To understand visitors’ motivations or their “intent,” you must look at the keywords and ads that inspired visitors to click through to your site in the first place. Keywords are often loaded with meanings and particular motivations, so researching them is helpful. Companies build entire pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on keywords that hold no relevance to what they offer. Furthermore, the keywords are important, but how relevant is your landing page to the keyword visitors used? Some companies use a single, general landing page for a variety of paid campaigns. Others use their main home page as the landing page. Funneling all sorts of personas—with varying motivations at different stages of the buying process—through a single common page usually results in a low conversion rate. The challenge is to cater the message and the unique selling proposition to satisfy various visitor intents.
Continuity is an important component of trust and is addressed by answering the following questions:
Continuity refers to maintaining relevance and scent at every touchpoint visitors have with your website or campaign. Relevance and scent reflect a continuous theme on the different pages the visitor navigates through, such as the pages’ look, feel, offers, and copy. Continuity becomes especially important when you have control over the ad that leads to the landing page. Both variables must work together to increase users’ trust by assuring them that they have not landed on the wrong page and that your page is relevant to what they are looking for. But it does not stop there. As visitors navigate through your website, the same themes should continue from one section to the next.
Continuity is equally relevant to any marketing and advertising. If your company promotes a service or product using a television commercial or magazine ad, the continuity is important when the user responds to that advertisement. How is the message continued between the advertisement and the actual store? How relevant is the prospect’s exposure to the ad? How relevant is the medium where the ad appears? Online marketing simplifies these processes because it provides greater control over how potential customers interact with your advertising and website. It also provides mechanisms to track actions to evaluate the effectiveness of advertisements and marketing efforts.