Landing Pages by Design

Lots of energy goes into designing a website home page, but not enough on landing page strategy and contents. If you use a click-to-read-more approach on your website home page, your landing pages take on even greater significance.

Landing pages are where viewers land when they click links on your home page. Viewers may go to a home page out of curiosity. They go to a landing page with the intent to find information of interest. You need to provide it, along with a call to action.

Too often landing pages are cast with the design format of the entire website. Continuity is a good thing when it comes to navigation, but it shouldn't be an overlord that tramples clarity for viewers. If home pages are intended to capture a viewer's attention, a landing page's job is to hold that attention. On CFM's website — we have landing pages devoted to each of our five business lines, They were designed with the client personas of each business line in mind.

Keeping someone interested is a function of relevant content, which is nicely displayed and in a hierarchy and language that makes sense to the viewer. Landing pages aren't playgrounds for creativity; they are the platforms that convey your key messages.

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PR Versus Advertising

The digital age and increasing segmentation of media outlets has caused many advertisers to rethink how they spend their marketing dollars. Public relations has been by and large the beneficiary.

The value of paid advertising is knowing when and where your message will be placed. That knowledge may be reassuring at one level, but unnerving if you aren't sure the eyeballs of your target audience will see your ad. Newspapers and magazines are slimmer today because there is less advertising, not less news.

Ads give advertisers and their ad agencies more creative control of their message. But again, you can't always control what your readers or viewers watch — or how and when they will watch it. TIVO, fast-forward buttons on TV remote controls and Hulu have replaced a quick rise from the couch to get a beer during commercial breaks.

PR professionals admittedly have less control over placing stories and conveying key messages. What they do have going for them are strategies and tactics that pull people to a story, not push a message. Editorial content seems more credible.

While ads can and often do tell stories, many times amusingly, viewers know they are being sold something. They may remain skeptical of a news story or a sponsored contest, but they don't usually come across as a hard sell. The news media rarely uses exclamation marks.

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Making Your Facebook Page a Fan Magnet

Much effort is exerted to get someone to "like" your Facebook page. Equal or greater effort is needed to earn a return visit.

Businesses and organizations spend a lot of time and money to accumulate a large number of followers. But if you don't give them any reason to follow you closely, it is a paper army.

People, even your most devoted fans, are busy. They will only return to your Facebook page when there is a reason. Giving them a good reason is your challenge.

Contests and events attract interest. So does quality content that informs or inspires. Best of all is some type of engagement, in which you ask for their ideas or involvement. Blogs routinely trot out lists of things to do to bolster your Facebook ranks and keep them excited. In truth, there isn't a formula for success. Each brand, organization or cause needs to find its own sweet spot.

A contest may be inappropriate to raise awareness and recruit financial donors for a cause. Events may be impractical for certain kinds of products or services.

What brings people back, including fans, is engaging content of interest to them. If you are in sync with your target audience, that may seem like a natural expression to you. If not, you need to talk to your fan base or potential fan base to find out what they like about you and what they want to know more about.

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Local Matters in Marketing

The new social media phenomenon of Cash Mobs proves that in the global economy, twitterverse and cyberspace, local still matters in marketing.

The Cash Mob movement encourages people to go to small, local business and spend money, en masse. 

According to the Cash Mobs website, a Buffalo blogger, Christopher Smith, originated the idea almost a year ago. A Cleveland attorney helped popularize the movement last fall. NBC's Today Show gave its seal of approval in a televised segment last week.

Using Twitter, organizers put out a call to followers to meet up at a local store on a particular day — and bring money to spend. A horde of smiling, eager shoppers can brighten the day of any merchant, perhaps even making a difference in whether the local business can keep its doors open.

Cash mobs are a stark contrast to the rash of flash mobs that have flouted surveillance cameras while looting stores. The goal of cash mobs is to "build community," not ransack them.

This application of social media is further evidence that reach can be global, but targeting can be local. Whole Foods Market has demonstrated the value of tweeting about events or special offers in individual or groups of stores. Local and regional brands such as Burgerville, Ninkasi and Dave's Killer Bread use Twitter and Facebook in the same way. Posts build brand familiarity, while marketing local activity.

The advent of cash mobs reinforces the point that marketing isn't just about money. It's also about creativity and energy.

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Visual Storytelling: Child's Play

Children's storybooks delight children and parents alike because of the dazzling interplay of words and pictures. Their success underscores the power of visual storytelling.

"Sure, picture books are great, but I never could do anything like that," is a typical refrain. The truth is, you can tell a story visually if you let the child in you out.

Martin Salisbury, an illustrator, and Morag Styles, a professor of children's literature, collaborated on Children's Picturebooks, The Art of Visual Storytelling. The book describes how these books charm young and old and the key stages of conceiving a visual narrative.

In an interview with NPR, Salisbury says the appeal of picture books is "the simple visual style [that] allows readers to project their own personalities and thoughts onto the character." Sparking imagination in viewers leads to engagement. And that engagement can be etched deeply in the memory, as reflected by how many pictures and phrases adults remember from children's picture books.

Visual narratives aren't dumbed-down narratives or merely pictures added to illustrate words. "It's that issue of condensing something into something very elegant and short, usually 32 pages, which is very, very complex to do," explains Salisbury. "Making it look simple and elegant is perhaps the hardest thing to do."

It also takes hard work, much the way Mark Twain meant when he said he would have written a shorter letter — if he had more time.

As understatement has fallen out of favor to the more raucous exchanges of reality TV, visual communication remains a source of subtlety. In his NPR interview, Salisbury cites Rosie's Walk as an example of pictures telling a subtle story. Rosie the hen struts through a farmyard while a fox stalks her in the background. The text never mentions the fox's intentions as it describes a series of misadventures by the fox. Nevertheless, children invariably shout at Rosie to watch out for the fox. In marketing, we call that subliminal messaging.

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