WHAT DOES “LANDING PAGE” MEAN?
Before we get into much detail about why landing pages are important for your digital marketing efforts lets clear up just what a landing page is, and it’s purpose.
Many people may call any page on any given website a landing page, simply because any page really is a landing page in the sense that you can land on any page while searching the web.
Marketers differentiate between a regular page and a proper landing page through two landing page characteristics:
- Landing Pages (the ones we talk about here) have a form
- Are used to attain the visitor’s information (name, email, phone number, etc.)
*Keep in mind, having a form on your page does not mean that it is a landing page.
P.S. Your home page is not a landing page
1. GENERATE LEADS EFFECTIVELY
What better way to optimize your website’s lead generation than creating landing pages that are strictly dedicated to do just that? Many marketers and companies send all of their marketing efforts to a homepage. Individuals taking part in this are throwing away leads – even worse, hard-earned cash.
Conversion rates are highly improved when traffic is sent to a conversion-optimized landing page. Across various industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, the top 25% of these are converting at 5.31% or higher. We have seen conversion rates of 11.02% with some of our clients – getting close to the top 10%, which are converting at a rate of 11.45% and up. Landing pages are an industry best practice, so why throw away your dollars in practices that are ineffective and inefficient?
2. REMOVE DISTRACTIONS
Using a homepage as a landing page for your paid marketing efforts can be incredibly distracting to your visitors. Landing pages allow you to remove distractions such as sidebars, navigation bars, slideshows or anything that is not enticing your visitors to give you what it is that you want from them. Removing these distractions will exponentially increase conversion rates.
A website homepage has multiple distractions, whether that is the navigation buttons on top, the map or social media buttons at the bottom of the page. When you are looking for one thing and one thing only all of these extra elements will distract your visitors from converting.
Take a look at this example of one of our clients using landing pages where they removed all distractions and focused on a single offer:
3. KEEP YOUR PROMISE
Advertisers lure people with different ad copy and different ad promises. When your audience clicks on your ad, they are expecting to find just what you are advertising, nothing less, nothing more.
By sending visitors to a homepage, you are breaking your promise, whatever was offered in the ad is being disregarded. By using a landing page dedicated to a particular campaign you are giving your visitors what it is they are looking for, whatever it is that the ad was advertising is what the user wants to see on the landing page. Hence they clicked on your ad in the first place.
i.e. If your ad mentioned 25% off for a limited time, the user is looking for a coupon code that says 25% off at checkout, not your homepage with multiple images and no information about the offer served through the ad.
4. AD SCENT & CONSISTENCY THROUGHOUT CAMPAIGNS
Your ad and landing pages should be consistent and contain similar copy at all times. Not only does it tell the visitors that they are in the right place and avoids confusion, but it also helps with the performance of your campaigns – especially for PPC/AdWords.
In AdWords, The Quality Score of you ads is strongly determined by how closely the keywords and copy of your ads are to that of your landing page – why do you want a high-Quality Score? Because you want Google to serve your ads more often and charge cheaper average CPC.
5. MORE QUALIFIED LEADS = MORE OPPORTUNITY
Having a dedicated landing page for your campaigns is a great tool for many reasons, but the best one of them all is the number of leads/conversions your business will receive.
Of course, with more leads comes more responsibility. Make sure you are using your data wisely. You got the visitor’s information, but it doesn’t stop there. The biggest opportunity is here – it costs more money to bring more people in that it does to keep the ones already there.
Leads translate into email marketing campaigns, drip campaigns, and remarketing campaigns. This is your business’ opportunity to nurture all the people that have shown interest in what your business has to offer. Tell them more about your company, what other products you offer (they’re already interested, why not show them more?), or send them a coupon code/offer to come back for more!
