I’ve made a gradual yet significant impact on how Audigy builds landing pages since October of last year, when I helped create a new role – Lead Generation Specialist. I’ve created several landing pages over the last year for our corporate team’s email and PPC campaigns, our B2C PPC team’s landing page templates, and landing page templates for our sister companies Beltone and ReSound. Not only that, but I’ve also had the opportunity to start creating landing page templates for our member websites to target specific audiences with ancillary products and services.
We’ve been using Unbounce Classic for most landing pages for years, which was an immediate challenge for me since I was previously building full websites by means of a traditional page builder interface on WordPress. In addition, since Unbounce is well aged and falling behind in terms of features that other platforms include like interactive content elements, animations, global design settings (i.e. colors, spacing, and fonts), and having to copy and paste code a lot. I overcame this challenge through learning how to push the boundaries of Unbounce Classic with my own custom code, clever use of light boxes, mobile- and desktop-specific elements, and more to accomplish whatever the designers might send my way.
Audigy has lost a lot of talent over the last couple of years (90% of our digital department and a number of print designers) due mostly to factors out of the company’s control, which has presented some substantial challenges to me and the rest of my team who are mostly new to Audigy and our peculiar clients. I also started noticing that the mock-ups I was getting from the design team were not always aligned with modern best practices that I was reading about.
One reason for this is the fact that most of our designers are experts in print design, but not as familiar with the unique attributes of digital design. They still use Adobe InDesign to this day to create landing page mock-ups that they deliver to me in PDF format. When I give feedback, I have to either type out my comments, mark up the PDF with Adobe Acrobat, take screenshots, or else build out a prototype in Unbounce to show them what I mean.
I overcame this challenge by taking the initiative to learn and develop my skills through online tutorials like Isaac Rudansky’s Udemy course on landing page design and the Salesforce Demand Generation trailmix. I learned a lot in a short time period like how B2B and B2C landing page design strategies differ as well as what makes our industry unique, including the various audiences: hearing aid manufacturers, retailers, hearing care professionals, and their patients. Since then, I’ve regularly advocated for best practices and testing.
Another challenge that I faced in my new position was that our Corporate marketing strategy was largely developed by external consultants that left us only a few documents with limited usefulness for our needs. Our sales team was doing a great job converting prospects to members, but their job was slow and inefficient. As marketers, we were failing to generate sufficient leads without the costly help of buying databases full of cold emails. We weren’t using any of the relatively cheap resources we had available that would fall under inbound marketing (pulling traffic to our website with targeted content). We were failing to nurture these leads with useful and relevant communications that would help warm them up to qualify them for interaction with our sales team. Likewise, we were also failing to properly identify how many ideal leads we were attracting through clear and timely reporting.
My previous experience in Audigy with website building, design, development, and SEO led me to overcome this challenge by researching and addressing our lack of content strategy and relatively weak lead generation process. I began by creating a landing page template library spreadsheet and constantly advocating for user testing, A/B testing, and feedback mechanisms.
From the time I began on landing pages late last year until earlier this year, our landing pages have been getting few results. In March of this year, one webinar page had zero registrations to attend the live webinar. After I started making recommendations for relatively minor adjustments such as switching the main heading with the sub-heading, placing all the info needed to convert above the fold, and improving content layouts, we saw another webinar page in May get ~95 conversions. I’m not sure the reason for the difference between those two pages, however, after months of advocacy for testing to help us improve our landing pages, we are currently preparing to experiment with our team’s first A/B tests for some upcoming landing pages for our sister company, Beltone.
I’m excited to see where this project will lead Audigy and our sister companies’ online marketing and sales efforts, but in the meantime, I’m also excited to hear about how you’ve found success with landing pages and A/B testing. Let me know by sending me a message today. Thanks for reading!