A landing page is perhaps a business’ most crucial webpage; it can literally make or break a sale. How many times has this happened: ever been enticed to visit a company’s website by a deal and then been unable to find said offer on the site? That’s a major marketing fail. Despite the number of benefits of landing pages, it’s astounding how much marketers will spend to bring people to their websites, but then just drop them off at the home page, rather than a special landing one. 

This is the digital equivalent of a landlord taking prospective renters to an apartment complex and telling them, “It’s one of those apartments,” without showing them the unit or even telling them the apartment number for them to find on their own. To avoid being that landlord or that marketer, here’s how to maximize your campaigns with landing pages.

1. Know What You’re Talking About

Before diving into the benefits of landing pages, let’s ask: what is a landing page? A landing page is a special page on your website where traffic is directed to prompt a certain action. That action could be anything from buying a product to downloading an ebook to signing up for a list.

An important distinction: your website homepage is not a landing page. Landing pages are designed to do only one thing: generate leads. They are where the call to action takes you so you can complete that action. As a result, good landing pages are very simple in appearance and have a minimal amount of content. Website home pages, on the other hand, are typically relatively busy ones and funnel traffic into several different directions. Also, home pages are not targeted and generally lack lead-generating capabilities. Landing pages are a little bit of extra work to set up, but the results they yield far outweigh the additional efforts.

2. Know What Ingredients Go into a Successful Landing Page

There are a few key items to include on your landing page:

• Conversion form. This is the whole purpose of the landing page. Have a form to capture visitors’ information and make it as frictionless as possible for visitors to give you their information. Visitors want to get in and get out, but don’t let their leaving be because your information was unclear.
• Copy. Copy should be clear, concise, and compelling. Landing pages should be clean and clutter-free. Starting with a powerful headline, your copy needs to make the point quickly and then get out of the way so the customers can go directly to the conversion form or point of sale. With too much copy in front of the form, you’ll lose them.
• Responsive design. Just like the rest of your website, your landing pages must be built with responsive design. (Your website is responsive, right?) The last thing you want to do is spend resources on bringing a prospective customer to your page and then have them ditch you because your made-for-desktop website is so small on their phone or tablet they can’t even decipher it.

3. Know How to Maximize the Benefits of Landing Pages

Once you’ve set yours up, the benefits of a landing page are endless, but here are a few noteworthy ones: 

• Targeting. There is no cap on how many landing pages you can have, which means you can create landing pages for highly targeted demographics. In fact, the more specific you can get, the better. Create a different landing page for each of your marketing personas and by targeting your messages, you’ll generate more leads.
• Analytics. Landing pages can provide a wealth of data on your customers and prospective customers. Every time a visitor completes a conversion form on a landing page, you get data on the individual, which is useful for personalizing pitches for them.
• Evaluate marketing performance. Create different landing pages for different elements of a campaign and you can see which pieces worked better. For example, if you use different landing pages for Twitter and Facebook, and the Twitter-specific landing page gets 1,000 visits while the Facebook one only gets 500 visits, you know you may want to revisit your Facebook campaign or redirect your resources to Twitter. Compare results on platforms, offers, and more to really hone your marketing messages (and if need be, adjust the campaign mid-flight).
• Provide additional content for your content marketing. The content marketing machine is always hungry and always ready for more content. Landing pages can help you stretch your content library and act as content for your marketing vehicles by giving you more things to share in your social media marketing/email marketing/etc. 

The more landing pages you have, the better. Want to start creating ones of your own, and need help discerning which ones will be most effective when and where? Get in touch so we can be your on-demand marketing team and transform your marketing results.