Landing Page Friendly CMS - New key to Internet Marketing

The effectiveness of landing pages to natural and paid search is changing the meaning of websites to marketers.  Selecting the right software from a new breed of content management (CMS) is now critical to effective Internet Marketing.

The patterns of web users is rapidly changing and so it the strategies of marketers.

The Old Way ...

In the old days the majority of people who visited business websites did what was called "browsing".  They would often come in through the homepage via a direct link or URL.  You might have a few people "deep linking" to pages within your site through an Internet search engine like Google.  In this case, they would still tend to browse until they find what they are looking for.  Even though websites were designed with the AIDA (Attention Interest Desire Action) sales model in mind, individual pages within them often weren't.

Most Internet users had more time back then to compare products and services. 

Email Marketing

Email Marketing was one of the first ways businesses used landing pages effectively and is still very much in use today.  The Email provided the attention and interest, while the desire and action were often fulfilled by a target webpage.

Google Adwords and Cost-Per-Click

Along came Google Adwords, a paid search (CPC - cost per click) advertising system, and many early advertisers could still cut it by simply linking an ad to their website homepage.

However these days information flows so fast that consumers are often making choices in a matter of seconds.

As competition for keywords increased, Google had to find new ways to keep their service competitive for the majority of advertisers and they added the "quality score" which takes into account the effectiveness of the target pages for their ads.  Advertisers responded with a skill of creating pages that would instant conversions.  It started with eBay and Amazon started pumping clicks through to their category pages and smaller shopping sites directly promoting their products. 

Designing the perfect Landing Page

A landing page is most often the first - and the last - page that many targeted visitors will see.  So it really needs all the elements of an elevator pitch.  In most websites, however, the pitch was contained somewhere else on the site.

Businesses, stuck with brochureware websites, were slower to take up the concept. 

Google provided Analytics, a really useful tool analysing landing page effectiveness, because unlike the majority of stats tools which focus on overall stats, Google focuses on page oriented stats with useful information such as Entrance Sources, Entrance Keywords and bounce rates.

Businesses are starting realise that keyword focused landing pages became effective for natural search too and with the prices of domain names and website templates coming down - cheaper too.  The rise of multi-Domains and keywords would combine to create highly targeted pages designed to make consumer decisions easier and close sales in seconds.

The New Way

With the competitiveness and the concerns of business for the economy, gaining an advantage in natural search has become increasingly important.

Content on the web is still king, but it is about to be overthrown by "killer content", content that deals its consumers and competitors the knock-out blow.

Landing Pages are the New King

The effect is that websites have changed from a set of webpages to a set of landing pages. 

In response to the growing need, Google created the Adwords/Analytics integrated Website Optimizer tool to enable webmasters and web developers to optimize websites.  However not all this knowledge can be productized and certainly this tool doesn't work with existing content managed sites.   And the catch is that to produce the large number of landing pages required for an effective Internet Marketing campaign - CMS is the only real option.

But traditional website content management system are still built for the old approach - browsing. 

So the majority of today's content management systems (or "legacy CMS") are playing catch up with the demands of landing pages.

But there is hope and I'll briefly explain why and how you can build your CMS managed website to maximise its Internet Marketing potential.