Brand profiles on third-party websites like Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice play a critical role in acquiring qualified leads, and yet they are often overlooked in the overall schema of a marketing campaign. Well-crafted profile pages improve software providers’ rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), attract the right traffic, drive conversions and build buyers’ confidence.
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Use Your Product Profile and Product Landing Pages to Drive Conversions
May 3, 2022
Contributor: Kari Test
Optimize your software product pages and feature them on the right channels to acquire high-quality leads.
On average, 48% of website visitors leave the primary landing page without engaging deeper with any marketing collateral, according to Gartner research (full report available to Gartner clients).
So, what should SaaS and software providers do to ensure their product profiles and pages drive leads and ultimately convert prospects?
Whether the goal is to book more demos, get signups for a free trial or prompt downloading of marketing collateral, the three steps discussed below can help enhance visitor engagement and lower bounce rates for landing pages.
Step 1. Choose the right channels to position your product profile
Creating a brand profile on trusted third-party channels, such as customer reviews sites, helps accomplish two things:
- It brings in qualified leads that have already identified a business problem and are seeking possible solutions.
- It improves your site’s search ranking by acquiring links and builds consumer confidence in your brand by creating social proof around your products and services.
Why be selective in choosing channels to feature your brand?
As a B2B brand, your business faces an enormous challenge in adapting marketing campaigns to digital channels due to the breadth of the options available.
While there’s no need to limit yourself to a few marketing channels, don’t feel the need to target all channels and sites.
Pursue platforms that have an audience closely aligned with your target market to deliver high-quality leads primed to convert. Examples include LinkedIn to target individual professionals and reviews platforms such as Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice to target in-market software buyers.
Here are channel recommendations for software providers to gain brand exposure and reach more in-market buyers:
- Software reviews sites. Buyers consider third-party reviews sites to be a trusted source of information. Target popular, high-traffic reviews sites your target audience visits often to read reviews, gain product information, or compare software. Start by creating a free profile and then consider pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-lead (PPL) campaigns on channels with high conversion rates.
Also, inquire about the type of leads you should expect. For instance, Software Advice uses expert advisors to provide more sales-ready leads based on the lead qualification criteria. Meanwhile, Capterra and GetApp capture high-intent buyers who prefer a more self-guided purchase journey.
- Website landing page. Connect your PPC and organic marketing campaigns to a dynamic website landing page that caters to segmented audiences. For instance, your landing page should exhibit your product or brand from a technical point of view to IT professionals compared to nontechnical stakeholders.
- Social media. Establish a brand profile on key social media channels for B2B buyers, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Today's tech buyers use social media to explore educational content and discover software options. Building a presence on key channels helps you connect with current and potential customers.
Pro tips to make the most out of profiles on third-party sites
- Complete your business profile. Do not just enter the bare minimum information; add the non-mandatory items as well. Describe your brand and product features clearly, and take advantage of every section to connect to your target audience.
- An essential reminder as you create your profile. Get listed under the right software category, provide high-quality and relevant images and add links to the right webpages.
- Ask your existing customers to review your products on these sites to build brand reputation and garner visibility for your products.
- Differentiate your value proposition, product description and messaging on each channel to align with that channel’s audience.
Step 2. Design your product landing page for conversions
Once you’ve shortlisted the channels you want to maintain a presence on, the next step is to optimize your brand profile and product landing pages on those channels.
Establish conversion goals for creating a brand profile or product page, and let your goals define the elements you include in your pages. Keep these aspects in mind when creating your product profile and landing pages.
Maintain consistency in messaging between your website and external channels.
Continuity between your brand profile on third-party channels and landing pages is important to connect one experience to another. Create a cohesive visitor experience by using similar messaging and calls to action (CTAs). This will help ensure the audience can clearly identify your brand.
Align your landing page to the target audience.
Add a level of personalization with dynamic landing pages. This involves creating landing pages that display different messages to different users based on the channels they come from, their location, the keywords they seek and where they are in the buying journey.
Clearly differentiate your messaging.
Software buyers often find it difficult to differentiate between brands, especially when product features and services are similar. Clearly outline your brand’s unique value proposition on your product profile and landing page. One way to declutter your value proposition and ensure it stands out is to talk about your software in the context of your audience. Answer three critical questions in your software value proposition: Why should visitors buy? What do they need to buy? How should they buy?
Use smart landing page design.
Include smart elements on your landing page to reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. Take care of the following elements when designing your product landing page or brand profile:
Smart design features to include on brand or product landing page
- Scannable text. Draw visitors’ attention with succinct headlines that communicate one idea, bullet points that call out important facts and customer testimonials that evoke trust.
- Benefits, not features. Prominently highlight the benefits buyers will obtain from your software, instead of listing out its features, which can look jargony and contextually distant for some buyers.
- Images and videos that tell a story. Use human elements and imagery on your page to ignite trust. Leverage images in your headers, show a headshot of a webinar speaker, use a pleasing color scheme or work with other such visuals to tell the same story as words do.
- CTAs. Place your primary CTA button in a prominent position, such that visitors don’t have to scroll to act. Include multiple CTAs across a page to avoid dead ends and lead users to relevant content that takes them further down the sales funnel.
- Concise forms. Use limited and important fields in your forms to save visitors’ time. The six highly ranked fields in demand generation forms are name, email, organization name, mobile number, job title and location. If your campaign targets known contacts, you can create a separate landing page without a form.
- Mobile-friendly. Make sure your landing pages have a responsive design that doesn’t distort information when opened on smartphones or tablets.
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Step 3. Test and tailor messaging for different audiences
Use A/B testing — a randomized experiment that captures user experience by showing two variations of the same thing — to measure visitor engagement. A/B testing is critical to the success of your brand profile and product landing pages. It improves buyer engagement and increases the chances of conversions.
Develop low-fidelity prototypes and test them with a focus group that resonates with your target audience. The idea is to test if the messaging, visual elements and CTAs on your product profiles push users toward conversion or the goal of your marketing campaign.
Here are a few common elements SaaS providers test to optimize their product landing pages:
- Buyer persona traits. Test your landing page’s usability for the buyer profiles you want to target. Measure your page on three traits: demographics (job role or title), technographics (software solutions currently in use) and firmographics (industry, geography or company size).
- Target audience segments. Check how your landing page caters to segments within your target buyers that you want to convert, such as existing customers to whom you wish to provide complementary product recommendations.
- CTAs. Test your CTAs on whether your audience prefers text, buttons or images. Use AB testing to find the appropriate placement and number of CTAs for a page.
- Copy/messaging. Measure your content with respect to its form (location, size and length), headers, personalization, style, voice, font style and clarity of messaging.
- Imagery and page layouts. Test the type of icons and graphics used, and their color, size and location. Assess how all the elements (images/videos/text) are placed and prioritized on the page.
- Forms. Check form fields for their height, width, length and order. Be clear about what buyers receive in return for their information, and test the messaging and CTA to optimize conversions.
Use a combination of the tips given above to boost the performance of your landing pages, reduce bounce rates and drive conversions. Optimizing your brand profile and product detail pages go a long way in improving marketing campaigns and getting high-quality leads from web assets.
Click here for more ways to optimize your product profiles across Capterra, GetApp and Software Advice.
Kari Test
Kari Test is a Senior Marketing Manager at Gartner Digital Markets focused on helping software marketers improve campaigns and maximize ROI. Originally from Annapolis, Maryland, Kari graduated from Elon University before moving to the Washington, D.C., area. In her free time, she loves exploring Old Town Alexandria, traveling, and trying new recipes. Connect with Kari on LinkedIn.
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