Two women collaborating on a laptop to optimize a Google ad landing page for better results.

We repeatedly talk about how Google Ads are great for small businesses. Their scaling budget, focused targeting, and clear metrics make them a versatile option. Once you’ve set up effective Google Ads, you’ll be able to direct users to a landing page on your business’ website. That landing page has just as important a job of ensuring potential customers continue on to purchase your products or services. We’ll explain how you can optimize your Google Ads landing pages for better results.

What is a Landing Page

A landing page is a page on your website where a user ends up when they click on a digital marketing campaign like a social media post or Google Ad. It’s where the user “lands” in their digital flight. The landing page ensures those who are interested in the marketing campaign maintain that interest and direct them to complete the desired actions. This could be to purchase a certain product, hire your business’ services, have them sign up for a newsletter, attend an event, etc. Your Google Ad’s job was to increase awareness about your business, its services, or its products and convert them to visit your website. The landing page continues that conversion process by providing a friendly and focused welcome with clear directions to keep going.

How to Optimize and Improve Your Landing Pages

Just like with any digital marketing, there are various strategies to consider when optimizing your landing pages to improve their performance. Here are some of the key strategies along with examples that represent these best practices.

The Right Page for the Right Ad

Unlike your home page, a landing page has a more precise job. It welcomes a user who has come for a specific reason through a specific Google Ad. Therefore, you don’t want an overly generic landing page that will leave users lost. Tailor the landing page to each ad or type of ad. For example, a Google Ad for a certain product or service should land the user on that product or service request page. If a user follows a link to sign up for a newsletter or event, the landing page should be the form to join. If users don’t arrive on a corresponding landing page, they are only likely to get confused, frustrated, and leave.

Concise and Effective Copy

Another way a landing page can potentially confuse any new arrivals is by being full of words. Users have come with a specific purpose, and a landing page should have clear and simple messaging that provides pertinent information. Keep copy concise to be the most effective. Wordiness or jargon could lead to confusion and distract a user from completing the conversion that’s your business’ goal. This landing page from FeminaHealth is a great example. Notice how the simple copy effectively communicates the information with distinct formatting that clearly directs the user to the next step.

Clear Call to Actions

Along with that direct and concise copy, you will want a clear and prominent call to action on any landing page. This will make it clear to a user how to proceed when they arrive on the page, optimizing its performance. On a product page, this will be a clear button like “Add to Cart”. On a newsletter or event signup, these calls to action could be a “Fill the Form” in prominent text with a clear “SUBMIT” button at the bottom. These clear calls to action help direct a user to continue from the landing to the next critical steps in the process. This landing page from Goldberg Centre Vision Correction for booking a consultation is a perfect example of a prominent call to action that directs any landing arrivals.

Cohesive Branding Between Google Ad and Landing Page

An important element of designing any optimized landing page is making sure it is consistent with the rest of your digital branding. When a user arrives at a landing page, they want the space to be familiar and expected. If they arrive at a page that doesn’t match the Google Ad visually and verbally, they’ll be confused or even worried they’ve been taken to the wrong place. That’s why it’s best practice that your landing page has cohesive branding. The space should seem familiar and right, and so should be custom-designed to match the visuals, tone, and style of your business. A great example of this strategy is this landing page from talkspace, where the branding is clear in the page’s logo, colours, and the tone of its copy.

The Best Landing Page is One They Don’t Walk Away From

Now you know some of the best practices for optimizing and improving your Google Ads landing pages. You want a landing page to provide a clear, directive, and familiar experience for any user arriving there. Its job is to keep users there and in contact with your business, not scare them off. If you want more tips for designing your landing pages or want some optimized pages designed for you, contact our advertising and web design teams at Rosewood, who are masters of sticking the landing. 

A man and a woman setting up various equipment for live streaming in real time

Today, live video streaming has well established itself as a dominant force in online content. As a powerful tool for engaging an audience, its popularity has led to every major social media platform providing the ability to view and produce live video content. Live streaming is an especially powerful tool for brands and businesses. It allows them to engage their audience in real time. We’ll explain some of the basics of live streaming and how your brand can use it to directly engage with its audience.

The Benefits of Live Streaming

One simple benefit of live streaming is that it’s extremely popular. it’s one of the most popular kinds of video content online with 23.7% of time spent on social media platforms dedicated to watching live streams. The other benefit is that live streaming is the best content for directly engaging with your audience. In all live streams, users can chat and react to the content in real time. In turn, the streamers can immediately respond and engage with their active viewers. This makes live streaming extremely personable compared to other kinds of content, and is why it’s also a popular choice for influencers. The result? Live streaming is one of the best ways for your brand to foster personal connections and communicate directly with its followers.

Streaming Platforms

With streaming’s immense popularity, there are many platforms to choose from. However, like any services, there are some clear leaders. 

Social Media Live Streaming 

Considering how fast they deliver and spread content, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the major social media platforms have their own live streaming services. Facebook LiveInstagram Live, and TikTok Live are all great and popular options for your brand’s live streaming. These allow you to stream directly to the audience you’ve already developed on any of those platforms. Plus, it’s easy to start right away. Streams on these platforms usually have simple production values, with streams coming directly from a mobile device.

Twitch and YouTube Live

The two other dominant streaming platforms are Twitch and YouTube Live. They are by far the most popular. Twitch users watched over 210 million hours in just the third quarter of 2022. It originally was designed for streaming video games, which is still the primary content on the platform. However, over the past years, Twitch and its streamers have diversified to now include more broad cooking and “Just Chatting” categories, the latter being by far the most popular. As a true testament to the variety, the BC Marine Mammal Rescue streamed the Vancouver Aquarium’s otter habitat for multiple years there. YouTube Live streaming is newer but has always been as diverse as YouTube’s on-demand content.

A difference for these platforms compared to social media streaming is production value. Twitch and YouTube streams tend to have more complex video and audio setups. Streams are meant to be horizontal video and rarely, if ever, come from mobile devices. Similarly, some brands and companies even just stream out pre-recorded videos or presentations. On the other hand, that complexity also means these platforms come with various tools like creating clips or countless plugins that social media lacks. Overall, these platforms are better suited for brands planning to make streaming a regular part of their content delivery strategy. 

Tips for Live Streaming

The ability to communicate and engage directly with your audience makes live streaming incredibly exciting for brands, but it can also be a little daunting. Here are some of our tips if you’re looking to start:

  • Engage your audience – The strength of streaming is the live component that allows for engagement, so be engaging. Address feedback, answer questions, laugh at jokes, etc. If people see you are engaging back, they will be more motivated to keep engaging with your brand.
  • Choose who and what to engage with – You can’t and shouldn’t engage with everything. If a stream has a large audience there will be a flood of chat messages, and you will have to be selective where you spend your time. Your audience will understand. Unfortunately, some material might be inflammatory or insulting. Ignore it and remove it. Acknowledging it could only fan the flames.
  • Announce and schedule streams – While many do regularly spend time on social media, many won’t be aware of your streams unless they stumble upon them. Announce planned live streams on your social channels so that followers are aware of when it’s going to happen. You can also provide some hints of the stream’s content, such as QA, announcements, a contest, or a giveaway. On dedicated streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube, it’s more typical to have a set schedule and announce streams on other social channels.
  • Spice things up with spontaneity – Spontaneous and sudden streams can also have a charm of their own. If they attract enough audience, they keep your following regularly attentive, checking your other content to see if a live stream is happening.
  • Remember you’re live – Live streams have no edits or cuts. Be attentive to what you’re saying and how. Mistakes are fine and part of the charm but keep them innocuous.
  • Choose the right platform – It’s best to stream where you have the biggest following, especially in the case of social media. However, as already mentioned, if you’re looking to make live streams a prominent part of your brand’s content, look towards Twitch or YouTube.
  • Consider streaming on multiple platforms – You may have a substantial audience on more than one platform. Consider streaming on multiple platforms at once. Various other tools and services help with this, such as OBS. Just remember that when you are streaming on multiple platforms, you need to be attentive to engaging that audience in multiple spaces.

Let the Live Streams Flow

Now that you understand some of the benefits, and fundamentals, and have some extra tips in your toolbox, your brand is ready to go live. If you’re looking for more specific advice, need help with live streaming, or are considering making it part of your brand strategy, contact our marketing team at Rosewood Marketing. Their expertise will help you get those streams flowing.

A robot using a phone and writing in a notebook with a pen.

If you’ve spent any time on social media or the internet at large lately, you’ve seen AI (artificial intelligence) has become a hot topic. Services like ChatGPT and DALL-E2 and their AI generated content have been featured in countless articles and posts. These conversations aren’t about a malicious AI like Skynet, HAL 9000, the Cylons, or Ultron of science fiction. Instead, these AI are learning programs currently in development that have become capable of generating creative content like images, art, and text. Naturally, this has created a lot of discussion about the capabilities, uses, and ethics of these kinds of programs. Rosewood Marketing is here to help you get caught up with everything you need to know about AI-generated content.

What is AI?

Let’s start with the basic: what is AI? AI in science fiction has typically referred to fully sentient artificial beings, usually computers, androids, or robots. These are not the AI were dealing with in reality… yet. Instead, AI currently refers to programs that use machine learning to more effectively complete tasks. These programs “learn” by running training data through algorithms to learn concepts and associations. They then make decisions or predictions without needing direct programming. These algorithms are now used in numerous places such as search engines, photo editing, web design, recommendation systems, language translation, chatbots, and far more. The technology has proved vital in being able to parse the massive amount of data now available on the internet. 

The Need to Know on AGI (Artificial Generative Intelligence)

Most major tech companies currently have their own AI development projects and divisions, including GoogleMicrosoftAppleMeta, etc. These are for various applications, most of which are primarily still for backend services. Typically, users don’t directly engage with or realize they are using AI programs. 

Generative AI, however, are ones the wider public has more actively interacted with lately and are responsible for the wave of AI generated content. These AIs are designed to generate visual, audio, or textual content based on user inputs. OpenAI is currently one of the recognized industry leaders in developing generative AIs. They’re responsible for both ChatGPT and DALL-E2, whose respective text and image generations have been all over the internet lately. OpenAI’s technology has also been used in partnership by Microsoft, who is currently using it for developing a “new Bing.” Nor is OpenAI alone. Midjourney is another major image generating AI that has become popular.

These programs accept textual prompts or commands and then generate content in response. Overall, the current general interest comes from both programs’ adequate ability to fulfill those requests. The sudden popularity is the result of OpenAI and other services recently making the programs available to the public. ChatGPT is currently free to use for its research and development, while Dall-E2 and Midjourney comes with a set of free uses with more available for purchase. 

Benefits of AI Generated Content

The benefits of AI generated content are immediately clear. With simple prompts users can create full pieces of text, lines of programming code, a sound bite of a person’s voice saying a specific phrase, or custom visual art faster than a human could ever produce and without that effort. The sudden impact of AI generated content is because of its immediately impressive ability to generate content from simple commands. These AI can greatly benefit content creation by speeding up the process and reducing human workload. Imagine being able to just give the prompt “Write a blog telling me everything I need to know about AI generated content” and getting a full article like this in a few seconds.

Drawbacks of AI Generated Content

That, at least, is the ideal. A lot of work needs to be done before AI generated content, replaces human creators, if ever. It is true that the creations of generative AI are already staggeringly impressive. While these AI are quite capable at creating certain kinds of art or texts, they immediately falter at more complex tasks. AI generations of humans have become infamous for their monstrous hands. CNET had recently used AI to write its articles, but after a review found more than half of those articles had serious errors, they paused further use. AI can only generate content as well as they have been trained, and right now AI generation remains at a stage that is an advanced technological parrot. It’s ability to create is impressive, but it does not actually “know” what it’s doing.

Where will AI generated content go?

Currently AI generated content isn’t quite up to par with human creativity and expertise. For simple tasks, however, AI are already producing staggering results. Along with the need for additional development, there are also current ethical concerns and debates about these generative AI. They have been trained on a wide set of creations by artists who did not give explicit permission for this machine training. As a result, AI generated content has raised debates about whether these programs are stealing from other human creators. That has only become more complicated with concerns that these AI will replace human artists and creators

On the other hand, AI generated content can be a powerful creative tool. Artists have been using generative AI in their work for decades, such as Harold Cohen’s AARON. Ultimately, creators and industries will adapt to how AI generated content develops and can be most effectively used. It’s a powerful tool, and just like any new tool, it needs to settle into its appropriate uses. If you’re interested in current AI applications for your business’ website, check out this blog and contact our web design team. You can also discuss with Rosewood’s marketing team about the current uses of AI generated content in marketing.