?

If you make your content too generic & try to hit as many people as possible, you’re going to become invisible. There are a million banana sellers out there so your copy has to be more than just “we sell bananas.”

Demographics = Relevancy

The narrower you make your target audience, the more relevant and resonant you become. Every platform should offer a decent set of demographics; just by using one of them you can make your ad a little more relevant:

Are you a man? Do you like Bananas?
We have awesome bananas for awesome men
http://banana.com

It might be a little basic but it’s certainly more resonant to us XY types than the first one. However, it’s still pretty lame and doesn’t offer a compelling reason to click through.

Relevancy & Reason FTW!

L.A based V.P of H.R who loves shoes?
Read how bananas prevent blisters
http://banana.com/freebananas

Now we’re talking! We’ve narrowed the demographic down by location, seniority and gender (kind of!) and we’ve offered some information that they might be interested in learning about. We’ve even been clever in the naming of the url to let them know there’s something in it for them!

The Landing page

Of course, the success of this campaign is not driven by how many people click through on the ad – it is driven by how many people become new clients or customers, and that element is totally determined by the design of the page they arrive on. More on that next week!

If you’d like help setting up a creative outreach campaign, reply to this email and book a session!