How to make every page a marketing page (and why you should) Posted by Mark Nunney on 23 July 2010

By adding irresistible offers to unmissable positions on (almost) every page, ThinkingManagers.com more than doubled its response rate. Following his previous article Does your marketing stop when your content starts?, Mark Nunney here shows us how to make every page a marketing page.

This article is an edited version of a chapter of Wordtracker’s The Website Content Recipe Book – 21 irresistible content ideas to wow visitors and boost your search engine optimization.

ThinkingManagers.com’s dramatic improvement was primarily achieved by placing marketing in the middle of the top of almost every page (beneath the main headline) and also high within body copy. Previously, there had been some marketing in its left-hand column and articles finished with an offer.

There are two key points here:

• Put your marketing on the page where it will be seen.

• Put some marketing on almost every page including ‘non-marketing’ pages. So not just ‘landing pages’ or ‘closing pages’ or pages that are optimized for buying keywords.

You can see the new marketing positions on ThinkingManagers.com outlined in red in the screen grab below:

With these and similar simple techniques, all your pages can act as marketing landing pages. That includes pages that weren't written to directly promote your products, category pages you never get time to work on and even pages that might not contain much copy.

We'll now have a quick look at why this works and how you can use similar techniques to increase your own site's response rate.

Put your marketing where it will be seen

For most of your visitors, you get just a few seconds to give a reason for them to stay on your site. And no matter what you do many will quickly leave, perhaps forever. Therefore, to maximize response you must put your marketing where it will be seen within the first few seconds of a visit.

This means your marketing must be visible without the need to scroll down the page (we call this being ‘above the fold', an old newspaper phrase). But whereabouts above the fold is crucial and you can decide where by first using the results of others’ tests and then starting your own.

Eye-tracking research shows us where our marketing will be seen

Research tracking site visitors’ eye movements and displaying the results as ‘heatmaps’ gives us our first clues about where to place marketing. Below are three heat maps for different types of sites:

The above heatmaps are from an About Us page, a product page on an ecommerce site and a Google results page. Red areas show where users look the most, blue the least and gray not at all.

We can see that users mostly look at the top of a page’s main body of text and its headlines; users are less interested in banners and separate left and right-hand columns.

Conclusion: place your marketing just below your main headline and within body text as high up the page as possible. And this is exactly what was done on ThinkingManagers.com above.

What will work where

In few of the examples given here are direct offers to buy something being made. They are mostly offers to have something for free. We might see them as attempts to invite users to start their journey along the marketing funnel.

This is an important point to make as you might interpret this article as saying you should immediately slam ‘Buy Now’ messages onto your pages. Although try that if you like – it might work for you.

So your marketing on ‘non-marketing’ pages might be an attempt to recruit an email address with a free report or other irresistible benefits.

Or it might be an attempt to get visitors to go a ‘landing page’ that tries to make a sale.

This page you’re reading is an interesting example. The chances are you arrived from a free newsletter so there’s not much point in trying to recruit you to that again. So we use the prime marketing position to entice you into reading about a book about creating content for websites. Here it is again:

Always be testing

‘Always be testing’ is a mantra that should quickly follow ‘Always be marketing’. Once you have your new marketing positions in place you should never stop testing different marketing content and positions. The rewards can sometimes be astounding.

For example, Sports Injury Bulletin trebled response (yep 300%) by adding a marketing position below the page headline and offering free reports with a sign-up to a free newsletter.

You can try your own simple tests like this or get sophisticated and scientific with tools like Google’s Website Optimizer.

Also, if eye-tracking heatmaps are too expensive for you then with Crazy Egg and Click Heat you can create heatmaps from users’ clicks for free.

Learning to place your marketing on the most looked-at positions on every page is an early step on the road to maximizing your website’s conversion. For a more advanced exploration of conversion, see Conversion Rate Experts and GrokDotCom.

Also, ecommerce site owners will be interested in a new Wordtracker Masterclass on ecommerce copywriting from Karon Thackston. That will be published in a few weeks.

What is your site for?

I regularly hear the objection that putting marketing where it will be seen will put readers off the article, the site or the product. If you’re thinking that, ask yourself who and what your site is for?

If your website exists to sell products and services then you are interested in what maximizes response, not what minimizes fuss. The whole point of your website is to give you a chance to present your marketing – so why back off from the obvious best way of doing it?

If your current response rate is 2% then that’s 2 out of every 100 visitors doing what you want them to do: appealing to just 2 more people (per 100) will double response. Is it a problem if, whilst doubling response, your new marketing does not appeal to those other 96 people?

If your marketing appeals to potential buyers by genuinely offering real benefits then the chances are that the only people that aren’t going to like it aren’t ever likely to be your customers. It was nice of them to drop by and make your visitor numbers look good but your website is not for them – it’s for potential buyers.

So convert all your pages to marketing pages by putting your marketing where it will be seen by the most visitors and don’t let the sensibilities of someone else’s customers stop you increasing yours.