What’s a Landing Page and Why is it Important?
Many people are confused between the homepage vs. landing pages, or generic web pages vs. landing pages, and the forethought that need to be made when developing each of them.
So, what is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a standalone web page created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign.
It’s usually the website page visitors “land” on immediately after clicking links in email marketing campaigns, social media advertisements or search engine results.
Where a homepage many have many goals and encourage exploration, landing pages are designed with a single goal or focus, known as call-to-action (CTA).
Here is an example below of a home page on the left and a landing page on the right.
See how the home page has lots of potential distractions and areas of explorations while the landing page is super focused on selling bikes. It is trying to encourage action with a 15% off discount. This is why expert marketers use landing pages too.
Well-designed landing pages have the capacity to generate significant traffic and act as a leading paid channel for businesses. It will have the right copy (written information that aims to inform and/or persuade an audience) and images to drive the conversions (actions) desired. This requires a decent amount of skill and effort to design. High-performing landing pages demonstrate understanding of the consumer’s needs and want, delivers value, and a clear explanation of how those needs can be met.
Why Do You Need Landing Pages?
If you aren’t using landing pages in your marketing campaigns, you’re missing out on significant opportunities. Here are some benefits of landing pages:
Lead generation
Landing pages are handy for collecting valuable contact information. You can require visitors to enter their names, emails, and job titles on contact forms in exchange for gated assets like webinars or ebooks. This allows business to build a relationship and market to consumer.
Niche – Single focus
For example, say you are a web designer marketing specifically to dentists. Well instead of sending them to your website that could be more generic and distracting, send them via email to your landing page specifically designed and marketed to web design for dentist. This is a more customer focused approach with better results.
Promoting action
Landing pages allow you to emphasize a single action you want visitors to take. Whether you want prospects to buy now, join now, download a gated asset, sign up for a newsletter, or purchase items on sale, focusing on one goal per page encourages your visitors to make a decision.
Boosting site performance –
Search engines like Google, etc. can also detect how well your site anticipates visitors’ needs. Your landing pages can help algorithms determine your landing page’s value and boost your SEO with relevant keywords in headers, URLs, alt text, and content. Unclear messaging on your landing pages will drastically change your ad rank, cost-per-click, and position in the ad auction.
Key Elements for Great Landing Pages
Landing pages will differ based on their corresponding campaign, but each must have these fundamental elements to increase conversions and capture lead information.
Personalize your message to stand out from the crowd.
Address your target customer by name, niche, profession. Add relatable videos or images. Play up concerns that prospects might have based on their role or industry. You need to grab the visitor’s attention and communicate your message with a clear – eye catching headline, supporting headline, and image.
Benefits
What’s in it for your customer? What’s in it for them? Demonstrate your unique value to your visitors right away with clear, compelling, targeted copy. Some landing pages demonstrate benefits by including a bulleted list of what someone will learn if they download a piece of your content. Another way to do this by adding an ROI calculator. This allows prospects to immediately predict how they could use a product to save time or money.
Social proof
Incorporating social proof in the landing page can improve user’s confidence in your offerings. Try inserting a banner of your biggest customer logos to validate your company. Testimonials can also help build trust and confidence in your company, product, service. Include links to press articles or emphasize how many happy customers your company has recently acquired. Do some A/B testing to identify what social proof generates the most respect and interest from your reader.
CTA
Call-to-Action should align with an action you want visitors to take and remain consistent throughout the page.
- Closing
Repeat your message and give your visitors another clear pathway forward. Obviously, you want visitors to follow through on your call to action. However, they may not be quite ready to complete that action. Give them an out by suggesting something else that could help them make a decision, like requesting a demo, joining an email list, or downloading a report.
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