I picked up the new 53 Paper app for the iPad this weekend. Really a beautiful piece of software for sketching ideas without having to be an Illustrator jockey.
Inspired me to share why I find landing pages (and microsites, conversion paths, and other kinds of post-click marketing) — the focus of my company, ion interactive — so fascinating and rich with possibilities:
The intersection of performance marketing, content marketing, and technical wizardry. What’s not to love?
Well said (and diagrammed) Scott!
Scott – you show some of the important pivots of why landing experiences are so powerful (Performance Marketing, Technical Wizardry, Content Marketing), but you’ve ended with the question: What’s not to love?
To be balanced, one of the downsides of campaign landing experiences are when the actual website or product pages (the click after the landing experience) don’t hold up to the degree of content marketing, tech wizardry, and perforance that was invested in the landing page.
For some marketers, it’s easier to get budget and approval to create an incredible landing experience than it would be to redesign the underlying actual product experience.
This can lead to a clunky user experience when the customer navigates from the cutting edge landing page and moves into the relatively un-dazzling permanent webite content.
In these cases, I think the marketer would have been better to invest in the fundamental permanent site pages than in a short lived campaign landing experience.
Great landing pages aren’t a substitute for a great product experience. If your product experience is delivered primarily through another web property — say, an e-commerce store — then landing pages definitely aren’t a substitute for having an amazing online store experience.
However, the thing about great experiences is that they are incredibly context dependent. Having great landing pages — that are very context-specific — bridge into a great product experience would be ideal.