In 2015, I believe that we will see a shift in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships that take on a more personal approach. Brands need to realize that the consumer no longer fully trusts you anymore, they trust people. Brands are no longer in control, the people are – hence the rise in the use of social media as a main driver for consumers. To counter this, brands need to create more personal experiences for the consumer to let them know they are not here just to sell, but to serve.
In destination marketing, not only are we vying for the attention of potential travelers and meeting planners, but we are also struggling with how to convert them. We struggle with high bounce rates and lesser time spent on our websites. We struggle with consistent content that is connected to our ever-changing marketing efforts. Destination websites are one of the few owned properties that destination marketers are in complete control of from the moment a potential traveler lands on your site. But we often don’t have the budget to redesign our website as often as we redesign our marketing materials. One way to combat this is to develop customized landing pages that are directly tied to your marketing efforts. Customized landing pages are a necessity for any destination marketer who wants to funnel the potential traveler or meeting planner to a designated area.
Here are four tips on creating killer landing pages for your website:
- Connect your landing page design to your existing advertising creative. The key to any advertising message is consistency. You want the consumer to have a seamless interaction with your brand, so making sure your design elements on all platforms match is crucial.
- Make the content entertaining and informative. When consumers interact with your messaging, you need two key elements – inform and entertain. Inform them with the key message you want to get across, but keep it entertaining enough that allows to have some type of engagement with the content.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for the sale. Within the content of the landing page, have different calls-to-action to help funnel the consumer to your desired conversion. They are on your property, viewing your content, so don’t be afraid to ask them to do something with it. Odds are, they’ll do what you ask.
- Close the deal. Don’t blow a perfectly executed digital campaign by not having the ability to close the deal. It’s one thing to ask for the sale, but an entirely different thing to close and get the deal done. This phase involves your offline efforts, that can follow behind your online efforts to close the loop.
gathandborden.com 
Awesome post. I completely agree. I feel that is why many companies are branching out for sponsorships.
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