By Josh Gold

In our first post on landing pages, we talked about using video to achieve two fundamental goals: getting people to visit your page, and getting them to commit to an action once they’re there.

That covers question of how – how do you portray yourself? What tone and format that are best suited for the challenges of landing pages?

Today, we’re tackling the question of what – what content will help you face these challenges? What message do you need to convey to make your landing page a success?

Once again, there are two elements that you need to consider. Specifically: the subject and the audience.

What is your campaign about?

Remember, landing pages are created for the purpose of promoting particular issues. You shouldn’t be trying to boost your full brand or sell anyone on your organization’s overarching mission. Instead, you have the benefit of pushing an extremely focused message – something easy to understand and relatively manageable.

So make sure you stay on topic. Don’t bring up other programs, or go off on a tangent about the origins of your organization. This information may be very positive, but it also diverts attention away from your ongoing campaign. Instead of building momentum, you’re giving visitors more to investigate, more roadblocks to overcome before they can take the next step.

Who is your campaign for?

Once you articulate what is – and what isn’t – the subject of your campaign, you’re ready to consider how to present this issue to your audience.

This means asking. Who is your ideal viewer? What do they look like? What do they want?

For example, if your mission is to implement a unique educational approach, you should consider what makes this appealing to parents or children. If you offer counseling for those in crisis, ask yourself what situations tend to bring people to your doors.

Once you’ve determined exactly which images will resonate with your audience, you will be able to build a video that taps right into their interests.

If you’re really taking this seriously, we even recommend targeting multiple demographics with different carefully tailored ads. Instead of trying to construct a broadly appealing message, this allows you to speak directly to the unique concerns of each population.

Furthermore, each ad should ideally link to a different landing page, where you can select content and copy that will reinforce your thoughtful, targeted messaging. Furthermore, by dividing your audience in this way, you can track viewer responses even more effectively. You can see exactly where you’re bringing in the most traffic, how long visitors stay on each page, where they’re most likely to watch a landing page video all the way through. You can then tweak your setup accordingly.

In other words

Landing pages have a very limited job to do. They take on a narrow issue and streamline the journey from interest to commitment. They work best when there are no distractions around – when color, copy, and layout all unite to usher visitors towards a given conclusion. Nothing is extraneous.

Your messaging is an essential part of this process. By keeping your objective in mind and isolating the intended audience, you strengthen your landing pages and create a more effective campaign for your organization.

What campaigns do you have coming up? What target audiences will you be trying to reach?

Josh Gold, owner of Serio Films, has helped nonprofits raise millions of dollars through video-based marketing. You can follow Josh and his team over at seriofilms.com and facebook.com/seriofilms.