If you’re a marketing professional reading this article, you know creating and running marketing campaigns is not as easy as it may seem. Developing a successful marketing campaign requires strategic planning, target audience & behavior analysis, determining the right channel, message design and competitive positioning.

In my experience so far as a marketing professional, I’ve learned that focusing more on the target customer and their needs helps us build and execute more effective, result-oriented marketing campaigns. Moreover, I have learned that today, customers' needs, pain points, decisions, and attention spans change extremely rapidly. And that's without mentioning other factors such as competition, technology updates, and innovation. As quickly shifting environments force marketers to roll out new and creative marketing campaigns, they need to do so on a more frequent basis than ever.

My most fun (and easiest) part of developing a marketing campaign is building ad landing pages. I’m sure as you read on, you’ll know why. You most likely already know that marketing ad campaigns (paid or free) need to be directed to their own, specific landing pages for better results. We are a Drupal development company and we use Drupal as our website’s CMS (very obviously). Currently we are running on Drupal 9 (and here are some reasons why you should be on Drupal 9 too) and creating new pages as and when we need is really easy. Take a look at how I create a new ad campaign page for a test campaign on “Drupal 9 Migration”.

Landing Page for Marketing Campaign

But first, a little something about Content Types

Without getting too technical, let me go ahead and say that content types in Drupal are basically types of content :) Now if that confused you, here’s an example. If your website has various kinds of information like News, Articles, Video Gallery, Photo Gallery, etc., each of them can be classified as a content type. Each content type has its own sets of fields. For example, for Articles content type you will have fields like Title, Image, Body, URL alias, Meta description and so on. 

When you install Drupal 9, you get two content types by default - basic page and article. The basic page content type is usually used to create static pages where you would not update content very often. An article content type can be used for frequently updated pages like blogs, news, events, etc. You can further extend the flexibility of these default content types by installing other contributed modules but let’s not get too technical now. For deeper customization, find a Drupal partner who can customize and build content types that suits your business requirements. In this example today, I will explain how I create an Ad landing page content type for my marketing campaign.

A Few Must-Haves in your Landing Page

The basic goal of a landing page is to convert. It is not very likely that you see immediate conversions even if you have a great landing page design. But it is important to build your landing page in a way that users return to your page and convert sooner or later. Here are some key elements your landing page must have:

  • Clear and concise copy
  • An interactive element (an image or a video or 
  • A simple and short lead form
  • An attractive CTA (it could be your form too)
  • A trust element (certificates / verified / accreditations)
  • Make them an offer they cannot refuse :)
  • SEO optimization

And here are some things you should NOT have:

  • Too many navigation elements or outbound links that distracts the user
  • Unnecessary information and clutter

Lets make marketing

Let’s Design the Campaign

Now our website has been built by our Drupal developers using a component-based design approach. Each content type can use and reuse the various components when required. The ad campaign page that I’m going to create is a content type that has been customized to meet our marketing goals. We have used the Paragraphs module as the framework to build various paragraph types (or components). By default, Paragraphs do not have any paragraph types but the developer has complete flexibility to create custom paragraph types with a combination of fields.

So here’s how I create a new Ad Campaign page.

Step 1: Create a new Ad Page

Admin-> Content -> Add content -> Ad Page

Page

 

Step 2: Add content to the paragraph types

As you can see in the screenshot below, Title, Main Title, Description are the paragraph types.

Manage

 

Title - Not only do they provide your users with context on your page but the Title tag is a great place to start optimizing for SEO. The text that I enter here is going to be the Title tag text of my new campaign page. Drupal is great when it comes to SEO optimization. Now this text will also show up on the search results page as the title. So make sure your Title tag contains relevant keywords (starting with primary and then secondary) followed by your branding. 
Here, the title I’m using is: Drupal 9 Migration and Upgrade Services by Experts | Specbee

Main Title - Here’s where I add the main header (H1) of my page. I usually want this title to have keywords without making it too keyword-y (IYKYK) but this also needs to be attractive. Show your users what they can get with your product or service. Throwing in a question helps touch some pain points. Here, I have used keywords like “Easy”, “Fast”, “Seamless”, that resonate with the customer when they are looking for a Drupal migration service expert. 
I’m using this as the main title for my campaign : Looking for Easy, Fast and Seamless Drupal 9 migration services?

Step 3: Write a Description

The Description part is another paragraph type of CKEditor (we’re using version 4 here). I love using the CKEditor because it gives the editor so much control on styling elements and adding images of my choice. 

In this description, I want our prospective customers to know the process of our Drupal migration services. So along with adding an image of the steps, I will also add some text relevant to the message I want to convey.

Once I’m done typing out my text and styling it to an H2, I hit the Insert image icon, browse for the image and upload it.

Insert Image

 

Don’t forget to add an apt Alternative text to make sure your image is accessible to all. Drupal 9 makes it really easy for you to build an accessible website.

Alt Text

 

Once you hit Save, you will now see the image right there in your editor. You can align it as per your choice. I have chosen it to align with my text to the left.

Description

 

Step 4: Add credentials to build trust

It gets easier for prospective customers to trust you when they recognize familiar and impactful credentials on your landing page. It is important to have these trust factors in the first viewport. For our website, we have customized a Certificates component that has fields like title, image, and description. When I’m designing the page, I just have to pull out the certificates that I need to display (see image below).

Certificate

 

Step 5: Adding the form

Now that you have added enough charm and engaging elements in your landing page, here’s where the real deal happens - the form. Some important points to note about a landing page form :

  • Always make sure it is in the first viewport. That is, the user should be able to access it without having to scroll down.
  • Add other CTAs as you scroll down the page so that a click on that CTA again leads back to the form.
  • The form or the CTA button (Submit) should have a contrasting color when compared to the rest of the first viewport. This helps bring the user’s attention to it.
  • Try limiting the form elements to 5 fields or less. Not many users enjoy filling up long forms. 

In this campaign, both the CTA and the offer are in my form. We have used the very versatile Webform module that gives us the flexibility to create simple to complex forms very easily.

Webform

 

  • Webform Title - The title of my webform which will show up right above the form. I need to make sure it is clear and also has my offer. I have titled it as: Fill out this form to get your FREE Migration Audit Report 
  • Webform - This is a dropdown list of the webforms that we have created and used throughout the site. I have to select the one that suits my requirements at this point. I have chosen the ContactUs-Ads webform that we had created for our previous ad campaigns.

Step 6: URL alias

Having a user-friendly and impressionable URL comes with many benefits including that of search engine optimization. Once I’m done with designing the campaign, the next step is to give a friendly URL alias to my ad landing page. Drupal 9 has the URL alias module in core which helps in easily adding and editing aliases when needed.

On the right side of the page, click on the URL alias button and specify the URL you would like to use. I have used “/drupal-migration-testing” as mine.

URL Alias

 

Step 7: Save it!

And I guess we’re done! Of course, I haven’t created a very elaborate page. I have only designed the first viewport of my campaign here in this example as I wanted to keep this short (1500+ words already!). Typically, I would also add other components like a bigger text block and a client list. 

If you don’t want to publish it yet, uncheck the Published checkbox and hit save. You can also Preview what your page will look like before you save it.

Add Component

And now for the results!

Results

Drupal Migration Testing

Final thoughts

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article as much as I did writing about my experience with landing pages. If you found this useful, please feel free to bookmark or share this article with your friends! Are you looking for a Drupal partner to help you build you a compelling, customized and interactive website where you as the editor have total control over your content? Get in touch with us and our Drupal experts would be happy to help!

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