As this is a media blog, I have written a lot about different media types - search, affiliate, display, etc... all trying to win the attention of customers and entice them towards their website.

But is the message that leads the user to a website the same message they receive when they land? A good customer experience should take the visitor from their off-site touch-point straight to a page that will meet their expectations. Unfortunately we often see clients who come to us with campaigns where there is little relationship between the two, leaving the visitor to work harder to find what they are looking for.  That's if they don't just leave the site out of frustration.

Why does this happen? From what I have seen, it comes down to a division between the "website team" and "marketing team" in many organisations, especially those where the website is not seen as core to the business. Ultimately, both teams may want to drive success on the website, whether it is sales, enquiry or interaction with some fancy new widget, but these teams have their own performance goals to work towards. Marketing want to see that their campaigns generate site visits and have onsite acquisitions attributed to their own campaign. Meanwhile the website teams are moving around content and considering the online experience in order to maximise conversions, not just those from a particular media campaign but from the many, often simultaneous, traffic sources for the site.  Both causes are noble, but shouldn't everyone be pulling in the same direction?

So, what options are there to align the online and marketing experiences? Essentially, the landing page (and subsequent navigation through the site) needs to meet visitor expectation. It is no use landing on a site homepage with zero identifiable relevance to the media campaign when they could have landed deeper in the site or be a creative landing page that matches the campaign message.

I've blogged previously about the benefits of diversity and full service offering in a digital agency - being part of a full service agency we know that the first step to bridge the media/online divide is ultimately to get the teams talking!

So here are my three golden rules:

1) Talking - share plans, strategy and results between the online team and the marketing team. Replace the silos with an end-to-end view of the customer experience.

2) Testing - perform landing page AB or multi-variant testing to gather insight into what onsite content works best for different campaign plans. When everyone if fighting for a piece of webpage real estate ensure you base decisions on data instead of who has the loudest voice.

3) Targeting - it isn't possible to cater to everyone all the time, so target landing page content to the specific visitor. One option is to create a campaign specific landing page or microsite. Another is to serve targeted content. There are many tools that will segment site visitors and allow you to serve relevant content to them. For example, display relevant content to someone arriving by paid search, as opposed to a particular email campaign or those have arrived on the site organically. Just as I have blogged about customer targeting from a media point of view it can also be powerful to target a visitor onsite.