Retail landing pages are a type of landing page, popularized by companies like Metablocks, Smarturl (Gupta Media), Linkfire and others. These pages are used primarily by the music and publishing industry to sell products available from multiple retail sources. As a way of more fairly promoting purchase and streaming option, these pages have gained massive popularity.
The Rise of Retail and Streaming Options
The number of companies selling or streaming music continues to rise and has created a fragmented marketplace. Major internet companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon all have music purchase/download (iTunes, Google Play and Amazon Music) offerings as well as music streaming services (Apple Music, Google Play Music, Amazon Prime) in addition to leading streaming providers like Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Rdio, Soundcloud, Napster (Rhapsody) and a growing number of smaller services. Add to the mix, traditional retailers like Target, Walmart, Barnes & Noble and many others, consumers have 100’s of options to choose from. Retail landing pages (and specifically Metablocks Widgets) are designed to help solve this problem.
Fragmented Retail Music Market Place
The music market is a global one. The are well over 100 different services that distribute music in one form or another. Music distribution has definitely become more and more fragmented. Everything revolves around one simple fact over and over again: consumers have an ever-growing number of options on how they consumer music! The idea behind a fragmented market is one in which many companies compete and there is no single or small group of companies which dominate the industry. To be fair, music is less fragment that books or other markets for example, but the number of viable music providers is only growing. First, there was Apple, with its iTunes, then there was the streaming provider Pandora, now, we have Spotify, Google, Amazon, Deezer, Tidal and a growing number of music distribution and streaming options. Rumor has it that Facebook is working on a music service of its own. With this number of players and level of activity, choice is not going away anytime soon. The retail landing page or the music widget brings the retail providers that are most import to you together on the same page to give your users informed choices on where to get your music, books or other services and products.
Books are Even More Fragmented and More Profitable
If you think the number of companies selling and streaming music was large and fragmented you should consider the number of book retail providers. unlike music books are still usually consumed in non-digital formats, although there are a growing number of digital book providers like Kindle (Amazon), Nook (Barnes and nobles), Google eBooks, and Kobo Books.
Not having to produce the handheld form of the books makes digital books much more profitable than physical copies. The added cost of distribution, storage, printing, and sizing makes non-digital books even less of an appealing option.
The Evolution of Retail Land Pages to E-commerce and Application Hubs
Retail links are great, just like Yahoo! directory was great in 2002, but that was over 15 years ago! Retail links may be the start, but they are definitely not the end. The next evolution of the retail link landing page are music and book widget pages and allow links and applications to live and worth together to both monetize the retail experience and engage users in a meaningful way at the same time.
The Optimizer – Retail Marketing Game Changer
“The Optimizer”, a feature found only on Metablocks’ music widget platform is a key competitive differentiator for the service and a potential retail marketing game changer. The idea behind our optimization is simple, order and prioritize your links based on performance! Move your most clicked or largest revenue generating links (using Performance Horizon and Flyt.it metrics for example) to the top, and move (or remove) links that perform poorly. With retail landing pages, real estate and order are important, so positioning top performing retail channels above ones that don’t perform is a no brainer.