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What to Put on a Landing Page: 10 Must-Haves and Best Practices
Landing pages are one of the most important elements of lead generation. But they’re only effective if you know what to put on a landing page to begin with.
It’s common to put more attention and resources into your main website and product pages, but landing pages are the most direct way to convert a higher percentage of visitors into leads.
To get the most out of your lead generation strategy and increase your conversion rate, here’s what to put on a landing page.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a page on a website designed to turn visitors into leads.
Sometimes referred to as a lead-capture page, landing pages contain a lead generation form that collects the visitors’ contact information in exchange for something of value, like an ebook, an offer, or a discount.
The goal of a landing page is to tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do and why they should do it. Landing pages are separate from your website in that they’re created for a specific purpose.
You can create as many landing pages as you want — one for every campaign or offer you launch, for example. According to a recent survey, over half of marketers have between five and ten landing pages on their websites.
The difference between a landing page and your main website is that your website doesn’t have a single goal or call-to-action (CTA) for visitors to follow.
Homepages, while still an important element of a website, are typically less focused on a particular task because they are serving the masses.
Homepages are great for direct traffic, but when you can control how visitors arrive on your site, a landing page is the best place to send them.
When you have a specific product or campaign to promote, create a dedicated landing page for it. You can drive traffic to that page through email marketing, social media, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
If your messaging and the rest of the landing page elements are aligned with the visitor’s goals, then you should have a greater chance of converting visitors into leads. In a HubSpot Survey of 101 marketers, 10.9% say their landing pages have a 20% or higher conversion rate on average.
Wondering what it takes to get a stellar landing page conversion rate? Check out the tips below to learn what to put on a landing page to drive traffic and gain leads.
What to Put on a Landing Page: 10 Tips and Best Practices
1. Never use your homepage as a landing page.
It can be tempting to direct visitors to your website homepage simply because you’re not sure what to put on a landing page in the first place.
But if you’re running a campaign for a specific product or offer, you need a dedicated landing page.
As mentioned above, homepages typically have too much messaging, making visitors feel lost. We’d also recommend not using a main site product page either.
Even if your homepage and sub-pages are awesome, a dedicated landing page will perform better when it comes to converting visitors into leads because they are focused on one task.
Plus, you don’t need experienced design skills to create landing pages. You can use a landing page builder to seamlessly create a landing page that matches your website and offering.
In fact, our survey found that 43.6% of marketers use pre-made CMS themes and templates to create their landing pages.
Get Started With HubSpot’s Free Landing Page Builder
2. Follow the standard structure.
When it comes to what should actually go on your landing page, lead generation pages typically include the following elements:
A headline and (optional) sub-headline
A brief description of the what is being offered
At least one supporting image or short video
(Optional) supporting proof elements such as testimonials, customer logos, or security badges
Most importantly, a form on the landing page itself to capture information. If, for some reason, you can’t include a form on the landing page, use a large CTA button to direct visitors to the next step.
The headline should be benefit-focused to let people know right away what’s in it for them. Keep it brief while clearly communicating what your offer is. You can go into more detail with a brief description.
The description should emphasize the benefit stated in the headline and provide a few more compelling reasons why visitors should convert. Writing compelling copy that engages users can be a challenge at times. But don’t let this part slow you down in the landing page process.
Instead, consider using an AI tool like HubSpot’s Campaign Assistant. The tool can help you quickly generate copy for your landing page in seconds — all you have to do is refine it so it’s in your brand voice.
Finally, don’t skip the visuals.
Of marketers surveyed, 38.6% say that video is the landing page element that most positively impacts conversion rate, while 35.6% say imagery or graphics do.
In either case, landing page visuals are clearly impactful, so take your time when developing images and videos for your landing page campaigns.
3. Remove extra navigation.
A landing page is used for one purpose and one purpose alone — to encourage a visitor to take one specific action.
When visitors land on a page, you want to keep them there until they perform that action, whether that’s signing up for a product or downloading an ebook.
Leaving the navigation bar might induce them to continue wandering. To keep visitors focused on your landing page’s content and message, remove the main site navigation from the page so they don’t move off the page.
You should also be mindful of navigation as it relates to the lead generation on your landing page. If you have a form, keep your questions to a minimum. Of marketers, 30.7% suggest four is the ideal number of questions to put on a landing page.
Need to add a form to your landing page? You can easily put together a form using HubSpot’s free form builder tool.
In the landing page example below from MIT Technology Review, the form includes seven fields to fill in, with one being optional.
The rest of the page is straightforward, offers clear navigation, and outlines exactly what you’ll get after submitting the form.
4. Keep the objective simple and clear.
Don’t try to stuff too much information on your landing pages. Make it clear what the page is about and what you want the visitor to do.
Limit the amount of copy, images, media, and links to only what’s necessary, and organize your content in a proper structure so objects are in logical order. It’s especially important that the CTA is as crystal clear as possible for the visitor.
Let’s take a look at an example landing page from HubSpot. This landing page is designed to promote a free guide about optimizing landing pages for lead generation.
The design is simple — as soon as a visitor lands on the page, they’re greeted with the most essential elements:
A headline.
Brief description.
CTA button.
Image or video .
The headline and description are clear and let visitors know exactly what the offer is and why they need it. The CTA button is also straightforward, which is another best practice for landing pages.
Looking for more inspiration for your landing page? Check out these stellar landing page examples.
When thinking about your CTA button, avoid using the word “Submit.” Submit is too vague and doesn’t let the lead know what exactly they’re submitting their information for. Always use language that indicates what they’re getting in return.
For example, “Download Now,” “Get your Free Evaluation,” or “Join our Mailing List.”
5. Match the content to a visitor’s previous source.
Whether a visitor comes from a PPC ad, email, or CTA from another source, ensure the messaging matches throughout the entire conversion path.
If your PPC ad says, “Download our Marketing Ebook,” your landing page should say the exact same thing — or at least have similar messaging that lets users know that they’re in the right place.
If there is a disconnect in your messaging, visitors will feel as if they are in the wrong place and will likely hit the “Back” button.
6. Reduce friction.
Friction is caused by objects (or missing objects) on a page that inhibit a visitor from taking action. This can include providing too much information (adding complexity), animation that is distracting, lack of customer proof or security, etc.
Make your visitors feel confident in their choice to provide their information. To reduce friction, keep the page simple.
Include your most important elements, like the main message, your offer, and the lead generation form, at the beginning of the page.
Save the more detailed description, testimonials, and FAQs for later in the page as the visitor scrolls down.
Don’t require visitors to read too much, and don’t present internal links that will lead them away from the landing page.
Do include social proof elements such as customer testimonials, number of downloads or sales (to indicate acceptance from others), or security badges (if you’re dealing with sensitive data such as credit card information).
And, as mentioned above, make sure messaging matches throughout their conversion path.
7. Focus on value.
What you put on a landing page is just as important as what the landing page is for in the first place.
While landing page campaigns should be used often in your lead generation strategy, be intentional about what you’re offering to leads.
The offer has to be valuable for leads to exchange for their information, and it has to be something they can’t get anywhere else.
Here are a few examples of what provides value and what doesn’t:
Don’t create a landing page to download a fact sheet (never put these behind a form).
Do create a landing page for a valuable whitepaper.
Don’t use a landing page for “Contact Us.”
Do use one for a valuable guide, free trial, demonstration, or evaluation. Offering something of value will enable you to generate more leads so you can nurture them over time until they are ready to buy.
8. Only ask for what you need.
When it comes to lead generation forms, there is no magic answer for the number of form fields that should be required.
But here is one simple rule of thumb: Only ask for what you or your sales team really needs. If you don’t need their hair color, don’t ask for it. Try to stay away from sensitive or confidential information, too.
As for contact information, depending on what you’re generating leads for, name and email address is usually enough.
If you want to ask for more, 25.7% of marketers agree that a phone number is the next most important thing to request on a landing page form after name and email.
9. Create a lot of landing pages.
For every new campaign or offer, create a new landing page. The more landing pages you have, the more opportunities to convert traffic into leads.
And because these landing pages aren’t directly linked in your website’s navigation, you don’t need to worry about crowding your site or distracting visitors who are casually browsing your company page.
According to a recent survey of marketers, a majority (37.6%) only have five or fewer landing pages on their website. However, 6.9% of marketers have over 26 landing pages on their websites.
There is no magic number, but it’s clear that you can create as many landing pages as you have offers.
10. Make your landing pages shareable.
This is optional, but it’s another great way to drive more visitors to your landing pages.
Include social media sharing links or a social sharing widget on your landing pages so visitors can easily share that content with their own personal networks, and, in turn, drive more opportunities for converting leads.
If you partner with another company on an offer — let’s say an ebook — make a plan for both teams to distribute the landing page on their channels. The more coverage you can get, the higher the chance of visitors you’ll have.
Evaluate your landing pages, and use these best practices as a checklist for setting up the perfect page.
Effective landing pages are what will turn your website into a lead-generating machine. And don’t forget to test your landing pages to see which ones work best for you.
What Is Guerrilla Marketing? 11 Examples to Inspire Your Brand
The word “guerrilla,” in its written form, looks pretty intense. It conjures images of rebellion and conflict. Put it next to the term “marketing,” which makes many people ask, “Huh?”
But guerrilla marketing isn‘t some sort of combative form of communication. In fact, it’s actually a very unconventional form of marketing in that it raises brand awareness among large audiences without interrupting them.
Guerrilla Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Brand
Guerrilla Marketing Tips From Experts
What is guerrilla marketing?
The term itself was created in the early 1980s by the late business writer Jay Conrad Levinson, who wrote several books about guerrilla tactics in several professional areas.
Of course, marketing at that time looked very different. While guerrilla marketing is still used today, the ever-growing digital landscape is changing what it looks like.
Roots of Combat
When we hear the term “guerrilla marketing,” it’s hard not to think of guerrilla warfare — which makes sense since that’s where this marketing style got its name.
In the context of battle, guerrilla tactics depend mainly on the element of surprise. Think: “Ambushes, sabotage, raids,” according to Creative Guerrilla Marketing.
But how does that translate into the work we do every day? In marketing, guerrilla techniques mostly play on the element of surprise.
It sets out to create highly unconventional campaigns that catch people unexpectedly during their day-to-day routines.
Budget-Friendly
What marketers enjoy about guerrilla marketing is its relatively low-cost nature. The actual investment here is a creative, intellectual one. Its implementation, however, doesn’t have to be expensive.
Michael Brenner summarizes it nicely in his article on “guerrilla content,” he frames this marketing style in the same context as repurposing your existing content, like taking specific report segments and expanding each into a blog post.
It’s an investment of time but not money, per se.
In a way, guerrilla marketing works by repurposing your audience’s current environment. Evaluate it and determine which segments can be repurposed to include your brand.
Types of Guerrilla Marketing
As niche as it might seem, there are a few sub-categories of guerrilla marketing, as outlined by the firm ALT TERRAIN:
Outdoor guerrilla marketing adds something to preexisting urban environments, like putting something removable onto a statue or putting temporary artwork on sidewalks and streets.
Indoor guerilla marketing. Like outdoor guerrilla marketing, it occurs in indoor locations like train stations, shops, and university campus buildings.
Event ambush guerilla marketing. This tactic engages the audience of an in-person event — like a concert or a sporting game — to promote a product or service noticeably, usually without permission from the event sponsors.
Experiential guerilla marketing. This includes all of the above but is executed in a way that requires the public to interact with the brand.
Without context, guerrilla marketing can be a little confusing, so let’s see how it’s been executed by a few other brands.
Guerrilla Marketing Examples to Inspire Your Brand
1. UNICEF’s Dirty Water Vending Machines
I’m as guilty as anyone of wasting money on bottled water. I have no excuse. I have a reusable one. My workplace offers filtered water from a machine, not a traditional cooler, yet it remains a bad habit.
This guerrilla marketing campaign from the relief organization UNICEF resonated with me. It posed the question, “What if those bottles of water you waste money on were filled with dirty water?”
It reminded the privileged masses that in too many parts of the world, entire populations have no access to clean drinking water.
So, instead of frivolously spending that money on bottled water, UNICEF suggested putting it toward efforts to bring clean drinking water to these areas.
It created makeshift vending machines that sold dirty bottled water, with each button labeled as a disease caused by a lack of clean drinking water.
The big takeaway: Guerrilla marketing works in the not-for-profit sector, too. And while scary, saddening images are often an impactful way of communicating your mission.
There’s a way to convey it by creating something less in-your-face and interactive for the public.
2. BBC’s Dracula Billboard
When I think of Count Dracula, I conjure the penultimate villain synonymous with everything that goes bump at night. The BBC wanted to capitalize on this feeling to promote their show Dracula.
By day, their billboard was designed to be minimalistic, with red text on a white background with a few bloody stakes. However, like its subject, the billboard changed completely every time night fell.
The stakes were strategically placed to cast a shadow of Dracula himself.
The installation was featured in Adweek and had some viral success for its creativity and skillful implementation.
The big takeaway: Think outside the box for your advertising materials. In this case, light and shadow were enough to convey the message and capture attention.
3. Burger King’s Moldy Whopper
In the history of fast food, who’d have thought that a rotten burger would be the face of a widespread ad?
Not many people — which is probably why Burger King thought it’d be a good idea to release a time-lapse video of their Whopper burger decaying for 35 days.
Many people complain about how near-perfect burgers and cereal look in ads, so Burger King did the exact opposite to show how successful they were at removing artificial preservatives from the Whopper sandwich in European countries and the United States.
The images show the mold growing over the burger, from the buns to the freshly sliced tomatoes, lettuce, and onions to the juicy beef patty.
In the ad, there’s a reference to the number of days that have passed since the burger was made. And underneath, a statement read, “The beauty of no artificial preservatives.”
While it may seem very gross, the target audience did appreciate the ad’s message, and some even admitted that they’d choose the Whopper burger over others.
The big takeaway: Don’t be afraid to go to the extreme when marketing your products. It just might have the effect you want. Be cautious — but don’t be afraid.
4. Airbnb’s ‘Night At’ Campaign
If you were jealous of Beyonce and Jay-Z’s shooting their “Apesh*t” music video in the Louvre and want to experience it, get in here. Quickly.
To demonstrate its appreciation for art and its dedication to providing positive, unmatched experiences, Airbnb offered customers a chance to experience a night at the Musee du Louvre (yes, you read that right. Free.).
For its experiential marketing campaign titled “Night At,” Airbnb transformed the glass pyramid in the Louvre Museum into an enthralling bedroom where guests can spend the night surrounded by the world’s most cherished (and expensive) artworks, including the famed Mona Lisa.
In doing this, Airbnb bridged the gap between art and hospitality, creating lifelong customers of art aficionados who experienced this.
But Airbnb didn’t stop at the Louvre. It transformed other iconic locations into homes for a night, including the Shark Aquarium, the Paris catacombs (for Halloween Night), Dracula’s Castle in Transylvania, and the Great Barrier Reef.
The goal is to offer people the chance to immerse themselves in places with cultural, emotional, or historical significance — something Airbnb has achieved to the max.
The big takeaway: Connect with your audience emotionally by offering experiences that capitalize on their desires and interests.
5. Paper Tree x Rock Paper Reality Campaign
Rock Paper Reality (RPR), an immersive content and design firm, collaborated with Adobe Aero and Google’s Geospatial Creator to create an augmented reality (AR) experience for the Paper Tree origami store in Japantown, San Francisco.
Visitors in the area would scan a QR code, allowing them to view large, 3D origami sculptures integrated into the world around them through their device screens.
Beside each sculpture was a list of materials people could purchase in the Paper Tree store to recreate the model.
This increased business for the origami store and showed how companies can use Adobe and Google tech to make 3D experiences more accessible to their customers.
The big takeaway: If you cannot create an elaborate marketing campaign in the real world due to budget issues (or any other inconvenience), you can make it into a 3D digital experience that your target audience will love.
6. Budweiser’s Reunited With Buds Campaign
The spread of COVID-19 made 2020 a challenging year for everyone, including brands like Budweiser that aim to bring people together for a good time.
So, to celebrate the reopening of bars, Budweiser launched their Reunited with Buds campaign, which focused on uniting people after a challenging year.
In the ad, Budweiser’s adorable Labrador retriever puppy and its famous Clydesdale horses each make long journeys to meet up, presumably after spending the past several weeks social distancing.
With the spirited song “Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen playing in the background, the Reunited with Buds ad celebrated the excitement that comes with family, friends, and colleagues being able to grab a drink at the closest bar again.
In addition to accurately portraying the excitement of reopening, Budweiser displayed its product positively through balanced storytelling and nostalgic music.
The big takeaway: It’s okay to get a little sentimental and fill your campaign with elements that invoke powerful (and feel-good) emotions in your audience.
7. KFC Crocs
I’ve got two questions: Do you love KFC’s world-famous fried chicken? Now, do you like Crocs?
Suppose your answer is yes to both questions. In that case, you’ll understand the genius behind KFC’s decision to partner with Crocs, the pioneers of arguably the most comfortable shoes that exist right now (that’s just my opinion, though).
In 2020, KFC and Crocs released limited edition Clogs featuring a realistic Kentucky Fried Chicken pattern and the recognizable red-striped bucket.
The two Clog versions — the heeled and the regular — came with detachable drumstick-shaped Jibbitz charms attached to the top.
Beauty icon Me Love Me A Lot (MLMA) debuted the heeled version of these KFC x Crocs clogs at New York Fashion Week, one of the world’s most significant fashion events.
This garnered a lot of attention, which led to the limited edition Clogs selling out in less than an hour after the official release.
For every pair sold, KFC donated $3 to the KFC Foundation’s Reach Educational Grant Program, which helps KFC employees get college scholarships.
The big takeaway: To get as many eyes as possible on your campaign, launch it at a big event. You can also incentivize people to buy your product by making donations or doing some charity work that you love.
Or you can do both, like KFC and Crocs.
8. McDonald’s Quarter Pounder Fan Club
For nearly five decades, McDonald’s Quarter Pounder burger has been a fan favorite. In 2020, McDonald’s decided to capitalize on the Quarter Pounder’s popularity in Sweden to generate more buzz for it.
And it did so by setting up a Quarter Pounder Fan Club — a secret club for Quarter Pounder enthusiasts.
Not only did this club have limited membership slots, but the people who were accepted were given a special club card and access to Quarter Pounder-related perks, such as a candle pack, mittens, calendars, T-shirts, stickers, and pins.
This campaign motivated members of the fan club to share their experiences and love for the Quarter Pounder on social media platforms.
This piqued the interest of those who haven’t tried the iconic burger (or any McDonald’s menu item), and the giant fast-food chain got more customers through the campaign.
The big takeaway: Create a sense of exclusivity and make your customer feel special by creating a fan club or group of some kind. Then, offer them incentives to draw more attention to your campaign.
9. Samsung’s Capture The Night Campaign
To promote the launch of the new Galaxy S23, Samsung launched its Capture The Night campaign, which served to bridge the gap between creativity and technology.
Originally titled “Captura la noche” for its Argentine users, Samsung showed how much love and appreciation its users had for music as a way of life, as an intimate language, and as a coping mechanism.
Samsung created a web platform where its users can upload their night photos taken with Samsung Galaxy S23’s unparalleled night camera. This platform analyzes the photos and uses AI algorithms to define the style of music for each photo.
Not only can Samsung users figure out the kind of music they’d like to listen to, but they can use the platform’s suggestions to create original songs of their own, just like Agusto Schuster did.
The big takeaway: Figure out something your target audience loves and find a way to give it to them through your campaign.
10. Google Pixel Fold campaign
Foldable devices have been all the rage for nearly a decade, so when Google Pixel launched the Pixel Fold, it knew it had to go above and beyond to highlight its amazing features.
Working with Anomaly, an innovative marketing agency, Google Pixel launched a campaign with 3D anamorphic DOOH.
Anomaly used larger-than-life 3D illusion billboards and animation to showcase the foldable phone’s sleek design and highlight its immersive display features, among other things.
There is also footage of the displays that’ll be shared across social media to garner more attention.
The big takeaway: Figure out some innovative, novel ways to use regular marketing channels, such as billboards, video commercials, and social media.
11. SPAR Dress To Impress the AI Campaign
When it comes to guerrilla marketing, nothing beats interactivity. SPAR Slovenia knew this when it partnered with advertising agency AV Studio to set up an interactive city light right at the entrance of Interspar stores.
When a customer stands in front of the city light, the machine learning algorithm will scan their clothing style and use that to determine the customer’s musical tastes.
The process takes less than ten seconds and is safe as the system doesn’t store users’ photos. It only scans a customer’s clothing and plays music that matches their style, including rock, pop, and hipster music. The city light also recommends songs that customers might enjoy.
The big takeaway: Think about the things your audience might just pass by every day — and make those things do something unexpected and interactive.
Guerrilla Marketing Tips From Experts
Here are some tips to help you run a successful guerilla marketing campaign:
1. Know your target audience.
Since you know the product you‘re promoting, you likely have a good idea of the kind of people you want to target with your guerilla marketing tactics.
However, because of the spontaneity, creativity, and sometimes interactive nature of guerilla marketing campaigns, you’ll need to develop a deeper understanding of your target audience.
Guerilla marketing isn‘t just about reaching people but about forming a connection with a segment of your target market that has the same interests, needs, and values as the brand you’re promoting.
To do this, study your audience and figure out:
Where they hang out (online and offline).
What they like and dislike.
What they care about.
How they communicate.
What their routine looks like.
What can surprise them?
How they spend their leisure time.
Knowing this information can help you choose an appropriate location, craft a message that resonates, and pick out the right online promotion channels for your campaign.
“The secret sauce is really getting to know your audience like the back of your hand,” says Sudwir Khatwani, the director of The Money Mongers.
Khatwani explains, “It’s about chatting with them, understanding their quirks, and figuring out what really gets them excited. When you nail this, you can whip up a campaign that feels like a heart-to-heart chat rather than a sales pitch.”
That‘s what Red Bull did with their Stratos Jump campaign. It was a huge success because the brand understood and tapped into its audience’s interest in adventure and extreme sports.
That’s why they sponsored Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s groundbreaking freefall from Earth’s stratosphere, generating worldwide attention and increasing brand awareness.
2. Be creative and original.
The beauty of guerilla marketing is in its idiosyncrasy. It’s a marketing tactic that requires you to think outside the box for a way to embrace the element of surprise and create something relevant yet unexpected.
With guerilla marketing, the last thing you want to be is a copycat.
So the onus is on you to either come up with something that’s never been done before or put a unique spin on an existing concept — while ensuring that your idea aligns perfectly with your brand identity and values.
Adebayo Samson, the founder, and CEO of Academicful, believes that ambient marketing is the way to express your authenticity and creativity.
Ambient marketing involves integrating your messaging seamlessly into the environment in which your target audience interacts.
“It’s about becoming a part of their world, whether through strategically placed visuals, memorable experiences, or interactive elements,” Samson explains.
Samson says, “This approach ensures that your marketing efforts feel natural and unobtrusive, capturing potential customers’ attention without being intrusive or disruptive.”
Location does make all the difference with guerilla marketing. Jon Morgan, the CEO of Venture Smarter, knows this all too well.
“One memorable guerrilla marketing campaign involved a travel agency placing life-sized cardboard cutouts of exotic animals in unexpected urban locations. This sparked intriguing conversations, ultimately driving more people to their travel packages,” Morgan says.
This campaign’s goal was to encourage people to explore new destinations and experience wildlife in their natural habitats. It worked.
As Morgan says, “The key is to evoke emotions and make people stop and think.”
3. Test your idea before executing it.
The main goal of a guerilla marketing campaign is to wow your target audience. But if you execute your unconventional campaign without testing it first, you might end up doing the exact opposite.
No matter how genius your guerilla marketing idea feels, Tom Golubovich, the head of marketing at Ninja Transfers, advises that you test it on a focus group first.
“Guerilla marketing is unique and awesome, but it’s always a good idea to understand and respect the limits of your target market so as not to cause an opposite effect,” Golubovich says.
“Pick a small group of people to test your ideas beforehand, ask them for their thoughts, opinions, and feedback, and make your decisions accordingly,” he explains.
Testing your idea on a small group of people helps you predict how your larger audience will react to your campaign and the results you’ll get from it.
4. Promote your guerilla marketing campaign online.
After executing your guerilla marketing campaign, what happens next?
Some marketers choose to sit back and watch results pour in.
But a much more productive approach to take is the one that Jas Banwait Gill, the growth manager at SwagMagic, advises — which is to amplify the impact of your campaign through online marketing.
“Once the show is over, maintaining momentum is crucial. Keep the buzz going by hyping the success of your guerilla marketing campaign across your brand’s online channels. This extends the life of your campaign and keeps your audience engaged and excited about your brand,” Gill says.
Gill’s right. The presence of an offline guerilla marketing campaign shouldn’t mean the absence of an online campaign.
Instead, both your online and offline campaigns should work in tandem to increase awareness and generate qualified leads for your brand.
You can use different online channels, such as social media, email, blogs, podcasts, and PR, to promote your campaign, amplify user-generated content, and share testimonials and behind-the-scenes content.
You can even create a hashtag for your campaign and use it across all your marketing strategies, including content marketing, influencer marketing, and paid advertising.
5. Don’t focus on going viral.
Who wouldn’t love their marketing campaign to go viral? I sure would!
However, don’t let the prospect of virality make you take your eyes off the goal you want to achieve — providing value and getting more customers for your brand.
Going viral simply means that your campaign will reach many people; it doesn’t guarantee that it will reach the right people. So, while the guerilla marketing campaigns outlined above went viral, this shouldn’t be what you pursue.
Focus first on adding value to your target audience. If you go viral in the process, that‘s great. But if you don’t, you‘ll still get good results because you’re targeting the people that matter.
6. Analyze and learn from the results of your campaign.
When your guerilla marketing campaign is over, you need to analyze your results and see what you did right (and what you didn’t).
Jon Morgan, the CEO of Venture Smarter, proposes that you measure the success of your guerrilla marketing campaign using both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
“Track engagement, website traffic, social media mentions, and sales, but also pay attention to the conversations and brand sentiment it generates. These insights will help you fine-tune your strategy for future campaigns,” Morgan says.
You can also collect feedback from your target audience, partners, and stakeholders. Through this feedback, identify what worked well and what could be improved.
Document the entire process and note some best practices to adhere to for future reference. This ensures that you don’t struggle too much when you run another campaign in the future.
Guerrillas in the Wild
Starting to make a little more sense?
Hopefully, you’ll be inspired by these examples, especially if you’re promoting a smaller brand. Don‘t be afraid to crowdsource the content for these campaigns.
After all, creative approaches to your work help maintain guerrilla marketing’s budget-friendly, inbound nature.
Remember: Catch people where they are, and insert your brand there. Don’t interrupt, but invite them to participate.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
Programmatic SEO — Getting It Right
Programmatic SEO: Is it one heck of a challenge or something you can master in three hours? Do you need a specific toolkit, or will a basic understanding of Google Sheets suffice? And most importantly, how do you tackle programmatic SEO if you’ve never done it before?
These are all valid questions — and I’m here to walk you through the answers and more. Plus, I’ll even share a step-by-step process of how to begin with programmatic SEO.
(Psst: If you want to learn more about programmatic marketing, check out Programmatic Ads 101: The Plain-English Guide to Programmatic Advertising.)
Table of Contents
What is programmatic SEO?
How to Do Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO Examples
5 Tips for Building Your SEO Strategy with Programmatic SEO
What is programmatic SEO?
With programmatic SEO (or pSEO), you are making pages that target keywords nearly automatically.
Thanks to programmatic SEO, you can generate hundreds to thousands of landing pages designed to target hundreds to thousands of keywords — but you don’t need to spend time creating those pages manually, which saves a lot of time.
To do this, you’ll fetch data from and use pre-programmed rules. So, where do humans come into the picture? Only to fact-check the data and fill in the databases.
But here’s a caveat.
“Many people confuse product-led SEO with programmatic SEO,” says Kevin Indig, author of Growth Memo. Indig is also a growth advisor and ex-director of SEO at Shopify. He says confusion makes sense. These concepts do overlap.
Indig says product-led SEO involves a company that exposes a part of its inventory to drive organic traffic. A good example is Instacart, which allows Google to index all of its category and product pages.
“Programmatic SEO, on the other hand, is a set of pages created by a company that doesn’t have an exposable inventory,” says Indig.
He points to Workable as an example, which lists job descriptions on its site.
Job descriptions are not part of the company’s product inventory. However, the content fits well with the product, so the team created pages with the same layout and content pattern.
“To do pSEO, identify query patterns related to your product and build pages with the same pattern around them,” Indig says.
How to Do Programmatic SEO
Every pSEO case is somewhat unique regarding a toolkit and approach. To discuss the complete process, I’ll share insights from Juan Bello, founder of PorterMetrics, and Filippo Irdi, a growth marketing manager at Unmuted.
Let’s start with examples of pages you can design with programmatic SEO.
“At PorterMetrics, we started doing programmatic SEO to scale for Product pages and Templates gallery pages,” says Bello.
Tech stack you need to replicate Porter’s process:
WordPress + Elementor.
Airtable.
Google Sheets.
ChatGPT (through the add-on GPT for Sheets and Slides).
Whalesync or WPSync.
Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress or HubSpot CMS.
Meta description generator by HubSpot (at your discretion).
Now, I’ll take you through 5 essential steps of setting up programmatic SEO.
1. Choose a strategy for your programmatic SEO.
When devising a pSEO strategy, Irdi suggests considering one of the following three or mixing them up together to scale your efforts.
Vertical Approach
A vertical approach focuses on targeting a specific niche.
For instance, if you have a CRM designed for accountants, you can create content that ranks for keywords related to that profession. In this case, you’d be looking for terms that have a similar structure and are possibly used by accountants.
For example, if you search for “Software for accountants” in Ahrefs, this is the first result that comes up:
Here is a very clear pattern.
The two terms, “audit software for chartered accountants” and “accounting software for a chartered accountant,” have decent search volumes and the same structure: {accountant need} + for chartered accountant.
Given the search volumes and the keyword difficulty (KD), it’s worth deepening the research. The search result for “for a chartered accountant” has 273 terms with a similar structure.
You can use programmatic SEO to generate a landing page to target each of these keywords. As you can see, with the vertical approach, you pick a niche and attempt to cover every topic of interest for that specific community.
Pro tip: Don’t overlook keywords with low search volume. These can be hidden gems that provide unique opportunities to target specific niches.
Horizontal Approach
On the other hand, the horizontal approach involves positioning your content to capture traffic from different business types.
For example, if you offer booking software, you can aim to target niches that need your service. In the case of booking tools, you could think of terms structured like “booking tool for + {profession}.”
Following the same method, you’d search on Ahrefs for something along the lines of “booking software for.”
Here, the pattern is even easier to spot. All 499 keywords have the same structure: “booking software” + {business type}.
Pro tip: This is a great strategy if your product is highly adaptable and usable across industries.
ABM Approach
An Account-Based Marketing (ABM) tactic involves creating a list of partners or developing landing pages dedicated to prospective accounts and highlighting the benefits of a potential collaboration.
Let’s say you have a marketplace to connect manufacturers and contractors. You can create landing pages for all your production partners to leverage their reputation and drive traffic to your platform.
Pro tip: Create a comprehensive strategy and break it down into small pieces. Execute one piece at a time; if you get positive signals (such as an increase in organic traffic or pipeline traction), then move on to executing the next one.
2. Create a table (a database) of your content elements to fetch the data.
Next, visualize your potential topic clusters. According to Juan Bello, tables are an excellent way to do so.
“To do programmatic SEO, you should think of your marketing content as a table or spreadsheet, not as pieces of content,” Bello says. He then recommends the following layout:
Rows with the use cases or topics you’ll cover.
Columns with the “parameters” or elements of your content (e.g. H1, Title, text, images, etc.).
A table that covers a specific angle or cluster.
“The use cases or topics are every piece of content you’ll create for a specific angle or category. These topics are determined by your business model,” Bello says.
Example:
Company
Category
Angle
Clusters
Page example
Porter Metrics
Marketing reporting software
Use cases
Report template
Social Media report template
PPC report template
Agency report template
Porter Metrics
Marketing reporting software
Integrations
Dashboard software
Social media dashboard software
PPC dashboard software
Agency dashboard software
Booking
Hotels listings
Cities
Best hotels
NY best hotels
Boston best hotels
Toronto best hotels
Yelp
Restaurants listings
Cities, neighborhoods
Best restaurants
NY best restaurants
Boston best restaurants
Toronto best hotels
HubSpot
CRM software
Use cases
Software/tool
CRM software
Sales software
Service software
E-commerce store example
E-commerce
Color
Shoes
White shoes
Black shoes
Red shoes
3. Use case mapping to outline topic clusters.
To cherry-pick the topics without keyword research but with real interest from your prospective customers, PorterMetrics follows these four steps. Bello provided both the steps and the images of conducting this process.
Use Google Search Console to grab the keywords you’re ranking for. Categorize them or tag them into general topics to build use case maps.
Collect customer questions or topics from your customer service chats, calls, or emails to find the most urgent, common use cases people are trying to solve.
Use ChatGPT to analyze and summarize these conversations.
Scan other competitors’ and other websites’ robots.txt and sitemaps.xml to see how they structure their websites.
In Bello’s example, he learned how ClickUp structured their template pages by use case and then user type, ending up with +5K programmatic pages.
4. Make the most of content filling.
By following Porter’s pSEO example, create your table (or database) on Airtable.
Then, use WP Sync or Whalesync to sync the Airtable data on WordPress. These plugins would let you import this table to WordPress in a single click.
Every row creates a new WordPress page. Elementor lets you add dynamic elements so you can pull your Airtable columns as parameters on the webpage builder.
Click on the live Airtable template for content filling to replicate the structure.
To fill the table with content, use three methods:
Create formulas for headings such as “{Integration name} + reporting tool” (e.g. Facebook Ads reporting tool)
ChatGTP: Create dynamic prompts (e.g., “Create a description for an {integration name} reporting software…”). For this, we used the tools Data Fetcher or GPT for Sheets to connect ChatGPT to Airtable and Google Sheets, respectively.
Manually: When the copy isn’t standard to use formulas, or ChatGPT couldn’t provide contextual answers, fill pages manually.
Translation: We used ChatGPT to generate translations of every parameter and text into other languages (Spanish, Portuguese), making it relatively easy to make our content multilingual.
5. Dive into examples and results.
Stick to this tutorial to generate pages similar to Porter’s:
Connectors pages.
Looker Studio connector pages.
Google Sheets connector pages.
They are all nested under the Integrations category. creating
Destinations: [Integration name] for Google Sheets, [Integration name] for Looker Studio, [Integration name] data connector.
Languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese.
Note: If you change the subfolder from /en/ to /es/, you’ll find the equivalent in Spanish. If you change the subfolder to /pt/ and /connectors/ for /conectores/, you’ll see the Portuguese version.
Example
English: https://portermetrics.com/en/connectors/facebook-ads/ (Facebook Ads data connector)
Spanish: https://portermetrics.com/es/connectors/facebook-ads/
Portuguese: https://portermetrics.com/pt/conectores/facebook-ads/
That’s all; you now know the steps necessary to help you generate hundreds of pages.
Programmatic SEO Examples
Now that you know how to do programmatic SEO, I’ll discuss some examples.
1. Userpilot produces tool-by-tool comparison articles for zero and low-search volume keywords.
“We have produced 274 posts in nearly a year using programmatic SEO, which are converting at a 3x higher rate than our regular posts. You can see all the posts produced this way under our Tools category,” says Emilia Korczynska, head of marketing at Userpilot.
Korczynska says that these posts target the bottom of the funnel with keyword combinations like:
Best {use case} tools/software.
{Tool1} alternatives and competitors.
What is…{use case} + Question (e.g., how to {verb} {use case}).
[N] Best {use case} tactics that actually work.
Best {use case} services/agencies for your business / {industry}.
{tool1} vs {tool2} vs {tool3} for {use case}.
“The top benefit is that these posts convert at a much higher rate, and it’s not a traffic play. They drive relatively little traffic (less than 1% of our traffic),” Korczynska says.
Further, programmatic SEO contributed to large savings.
“It costs us so far $97 on average per programmatic post vs $275.09 per “traditional” ones,” continues Korczynska.
Now, you’re curious how it works from the technical side. Korczynska shares her working process. Her team uses post templates (a different template for every keyword pattern) built in Google Sheets, and two databases are also built in Google Sheets.
“The VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP formulas fetch info from the databases for each tool/use case and weave them into the template to produce a blog post. We then upload a CSV file with all the blog posts into our WP,” Korczynska says.
2. ClickUp uses programmatic SEO to publish over 1,000 pages per month.
ClickUp went from 25 pSEO pages and scaled publishing to thousands of pages per month. Here’s how it started and crucial tips for pSEO from Mason Yu, SEO product and AI advisor at ClickUp.
Programmatic SEO can trip up SEO experts for two reasons, Yu says.
“[One,] they cringe at the thought of thousands of duplicate content adding no value to the internet,” Yu says. “They can’t find a keyword pattern that feels worthy of a programmatic campaign.”
According to Yu, programmatic campaigns should take an iterative, agile approach. You don’t have to start with ambitious plans to launch 10,000 pages at once, he says. Instead, validate that there are enough reasons to pursue a programmatic keyword set with maybe 20-30 keywords.
“That will safeguard you from sending a bunch of useless pages into the void and test your programmatic prototype for content-market fit,” Yu shares. “Once you have the foundations in place and users find the content valuable, you can always expand your keyword list.”
Yu’s team at ClickUp followed this approach.
“Each time we expanded our campaigns, our results came very close to our projects because we had enough learnings to get buy-in for further expansion,” Yu says.
3. Tango builds how-to guides with programmatic SEO at scale.
Hal Zeitlin’s B2B marketing agency Candid Leap scales content marketing production for Tango with pSEO. Let’s walk through its workflow.
The Created with Tango Gallery campaign is in its early days. However, it’s a great example of how a brand can show off its product’s value prop in a unique way when driven by a researched SEO strategy.
Let’s see what visitors can get in this gallery.
Multiple categories to filter with multi-select (Use Case and Software).
Tags showing what you have filtered for, with x buttons.
Call to action inside the content grid.
Zeitlin’s team showcases pieces of content for different filters, making the most of programmatic SEO.
4. Flying Cat published 1,700 integration pages programmatically in 3 months, which led to 45% of all their demo requests.
Usman Akram, head of SEO growth strategy at Flying Cat Marketing, integrates programmatic SEO into clientele’s SEO growth strategies. Together with the team, they achieve astonishing results in terms of conversions and ROI.
Akram describes one client in the hospitality technology sector, which offered a middleware solution that links various tools to facilitate smooth operations. Think of Zapier but specifically for the hospitality sector.
Akram’s team created 1,700 BOFU pages for the company. These pages played a significant role, he says, contributing to around 45% of all their demo requests originating from organic search traffic.
“While our client’s website featured pages for direct integrations, our analysis using Hotjar’s session recordings revealed something intriguing,” he says. “Visitors to these integration pages were keen to understand not just the individual integrations but also how they worked together as a system.”
After some creative thinking, Akram and his team identified three types of scalable content that could be produced for each integration enabled by our client’s product:
Partner pages. These pages highlighted each direct integration with our client’s product. For example, “Connect [Our Client] with [Partner].”
Partner integration pages. These pages outlined the benefits of linking two of our client’s partners together.
How-to pages. For each partner, these pages provided instructions for common use cases, such as “How to Create a House Manual with [Partner].”
“The execution of this Programmatic SEO campaign wasn’t a challenge: we created some template pages with custom variables, created a large database for all variables, and pushed them live using a CSV import plugin in WordPress,” Akram says.
However, Akram notes, ideation and planning were the real challenges.
“We were charting an unconventional path with our research, as there was no existing search volume data for any of the 1,700 pages we aimed to create,” Akram says. “However, with a deep understanding of the customer, we were confident that these content ideas would meet the users’ needs.”
Did Akram’s strategy work? Let’s look at the results.
These programmatic pages were driving about 45% of all demo requests coming from the organic search.
Financially, each page comes to around $57, while a normal SEO page would cost >$400 typically.
In 12 months cumulatively, these pages drove about 86K organic page views with an average session duration of 4 minutes, 50 seconds.
5 Tips for Building Your SEO Strategy with Programmatic SEO
Are you excited to start making use of programmatic SEO best practices?
I thought so. But before you do, I’ll share six tips for building out your SEO strategy by harnessing programmatic SEO.
1. Eliminate low-quality, duplicated content, and isolated pages.
Aleyda Solis, international SEO consultant and founder, Orainti, shares her tips on addressing critical issues of pSEO-generated content.
She started by noting some of the big issues of content automation.
You could generate low-quality, spammy, or just not well-differentiated content that won‘t fulfill users’ search needs nor consistently rank. Thin or duplicate content cannibalizes each other, which will only hurt a site’s overall quality.
You could generate the pages in an isolated silo that doesn’t integrate or cross-link well with the rest of your site. This prevents users from continuing their journey.
Solis shared her tips to avoid these issues:
Validate the search demand.
“[Make sure] that there’s enough search volume and potential traffic to be ranked by these pages to compensate for the efforts, and that the query permutations are actually relevant for you to target,” Solis says.
Validate your content supply.
Solis suggests that teams check already ranking pages for the query variations. You can then identify the content type and format needed to rank.
Establish page generation criteria to avoid quality issues.
“Define the rules to generate and index your programmatic pages to ensure content quality and relevance,” Solis says.
For example, generate pages for query permutations with a minimum search volume and index only when they feature a certain minimum number of products, services, or insights. This ensures that you deliver unique value.
Establish page cross-linking criteria to help the search/conversion journey.
“How are these pages going to link to each other and to the other type and level of the site content?” Solis postulates. “How can you configure the necessary navigation elements so they can refer users to the next stage of the funnel?”
2. Automate adding structured data.
Aman Ghataura, founder and head of growth at NUOPTIMA, says, “Create a dynamic system that automatically adds structured data (Schema.org markup) to pages based on their content type.”
To add structured data to your pages programmatically, Ghataura shared the following steps.
Identify content types on your site that could benefit from structured data, such as products, articles, or events.
For each content type, create a JSON-LD structured data template using Schema.org vocabulary.
Modify your content management system (CMS) or server-side code to fill in the template with real-time data from your database. If you have a product page, the template should automatically populate fields such as name, price, description, SKU, and any other relevant attributes.
Implement a system that re-generates the structured data whenever the underlying content changes.
Code Example:
Ghataura shared a conceptual example using pseudo-code to illustrate how you might dynamically inject structured data into a product page.
“[Here] , , and other placeholders would be dynamically replaced with actual product data by your server-side code or templating engine.” Ghataura says.
<html>
<head>
<!– other head elements –>
<script type=“application/ld+json”>
{
“@context”: “http://schema.org/”,
“@type”: “Product”,
“name”: “”,
“image”: “”,
“description”: “”,
“sku”: “”,
“offers”: {
“@type”: “Offer”,
“priceCurrency”: “”,
“price”: “”
}
// Additional properties as necessary
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
<!– Product page content –>
</body>
</html>
Here’s how it might look in the code.
3. Use the combinations calculator to estimate the number of pSEO articles.
Before diving deep into programmatic SEO, make sure it’s worth the effort and is cost-effective. If your project needs around 15-30 pages templated pages, pSEO likely isn’t the best option.
To resolve this issue, Emilia Korczynska from Userpilot developed the Combinations calculator.
It shows you the number of pages you can produce from each template based on how many entries you have in each database it uses.
Create a copy to start using it.
4. Use alerting tools for sanity SEO.
According to Tejaswi Suresh, director of SEO at Botpresso, “When you deploy content at scale through programmatic SEO, there will be missed opportunities in terms of critical on-page SEO elements.”
That may include truncated meta descriptions, incorrect schema markup, technical bugs leading to 4XX or 5XX errors, Suresh says.
“Have an alerting system in place that routinely monitors these pages for inconsistencies and immediate alerts to reach the optimal health of the site,” Suresh says.
“Tools like Quickblink, Testomato, and Little Warden help keep your pSEO sites alive and kicking.”
5. Use the right tools to make your pSEO agile.
“I see a lot of marketers use Google Sheets and formal databases for programmatic SEO, I don’t like these,” says Hal Zeitlin from Candid Leap.
“Google Sheets is more like a make it once, upload it, don’t touch it solution. Formal databases are simply not easy for marketers to manage, maintain, and scale.”
Zeitlin team leans heavily on Airtable for programmatic SEO campaigns.
Generate Organic Search Traffic Efficiently with Programmatic SEO
Now that you know how to do programmatic SEO, you can use it to your advantage. Hopefully, these programmatic SEO examples and best practices give you insight into how you can make it work for your brand.