You Ask, I Answer: Best Landing Page Platforms?

In today's episode, Shavi asks, I'm creating a landing page for a client who has a website but a really wonky one and they don't want to use the landing page long term. Is there a platform that would let them pay per month and then stop paying when it's no longer live? What are the best landing page platforms? Okay, so I understand in some cases uh landing page tools are used by marketers who uh don't have access to the website or don't have uh uh timely access to the website where uh you can post stuff up, but uh you have to go through IT and submit a ticket and it takes several months to get uh something up and running. Um but if you do have access to the website and it's functional, uh there's little reason to use a landing page tool, especially if you have to pay for it.

Uh one of the curses of marketing technology currently is uh the fact that there are over 8,000 different vendors in the marketing technology space. Many of them do the same things. Uh all of them at some point cost you extra money. And a lot of the functionality that uh all these various tools offer is built into probably some of the tools you already have. Now they may not be optimal, but they may be good enough.

And in a uh period of time like we are in now, where uh every dollar in your budget matters, uh it may not be cost effective to run a completely separate tool that you then have to administer and track and and all that stuff. If you do use a landing page tool, try as best as you can to use one that is integrated with your marketing automation software. So if you're using, you know, Eliqua or Pardot or Marketo or uh Salesforce uh Marketing Cloud or HubSpot or Mautic, uh any of these tools that are robust marketing automation tools offer landing page support, and you can build a landing page in them, and as a bonus, you then don't have to try and get data out of your landing page tool and send it to your CRM because as long as your marketing automation software is configured correctly, it should already do that. The big question to ask is uh for landing page tools in particular, does it support all your tagging and tracking? Uh there are a lot of tools that support things like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, but don't necessarily support them all that well.

Uh they can uh fire incorrectly, they can have conflicting extensions, things like that. So make sure that uh whatever landing page tool you do select uh is uh robustly supporting the uh your analytics, which brings me to a really important point. A lot of landing page tools either operate on their own subdomain or have you configure a separate subdomain, and that can really screw up your analytics. Uh if you are not having if they are not set up properly, especially if it is something that's cross-domain. So, for example, like you know, your company.landing page tool.com as an example, as opposed to your company.com.

If you're running Google Analytics, at that point you now have to set up cross-domain support. You uh need to implement cross-domain tracking and uh configure Google Analytics in a way uh that it recognizes part of this other landing page tool uh as part of your website. This is uh uh one of the reasons, for example, why I don't use landing page tools at all on my website. I use uh I use WordPress for my personal website, I use WordPress for the Trust Insights website, and uh we build all of our landing pages right inside of WordPress, expressly to avoid the complications of you know multiple cross domains and subdomains and all that stuff. And uh just the tracking mess it makes, um, having you know cookies crossing domains, it's much easier to have everything within just your own website.

And depending on the CMS you're using, that shouldn't be that uh overly complex. It also means that uh you don't need to pay extra for landing pages, and if a landing page is has served its purpose, you don't necessarily need to uh rush in to delete it. You can uh you you you can leave it up there and you know clean up once a quarter or whatever, remove old landing pages and redirect them. So which landing page tool is the best? Again, to the extent that you can use ones that are integrated with your marketing automation platform.

Now, if you don't have a marketing automation platform as a company, you might want to think about getting one because it offers a lot of functionality in addition to the landing page tool that will serve you very well for uh collecting data, for cleaning it, for maintaining it, for offering things like user preferences, and uh for robust analytics and tracking. If you are a small business and you are technically skilled but budget poor, I strongly recommend uh Mautic, the open source uh uh marketing automation tool. It is very good, it is very robust, it is technically complex to install and operate because you basically are running it on your own server, but the costs are then are just the cost of your server. And when you consider that a lot of marketing automation software, you know, starts around 500 bucks a month and running your own server as of you know on a on a VM somewhere is like five bucks a month, that's a pretty considerable cost savings. It's something worth uh worth exploring and thinking about.

Um if you're not going to go that route, then you know there's there are again are tons and tons of different services out there. There's like lead pages and infusion soft and and all these different companies. It comes down to cat does the tool support your own domain, right? So like landing pages.yourcompany.com, uh, because that's important, as opposed to you know, your company.landing pages.com. Uh does support fully every form of analytics you want to use, including Google Tag Manager, uh, tag manager support I view as mandatory.

Uh and does it integrate with your CRM? That's a big big heavy piece because if if it doesn't, you have an awful lot of uh extra maintenance and extra unnecessary processes unless you're doing you know data cleaning and transformation of your data before it goes into your CRM. So that's what I would suggest. Stick with your website if you can, stick with your marketing automation software if you can't stick with your website, and then explore the different vendors if neither of those two are an option. That said, if you're at a place where you know you you're not allowed to access the website and your marketing automation software sucks, it might be time to make some changes to marketing.

And if you can't understand that that company has a handicap compared to its competitors, right? It is a technological and Martech handicap compared to its competitors that will catch up with it, uh, particularly when times get a little tough like they are now. And the company lacks the agility of its competitors to be able to change solutions quickly, to be able to implement new solutions quickly, uh, to be able to change on the fly. Bear that in mind. Uh, Martech skills and agility and competence are part and parcel of what's essential for a company to survive when times get rough, to be able to adapt to new circumstances very, very quickly.

And if you're patching up your existing infrastructure problems with things like a landing page tool, an email list clean tool, a this tool, that tool, and you have this buffet of a hundred different Martech vendors, it's a good sign that your Martech is not under control and you need to pause, do some governance, and uh and clean things up and come up with an actual Martech strategy. If you have follow up questions on this, any other uh questions, uh leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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