More M&A firms are starting to use landing pages to more effectively target new sell side prospective clients. While your website is still important, if you are wondering about the differences between a landing page and corporate website strategy, read on.
If your goal is to…
- Raise awareness about your brand in general
- Share in-depth information about your firm and services
- Build a long term SEO strategy around specific M&A specific keywords
you should be focused on building your primary corporate website.
If you are…
- Running targeted ads on LinkedIn or Google Adwords
- Trying to generate interest in a specific vertical or geography
- Promoting an e-book, a recent transaction, or a conference
you should be building landing pages instead of allocating more resources to your website. If you are doing any of the landing page specific actions above you should not be sending prospects to your home page. The below reasons explain why:
#1 Landing pages focus on prospect conversion, not necessarily education
Your website needs to cover a lot of basis to both educate, build trust, offer paths forward and more. A landing page is a much shorter, more focused effort that allows you to focus your visitor’s attention on taking some kind of action. Now, we all know that you can’t convince a prospect to sell his or her company with the click of a button, but if your goal is to meet face to face, conduct a value assessment or simply move beyond the computer screen you need to focus on convincing them to take that action.
The more content they have to read, the more service offerings you allow them to choose from, the more changes they have to drop off without ever converting. While your website must explain broadly your value prop, a landing page can ask the tough questions early on – Are you ready to sell but don’t know where to start? Do you know what your company is worth? etc..
#2 Landing pages are easier to test and much cheaper to build
The only way to improve your M&A firm’s online conversion strategy is through testing. Building multiple web pages gets expensive quick, but building many landing pages to cross test can be done for some hundreds of dollars and a few days time. We have seen too many M&A firms stagnate while debating which strategy is best in order to save resources. Instead, building a few, low-cost landing pages will allow you to quantify which strategy is best, quickly and clearly.
#3 Landing pages allow your M&A firm to be who you need to be, and nothing else
If you offer many services (buy side advisory, sell side advisory, capital formation, consulting etc.) you have to build a website that says a little bit about a lot. A landing page allows you to free yourself from this issue by creating landing pages that are specific to one service, one geography or even one industry. Given the choice, would you rather engage with a firm that has dedicated real estate online exclusively to your industry, or one who merely mentions it in passing? Having a focus specific to an audience allows you to run ads that are very targeted as well, which typically increases conversion rates significantly.
Want to learn more about how the best in the biz are levering landing pages to generate more leads? Let us know, we are happy to discuss.
