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Landing pages allow you to take the first step towards better leads and higher conversions. The market scenarios have become complex due to tools and software that promise to make a brand’s promotional work easy.
But in the midst of all this, marketers tend to forget the basic terms for creating a compelling marketing campaign.
A landing page is a prime requirement of any company if it wants to provide a personalised experience to its target audience.
So in this blog, I will explain what a landing page is and how it works. I will cover all the common questions people have about landing pages and how to utilise them for business growth.
What is a Landing Page?
A landing page is a standalone page on a website designed to enable a specific action. It’s where a visitor “lands” after clicking on a link in an email or an ad from Google, Facebook, Youtube, or other channels.
Usually, landing pages are hidden from the main navigation of the website and designed to convert visitors into leads.
History of Landing Pages Explained
The concept of landing pages began in late 2003 when Microsoft’s IT department was looking for a strategy to improve online sales of their key product, MS Office. Let’s see how landing pages looked back then:
Clearly, a lot has changed now.
I remember creating landing pages directly within the CMS of a website. So effectively, you would either code the page or use a simple template within WordPress.
Later in 2009, Unbounce showcased their landing pages builder tool, which was specially built from the ground up for just landing pages.
Today there are hundreds of landing page builders out there, and every year I see a trend where tech companies are pushing AI to come up with easy-to-manage landing pages.
Understanding Modern Landing Pages With Example
Modern landing pages explained through an example is the best way to learn about today’s landing page standards.
Here, I have taken the example of a landing page by Emerge Global. It is a brand that offers a lot of different courses and programs.
Let’s explore Emerge’s landing page specifically built to generate leads for their public speaking course.
On this page, we can see there are links at the top that actually just link to different sections on the page. Such navigational queues on the landing page help elevate the user experience, and having no external links prevents distraction from the CTA.
The header focuses on the benefit and the USP of the services offered on the landing page. Further, the landing page copy fills the visitors with the necessary information required, the intro of the host, pricing, course schedule and modules, FAQ, and social proof to build credibility.
The structure of the whole landing page works for one single objective: to get prospects to sign up for the course.
Landing Page Vs Website
Over the last decade, many people have asked me this question. What is the difference between a landing page vs a homepage or any other page on a website?
Let’s take the most common differences between a website and a landing page:
Website:
- Typically Describe your company, products, or services.
- Is aimed at serving everyone.
- It usually has several pages linked by a navigation menu.
- I may offer a function or service, such as online checkout, customer service, or access to data.
But on the other end,
Landing page:
- Describes a single offer, product, or service;
- Aimed at serving a particular persona or audience.
- Typically there are no navigation links. So visitors can’t go to different pages.
- The goal is to keep them focused on one action, whether filling out a lead generation form or click-through to a product checkout page etc.
Landing Pages in Google Analytics
You might have come across a landing page report in Google analytics. Today, however, we are talking about marketing campaign landing pages that are different from the GA report.
The Landing Page report in Google Analytics shows a list of pages on your website that gets the most traffic from external sources. We will talk about the landing page report in GA in a separate blog.
Working of Landing Pages Explained
It’s important to realise that landing pages create a win-win. As a business, you generate leads, and for visitors, it saves time and effort by showing relevant information quickly with fewer distractions.
A visitor will fill out a contact form on the landing page if they feel the information you provided was valuable to them.
Lead generation landing pages work somewhat like this:
- A Visitor sees a call-to-action (CTA) and ends up on a landing page.
- The Visitor can then browse the page, and if the information is trustworthy, convincing, and relevant, the prospect could fill out the form and become a lead.
- This lead is then stored and passed via email or some notification.
- Based on the data you collect about the lead, you can then reach out to them and start your selling process.
How to Use a Landing Page?
Landing pages are helpful for various marketing goals, no matter what stage of your business. Let’s take a look at how you can use landing pages:
1. Generating leads for your business
A lead capture or lead generation landing page is a landing page that allows you to capture all of the information necessary to convert visitors into leads in exchange for some freebie. It includes information like name, email, and phone number.
Once you’ve captured business leads using your landing pages, you can nurture them to become customers through direct sales or email marketing.
2. Persona-based landing pages
Creating specific landing pages for each product or service lets you segment your audience and address their pain points more directly at each customer journey stage.
Let’s compare these two examples from Bequest.
In the first example here, the target audience is first-time buyers.
Whereas here, on the right, the target audience is first-time parents.
As you can see, there are subtle variations between these two pages to consider the campaign’s target audience.
3. Validate Product Ideas
If you want to start a new business and would like to validate whether your customers will buy from you, you might want to set up a Pre-MVP landing page. MVP stands for a minimal viable product, and in this example, I am suggesting a Pre-MVP page.
You can quickly set up a pre-MVP landing page and send relevant and qualified traffic to it. You can validate your idea if visitors take action on the page and, let’s say, leave their contact details. Some pre-MVP landing pages are great for testing ideas at a stage of product development.
4. Thank new leads
The thank-you page is a landing page in disguise. It helps in directing leads to another pitch or offer. You can build customer loyalty by placing links to your calendar, blogs, and social media to build rapport further.
Benefits of Landing Pages
The benefits of creating a landing page for marketing campaigns are unlimited. We will discuss five factors that make landing pages indispensable.
- Deliver targeted content to a specific audience
Because landing pages are so targeted, you can laser focus on your messaging, imagery, and offer. As landing pages have a single focus and target a specific audience, they secure more conversions and leads.
- Faster to Build
For me, the most significant benefit of having a landing page is that you can build one outside the website’s main infrastructure, and without using IT or web developers, you can test a campaign.
For b2b clients with massive websites which follow sprints for their release cycles, changing even a simple button colour could mean waiting months.
- Great for building an email list
You can request visitors’ email addresses in exchange for valuable free stuff like ebooks, whitepapers, PDFs, or tools. It can help you grow your email subscriber list faster.
With some tracking, you can also check which channels are bringing you the most traffic and conversions by reviewing the analytics with the help of tools like Google Analytics, ActiveCampaign, etc.
- Easy to test
A landing page is an excellent opportunity to test out different creatives, copies, and designs. You can come up with different variations and test them against each other. The risk of testing a new landing page is usually smaller than the risk of making significant design changes to your entire blog or website.
By the way, I have a detailed blog on the A/B Testing framework in which I have explained how to test a landing page to maximise conversions.
- Promote Products and Services
A landing page is a great place to promote products and services. Let’s consider the case where your company has recently built a new product. Although you can add a new page to your website and promote it, having a separate landing page to showcase this new product puts the spotlight on that product.
Therefore, you can provide more value and demonstrate the benefits and importance of this product to your customers without distracting them with other things.
I can go on forever, but I am confident you can see why using a landing page is an excellent marketing and lead generation tool.
Message Matching
I strongly recommend matching landing pages with the intent and the right traffic source. To keep it simple, I mean to make sure your ad copy matches your landing page copy.
Here is a set of rules which can help:
- SEO, match your landing page copy with different keyword groups or themes.
- PPC or SEM landing pages, match the landing page copy with the keywords and ad copy.
- Facebook Ads, match the ad copy and creatives with the landing page copy and creatives.
- Email, match the offer with the one in the email copy.
Different Types of Landing Pages
Marketers use all types of landing pages to make their marketing campaigns successful. There are specific landing pages for all kinds of advertising, be it for lead generation, webinar registration, or other purposes. All the different landing pages have their advantages depending on the final CTA.
There are 13 different types of landing pages, but I will not overwhelm you by discussing them in this blog. I have made a separate blog regarding this topic; you can check it out here.
Conclusion
All right, guys, there you have it – all the basics of the landing page explained, and now you are ready to build some of your own. But before you go, I have a surprise for you.
Check out this free download of my landing page checklist that includes all the essential elements and principles to build a successful landing page.
