In digital marketing, a landing page is a term used to describe a single web page that is created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. It is almost always campaign-specific, with a single focus, no confused messaging and no website navigation like you might expect.
The aim of a landing page
Landing pages have one simple goal, known as a call to action, or CTA. This is very different to web pages, which tend to have many goals, as they encourage exploration and provide navigation around your website. Because Landing pages are so focused on one particular area or action, they are great to use in your marketing campaigns; they increase conversion rates and lower the costs of lead acquisition.
Visitors end up on your landing page in a variety of ways, but they all consist of them clicking a link to it. They might click on a link in a Facebook or Google ad, click on a CTA in an email received, find the link in your bio on social media or click on a social post containing the link. There are plenty of other ways they could find their way to it, but this is up to you and your plan of attack. Once a visitor is on your landing page, you ideally want a conversion to happen, whether it be a purchase, sign up or registration.
If you think of this in terms of a marketing funnel, you would have prospects at the very top of the funnel clicking on ads or CTA’s within your email outreach or social posts. These prospects would then end up on your landing page and those that ‘convert’ will move further down the funnel to either warm leads or even customers themselves, depending on the objective of the landing page.
If not selling directly, the aim of a landing page is typically to capture any visitors contact information in order to grow your mailing list and encourage future engagement. Anyone who has found their way onto your landing page has already shown interest in what you have to offer at the end of the day, otherwise they wouldn’t be there. You can capture their details through the use of a lead-capture form on your landing page and then integrate this form with your CRM to automatically save contacts and their details. This takes the hard work out of it and means that all ‘signups’ can not only be stored, but they can automatically be entered into email nurturing workflows within your CRM, to push them further down your marketing funnel towards becoming a customer or client.
Capturing information doesn’t necessarily mean just asking for a visitor’s name, email address and telephone number. As aforementioned, landing pages are typically designed for a particular marketing campaign, with a focus on promoting an offer or an upcoming event for instance. With this in mind, they can capture not only information about who your visitors are but also about what aspects of the offer or event interest them, what they’ve converted on and what they want from you exactly. You just need to ask the right questions.
This is incredibly useful information and will allow you to start to build a picture of your target audience whilst also gauging more information around what they like and want going forward. What other benefits do landing pages provide?
Why are landing pages so important?
- You can generate leads quickly and simply.
These leads can then be added to your mailing list and nurtured to try and convert interested parties or followers into customers over time. - You can collect valuable information about your leads
Including Demographic information, which is very useful. You can then use this information to better understand your audience and market to them effectively. - You can start to understand who is more engaged from your early crowd.
Landing pages allow you to track reconversions of existing leads, as well as generate new leads, so you can start to identify those followers that are engaged and those that are not. - You can allow visitors to download content offers (PDF’s, E-Books, webinars etc…) or offer to send them interesting documents
In return for leaving their information and answering any questions on the page. - You can use your landing page with other marketing channels.
We advise that you share your landing page on all social media channels, but it can also be used in lead nurturing campaigns and dedicated email sends to increase its reach.
Now you know why landing pages are so important, you need to consider what they look like so you can approach yours carefully and make it as effective as possible.
What do landing pages look like?
Here are some of the main components of a typical landing page:
The Headline
This is the first thing that anyone will see. Make it clear and concise and be sure to mention anything that you are offering them in return for providing information.
The Copy
As with any website copy, the text you use is really important to explain more about your business or campaign and what you need from visitors, as well as sum up any offerings for the potential new lead. Keep the copy clear, simple, free of blocks of text and make it really hard for a backer to say no to filling in the form!
Lead capture form
As discussed before, this is where page visitors can submit their information. It is the most important part of your landing page so get the questions in the form right! Don’t ask too many and make sure to keep an eye on the number of conversions compared to the number of page views as it may well be that visitors are being put off by the questions you are asking.
Keywords
You want to optimise your content for search engines so include some keywords in the copy.
Buttons to share on all social media channels
You are still looking to grow your leads as well as engage with existing ones, so what better way to do this than by giving visitors to your landing page a simple way of sharing the page with their connections on various social media channels, like Facebook or Twitter. This will expand your reach beyond your own network which is ideal.
Minimise distractions
You can do this by removing any navigation bars or tabs on the landing page helping any visitors to focus solely on its content.
Image(s)
Including Images or graphics in your landing page will make it much more visually appealing and ‘a picture tells a thousand words’ after all.
Personal Bio
You may want to consider including a short bio in your landing page. This could be about the business founder or team involved and can be as simple as a thumbnail image and a quote. This will help visitors to the landing page relate to the brains behind the operation as well as the project itself.
So there you have it, an introduction to landing pages and their benefits when it comes to running a marketing or advertising campaign. As with everything in marketing, make sure you test it to get it right, integrate it with your CRM and set up analytics so that you can track views and conversions in order to better your landing page at every turn, based upon the figures. You might even want to split test your landing page, using different content, to see which converts best.