One of the increasing aspects of online marketing that gets talked a lot about is “landing page”. But what really is a landing page? Why should you use a landing page and why are landing pages important to the success of your marketing campaign?
Online marketing is an inbound type of marketing which is totally different from outbound marketing. Inbound marketing rely on the premises of gradually coaxing your customers to patronise you by getting your message right in front of them as they seek answers to questions they might have.
While creating content is a way to first catch the attention of your potential customers, landing pages enable you to keep the conversion going after your audience might have left your website. This is of great importance if you are in the B2B industry where customers may not bring out their credit card to buy from you immediately they land on your website.
Let’s take any ecommerce web-store, a good example of B2C; once you are able to overcome the 5 obstacle to sales, there is a great chance that the customer is going to pay for the goods right way.
But in a B2B industry where services are sold, your audience won’t bring out their credit card and signup immediately. Depending on how long your buying cycle is, they probably will visit other similar websites to compare rate and competitive advantages before they come back to finally buy from you. A good landing page enables you to “catch” a ready-to-purchase audience, who you can further take down the sales funnel.
What is a landing page?
There are various definitions of a landing page. In the simplest term, we will look at how two major proponent of landing page defines them.
First is the landing page definition from Unbounce. According to Unbounce, a landing page as being a standalone web page distinct from your main website that has been designed for a single focused objective.
Let head over to Hubspot definition. Hubspot defines a landing page as “web page,” whereas a “landing page” is any page on the web on which one might land that 1) has a form and 2) exists solely to capture a visitor’s information through that form.
From these two definitions, we can arrive at a single definition. A landing page is a page on your website dedicated to marketing a singular product/service on your website. And this is why the home page is usually not the most ideal page to be used as a landing page.
Why should you use a landing page?
A landing page is used when you want to capture the attention of your website visitors. Web visitors might land on a page specifically designated for a particular purpose.
Let us say you are promoting your services online through paid advertisement and you have created a specific page for your visitors to land on when they click on that link. Or as web visitors move from one page to another on your website, you have a dedicated page created specifically to market your services/products.
These pages are your landing page and are to be used when you want to “capture” information about your audience and entice them to take a particular action.
The action they cry out will vary based on what your offering are. Examples of such actions are:
- Buying a product for ecommerce website.
Or
- Giving their email in exchange for an offer on your website for lead generation website
How is a landing page created?
You can create a landing page by writing your codes if you are familiar with coding or you can use any of the following software to create your landing page.
Whichever way you decide to approach it, following landing page best practice will see you have the maximum benefit of for your offers.
Resources to Create landing pages
A lot of resources offer you the ability to create spectacular landing pages. Here are just a few of them.
Leadpage
Unbounce
Landing page Best Practices
Now that you have been convinced that landing pages are important to your online marketing success, what are some of the best practices that can help you get maximum conversion on your landing page.
- Write Awesome Headlines– Your headline is the most prominent feature on your landing page and it might be the one thing that will break or make your visitor decide if they are ever going to take-up your offer. Therefore your main headline should communicate clearly the benefit of your offer. If you get everything wrong, do not get the headline wrong.
- Support your main title with a sub-title: Followed by your headline are your sub-titles. Your sub-headings act as a break point further telling your visitors the benefits and features of your offer. Use it to further convince your visitors how you offer can help them or the benefit they will derive when they buy your offer.
- Have a Clear CTA: One of the main features of a landing page is the call to –action or CTA as it is called. A CTA is the point where the visitor takes an action on your landing page. Each landing page should have only one CTA and this should be clear. For example, if your first CTA button says “register”, do not make the next one “submit”.
- Clarity rules: Want to make your landing page effective? Then make sure you are clear in your offering. Remove any word that can be confusing or any word your visitors have to go get a dictionary to understand the meaning.
- Long or Short- It depends on you: A lot of times, the issue if you should use a long or short landing page format usually arise when designing your landing page. But what I have found effective is to understand what your offering is and communicate it effectively. Remember, the attention span most web visitors continue to reduce as they have to deal with huge volume of information to process and act on. And this brings us to the final best practice for a good landing page.
- Test everything: Yes. Test everything. From your headline to the colour of your CTA button, you should be testing your landing page to find out the winning combination. Depending on your resources, there are lot of things to test but what you cannot afford to do is not to carry out any test. Remember, marketing conversions usually hover at 3% so testing to beat this benchmark is one thing you should do.
Conclusion:
Successful online marketing revolves around creating great landing page that helps your web visitors take a particular action that furthers helps you fulfil your marketing objectives.
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[…] be treated as such. If you need pages for marketing your services directly, consider creating good landing pages for that. Your blog is therefore not a place to rant about how great your product or services […]