I was asked to setup a little campaign for an offline electrical company on “The Google”. The business they operate in is electrical testing or PAT testing as it is known here in the UK. It’s the kind of industry where I wouldn’t expect to find much competition when it comes to online marketing. That was until I saw the CPC’s in Adwords for keywords related to his business:
This is straight of the bat without having the chance to build up a good quality score but it blew me away how high the estimated first page bids were. So I spent some time checking out the competition and who it was that was bidding at somewhere near these levels. From that research it seemed clear that all the top bidders had some form of direct response lead capture form on their landing pages. Whether it be a request for quote or call back form it seems that industries are catching on to the power of direct response marketing.
If these sites are dominating in an offline industry it is only a matter of time before direct response marketing becomes a must for any company looking to advertise on Google Adwords successfully.
With click costs so high it is essential to get the most leads from your revenue spend as possible and a well designed direct response page is the way forwards in this approach.
This is what I came up with as a starting point:-
Why this type of web page works so well with adwords:-
- It’s simple
- It’s easy to read and interact with.
- The user has two options a) if he/she is looking for a quote they can fill in the form and get a quote. b) they can hit the back button. There are few other distractions on the page. No company history or about us page to distract users from what we really want > the lead. Some people may not like this approach or outright think it is wrong and you need a full website but this layout is tried and tested.
- The single page is much easier to test and develop. The above is just a starting point to start mutli-variate testing with. I’m sure it can be improved once traffic starts pouring in with better creatives, layout, bullet point benefits, testimonials etc.
I really think that this kind of lead generation form is going to be used alot in the next 5-10 years across almost every industry and country on the planet. Marketing departments are going to stop thinking about having a pretty website and start thinking about how to achieve their goals through online advertising and ultimately bring in more business.
The affiliate industry is well ahead of the game and this is the norm to many people working in this space but I was surprised to see how that knowledge is seeping out to other industries which you wouldn’t associate with an online presence.
I wonder how much of a difference it would make to people running these campaigns if they had prosper202 setup with a mutli-variate testing script and some background knowledge in online advertising. You can really dominate a industry like this with the knowledge that is gained from basic direct response performance marketing.
