If your goal is to grow your business through the use of online advertisements, you need to leverage the power of landing pages. What is a landing page? It’s a web page where people are sent when they click on a link in an ad or promotion on your website or elsewhere online. It is a standalone webpage created to accomplish the specific goal of each campaign -- to either sell, generate leads or build business relationships
A landing page is different from the homepage of your website because:
- it has fewer links, increasing conversion rates
- it has a targeted message for one specific audience arriving from the ad
Benefits of using landing pages
There are many benefits of using landing pages. These include:
- Supporting business goals – such as promoting a new product, getting new customers or closing more sales. Each landing page focuses on the specific audience and desired goal while measuring results.
- Increasing conversions – because landing pages communicate a clear action for users to take and make it easy for them to take that particular action through a well-defined call to action. This increases the frequency of that action, also known as a conversion. And more conversions usually translate to more customers and more revenue for your business.
- Generating data and insights – concerning which campaigns, content and channels generate the most leads. Landing pages reveal which topics and offerings are of greatest interest. They make it possible to track behaviours and learn about your target audience. This facilitates fine-tuning your campaign strategy and improving its effectiveness until it’s a high converting landing page.
- Improving paid search campaigns – by converting more visitors to leads as a result of keeping prospective customers focused on what they were looking for when they clicked on your ad. Otherwise, if they’re directed to your website, they may get distracted and forget what they were searching for, reducing the chances of them contacting your business or becoming a lead.
- Growing your email list – by allowing those completing a form on your landing page to “opt-in” to receive emails and offers from your business. You can then use this list to send out newsletters, announcements, special offers and promotions, ensuring that your business stays top of mind until they’re ready to buy.
- Increasing credibility – in several ways including using focused messaging that makes it easy for the visitor to complete their desired task and by sharing testimonials from satisfied customers so the visitor feels good about their decision to act.
- Improving brand awareness – when the style, look, feel and copy of the landing page are consistent with that of the linked advertisement. This uniformity helps visitors become familiar with your branding, making it more likely that they’ll recognise your business again in the future.
Landing page use cases
Site visitors arriving from various advertisement sources should not land on your website’s home page if you want to meet your marketing goals. To ensure best results when potential customers click on links in PPC, email, search, social media, display and banner ads, you need to have a separate landing page for each campaign. The three most common use cases for landing pages include:
- Promotion to one segment of your audience – allowing you to provide a personalised offer or message, to a subset of your audience, that’s tailored to their specific needs as well as their previous relationship with your company.
- Focusing on one of your many products – means that you don’t want to send them to your website where they could choose to purchase an alternate item. Sending them to a landing page keeps them focused on the advertised item, where they must either click through to purchase or close the page. This provides better metrics for messaging improvement.
- Traffic source segmentation and optimisation – makes it possible to provide the amount and type of messaging needed based on where they clicked through. For example, someone clicking on 140 character Twitter ad will require more information than one who clicks on a link in an email advertisement.
Now that you know more about landing pages isn’t it time you start taking advantage of their benefits by using them with your online advertising too?