Landing Pages and LeBron: What All Marketers Can Learn From This Gaffe

While those of you that know us know that we’re pretty big sports fans, it’s rare that we dive too far into that arena in this blog, where we focus specifically on marketing.  With all the news the last couple days about LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and other NBA players and where they may end up playing next season, ClickZ provides a great story on their site about a critical marketing error made by one team – And made by all types of marketers.  So even if you aren’t a sports fan and don’t know LeBron from Le Car you should still tune read on.   Specifically – Make sure your landing pages are always relevant.

From the article:

As rumors swirled Wednesday that LeBron James was going to sign with the league’s New York franchise, paid ads involving Knicks tickets and the “LeBron James” search term were spotted on Bing:

But it’s already evident that the Knicks’ marketing team has been shooting air balls when it comes to some aspects of its search strategy. The paid ads for “LeBron James,” “Amare Stoudemire,” “Joe Johnson,” “Chris Bosh,” and “Rudy Gay” lead to a landing page that advertises season ticket offers for the since-passed 2009-2010 season.

The paid search copy (see examples above) also hypes the 2009-2010 season in some instances. The Knicks spokesperson wasn’t able to confirm when exactly the Bing ads targeted to James and the other players went live, but said it was most likely when 2010-2011 season tickets went on sale in February. Therefore it’s fair to wonder how much budget has gone to paid clicks directing interested tickets purchasers to the wrong landing page.

Additionally, keep in mind the 2009-2010 Knicks (which the landing page promoted tickets and the upcoming excitement for this PAST season) were almost historically bad.

Put it all together and there’s an important lesson for all Marketers – Make sure your landing pages – whether for email, display ads, search campaigns or anything else — are always relevant.

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The Marketing Trenches blog provides thought leadership from actual marketing practitioners, not from professional thought leaders. Designed to help business leaders make more educated marketing decisions, our insights come directly from our experience in the trenches. You can find more from Right Source on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn.