The first step in any radio station’s digital strategy is to define the station’s goals. In short, what do you want listeners to do when they come to your radio station’s website? You can read more about setting digital goals here.
Once you’ve decided what your station’s digital goals are, the next questions is: How do we get listeners to do what we want them to do? When a website visitor completes a goal, such a signing up for the station’s email newsletter, it is called a “conversion.” So if ten people sign up for the newsletter today, you have “ten conversions on the email newsletter goal.”
How can you increase the number of conversions on your goals?
There are two general steps that will go a long way towards making that happen:
- Make the call to action really obvious.
- Remove the other options.
This is what a website landing page does. A landing page is a webpage that drives a visitor towards a specific action, such as signing up for an email newsletter. They are sometimes called “squeeze pages” because they remove other options and push the visitor in a specific direction.
On the Jacobs Media website, the main goal of our website is to drive registrations for our email list. We frequently use landing pages to do this. For example, here’s what a typical blogpost on the Jacobs Media website looks like:
This is not a landing page. From here, a visitor can easily browse the site. But if you were to click on a link to one of our upcoming webinars, you would see a page that is formatted like this:
This is a landing page. Notice the key differences from our other webpages:
- The links in the header, including the main navigation and the search bar, have been removed.
- The sidebar is gone.
- The footer, along with all of its links, is gone.
- The call to action is emphasized with a headline and a big orange button.
Once you get to this page, your options are limited: Register for the webinar or click your browser’s back button. We’ve removed all other distractions to encourage people to take the action that we want them to take — register for our webinar and, in the process, sign up for our email list.
If your radio station’s website is built in WordPress, you can design a landing page template that drives people towards your goals. In the WordPress backend, it is easy to select a template for pages (not posts) with a dropdown menu:
You may also want to look into landing page software such as Leadpages.
Where to Use Landing Page Templates
Most of the pages on your website will not use a landing page template. Save it for when your listeners navigate to a page that leads directly to a goal. You want to use landing pages to tip the ball into the basket. Here are the webpages you may want to use a landing page template on:
- The email newsletter signup page
- Contest entry forms
- Station event pages where the goal is to sell tickets
- Station merchandise pages where the goal is to sell stuff
- Advertising info pages where the goal is to capture sales leads
By strategically using landing page templates, you can significantly increase your radio station’s website goal conversions.
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