It used to be that a company’s website had only a few simple pages to it. A homepage, an About page, a page to list your products, and a blog were enough. With the internet marketing revolution, businesses, even the smallest ones, need a lot more web pages now.
Today, every business needs a pricing page and various landing pages. Perhaps you are vaguely familiar with what a landing page is. Not sure how to make one for your company’s products or services? Do you have a few live lead capture landing pages on your website right now? Are they not converting as well as you had hoped?
Across six expansive chapters, we will go over everything you need to know about effective landing pages and how to build them. This will include the basics (which will be covered here in Chapter 1) and more advanced concepts. There is something in this guide for people with all levels of marketing skills. Building a powerful and responsive landing page begins here.
Let’s begin with a simple but important question: What is a great landing page?
Imagine you’re skydiving. As you get closer to the ground, you pull out your parachute. On the ground are several landing pads for you to land on. These get you back on your feet safely.
Now, think of the Internet as the sky. There’s so much out there that a person (i.e., your lead) might see. Eventually, the lead knows what they want, and so they pull on their parachute to drop down. The landing pad on which they regain their footing is the landing page. These pages are built with a drag and drop landing page builder or a simple landing page software.
Landing pages are designed to provide more information about a specific product or service. Their ultimate business goal is to drive sales and conversions.
You should have a landing page for each product or service you sell. For instance, your company sells training courses, eBooks, and webinars. You’d need a separate landing page for each product. If you’re a marketing firm that provides social media management, email newsletter guidance, and content marketing services, you’d need a landing page for all three of those services.
Landing pages are often tied to advertisements you see on the Internet. These may be on other websites or across social media. When a lead clicks the link, they will be brought directly to your landing page. That’s why the specificity mentioned above is so necessary. No one wants to click an ad about your social media services and then be redirected to a landing page about content marketing. That’s a fast and easy way to lose customers.
There are several elements that are integral to any effective landing page. Let’s study these in more detail:
As mentioned above, landing pages are often used to drive sales. There are plenty of other types of landing pages that can help you achieve many marketing goals. Let’s talk more about landing page examples..
If you were paying attention to the first section of this chapter, you would know how we specifically differentiated between your homepage and your landing page. However, sometimes you will see other marketers transform their homepage into a landing page.
This is not to your benefit to replicate. An individual landing page is only supposed to appeal to a specific segment of your audience. Let’s use the marketing firm mentioned in the first section of this chapter once again as an example.
This firm offers social media, email marketing, and content marketing services. Imagine if their homepage was only about social media services. What if a lead who’s interested in content marketing finds the homepage? They’re going to be confused and move on to continue their search on another site. The company just lost business to its smarter peers.
The conversion rate of using your homepage as a landing page is pretty low, so don’t do this unless it’s only meant to be temporary. Create personalized landing pages wherever possible for better conversions.
If you’re a product-oriented business, you’ll want a product detail landing page. This page outlines your product, and also includes its benefits. You might include testimonials or a video of the product in action as well.
This isn’t a pricing page, but you should still include the price of the product in your copy. The only purpose of a product detail landing page, really, is to sell.
To make this page as effective as possible, only talk about one specific product per product detail landing page. Keep the bells and whistles to a minimum to avoid distractions. Don’t overload the reader with too many testimonials or videos; the copy is paramount.
Unlike the product detail landing page mentioned above, the lead generation landing page is less salesy. Instead, you’re enticing the lead to share their contact information, their email address. You want them to receive your email newsletters.
Again, this is not a sales page. You don’t necessarily need a lot of copy here. You might just write a paragraph letting the lead know what they might receive if they subscribe (such as exclusive access to a guide or even a freebie). Once the lead becomes a member of your email list, you can use follow-up emails to present small offers and, eventually, your main offer
Lastly, there’s the click-through landing page. This is like an abridged version of the product detail landing page. You’ll present some information about the product or service, typically in a bulleted format. The copy will be benefits-focused. There may be an accompanying video for more information.
The main point of this landing page is to push the lead to click to the next page, which is typically the pricing or checkout page.
Landing pages are individual pages on your website that are meant to provide more information about a product/service and drive a sale (i.e., conversion). To appeal to your various audience segments, you will need a separate landing page for each product or service. It is not recommended that you make your homepage into a landing page.
While many landing pages are aimed at selling a product or service, others are designed to get leads to subscribe to an email newsletter or just to click through to another page.
No matter which type of landing page you want to design, it should include several must-have elements. These are good copy, a strong selling proposition, a list of benefits, social proof in the form of a testimonial or review, and a CTA.
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