Online advertising has come a long way in 2016, consumers are smarter and businesses must provide much more value than ever. If you’re not an authority in your industry, getting prospects to buy your products right away is insanely hard and something I don’t recommend.
If you’re using social media or search engine ads to drive new prospects to product pages, you’ll end up wasting a lot of money doing so.
New prospects need convincing first
When a new prospect lands on your website for the first time and they don’t know a thing about you, you must provide them with value and reassurance of your business/product before making your sales pitch.
For example, I’ll often see small businesses that I’ve never heard of use search or social media ads driving cold traffic directly to product and sales pages. This doesn’t work because prospects want to know more about the business before they hand over their credit card details, with many hitting the back button and leaving their site.
There needs to be a ‘convincer’ in place for new prospects before they get to your product page.
What is a good convincer?
In-depth blog posts
Blog posts are one of the best ways to convince new prospects to buy your product or test-drive you service. Done right, a blog post can showcase all the benefits your product has, why it’s suitable for them with a few links peppered in to your product pages.
Blogs help put your offer into context, allows you to add social proof by inserting references backing up your statements, reduce buyer confusion and answers questions about your business they may have had.
Here’s an Ahrefs Facebook ad which leads directly to a very informative blog post about SEO:
At first glance what looks like an innocent blog post is a way for Ahrefs to get prospects to sign up to their SaaS tool. As you read their blog post here, you’re followed all the way by a call to action which is asking you to start a free trial of their software:
I’ve visited the Ahrefs website before so I’m in their website custom audience, and they are serving me an ad of a blog over a sales page.
Why?
Because I’ve not entered the next stage of their funnel and they know that serving value-based ads are going to yield a better ROI than if they straight up asked me to pay for their service.
Their blog post is providing free value on SEO which closely links to their product (SEO SaaS tool).
Landing pages
A landing page is another bridge to convince new prospects to buy your product or service. They are similar in some regards to a product page except they talk more about the benefits you’ll gain from the offer, and you’ll typically have to click another button before you’re sent to the offer itself.
Campaign Monitor use a Google ad that sends prospects to a landing page opposed to their actual product page:
If you were looking for a email marketing tool and Campaign Monitor directed you straight to their pricing page, you’d leave because you don’t know who they are or whether they can be trusted. Their landing page aims to resolve any issues and queries the prospect may have pushing them closer to making the right action.
When you can serve direct product ads
There are only a few times you can get away with redirecting prospects to product pages, this is when:
Targeting long-tail keywords. For example, the term Nike women’s Air Max 90 is a long-tail keyword for a specific model of sneeker. Anybody who is searching for that term is near the end of their buying journey and ready to make a purchase. Nike is also a global brand meaning the searcher doesn’t need convincing on the quality of Nike goods.
Nike and Office.co.uk both lead prospects directly to product pages when that term is searched on Google:
The other time it’s okay to redirect prospects to product ads is when you’re retargeting customers only. If a customer has bought from your business before, you don’t have to re-convince them to use you again, the hard work has already been done.
Summary
For anyone who is not a customer you should seldom redirect them to product or sales pages. Researching online has become a huge part of the buying process, leverage blog posts and landing pages to educate your prospects on your products/service, the benefits they gain from them, what your brand is all about and then redirect them to a sales page.
Where do your ads redirect to when serving content to non-customers?
Nick Bridges
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