Weekly Column: 2017-03-03
First impressions are just as it says, literally the feeling you get about someone when you first meet them.
People are sensitive enough to discern whether a person gives them a favorable or unfavorable impression within the short time of 0.3 of a second, and it just takes three seconds to determine someone’s first impression of you. The reason the first impression is so important is because the first feeling stays with someone for a long time. In order to break free from this first impression, you must make another impression that is 200 times stronger than your first impression. The bottom line, the first impression is the starting point of success or failure as well as a measure of happiness or misery.
This time, let’s take a look at landing pages. The landing page is the first page you go to when you click on a keyword or link used in online marketing. This will become the customer’s first impression of you and your business.
For example, when you click on the online marketing keyword advertisement ALC21, the ALC21 homepage will pop up, and you can choose for it to display the main screen or the ALC21 blog page. The landing page can be set up in different ways, and it is an important tool in effectively doing online marketing.
The main purpose of online marketing is to ensure that customers receive your advertising messages. Once a customer receives an advertising message, they become interested and click on the ad. Because the landing page is the first thing that a customer sees after the advertisement, the role of the landing page is to grab the attention of the customer and leave a good impression within three seconds in order to be successful. Essentially, it must become the place that most effectively delivers the message to the customers.
Unfortunately, most companies choose to show only their logo, navigation bar, address, and contact information in their landing page as their introductory message. More often than not, the landing page for these advertisements is the main page of the website, and this is a phenomenon that is happening almost as a rule in online marketing.
However, the customers’ interests lie in the individual products or services, not the introduction of the company selling the products, its logos, or its contact information. When the main page is the designated landing page, customers have to go through the cumbersome process of navigating around from the main page to the page where the product they are interested in is located.
For that reason, designating a strategic landing page is a great way to give a good first impression to your customers as well as delivering a strong message to them. If you have promotions, the landing page will introduce the product or service to your customers so that they will be able to get the information that they want easily and you will be able to get a good reaction from them.
Images that capture the customer’s attention and deliver a specific message are much more effective and convincing than sites that are simply text-only. A good example of making a strong impression while swiftly delivering your message is a moving image. Implementing things such as moving slides or video clips can increase customer engagement as well as grab their attention.
Occasionally, a minor change can bring major differences like in a butterfly effect. In order to do this, after collecting customer feedback, use that information to fine-tune your design and develop its function. Repeat this process until you get the response you are looking for. If you do so, it will not be difficult to make a good first impression with your customers.
With one well-designed landing page, you should be able to satisfy your customers, make a charismatic first impression, and make an appealing website that will retain customer attention.