One of the biggest benefits of using digital tools to improve your business is the variety of tools at your disposal. From advertising to SEO, social media to CRM, there’s always something to jumpstart and speed things up. But with so many different situations, it’s sometimes easy to miss some important tools, leaving gaps in your knowledge. If that’s what led you to realize what the landing page on your website is, don’t worry—you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we provide a brief overview of landing pages. We’ll cover the basics and answer questions like what they are and the difference between landing pages and microsites. We’ll also make sure you leave with some great tips to help you create landing pages that deliver results. So get ready to dive in.
- What Is a Landing Page?
- What Kinds of Landing Pages Are There?
- Why Would You Use Landing Pages?
- What Are Some Landing Page Best Practices?
What Is a Landing Page?
You probably already know that a website can have pages that perform certain tasks. The About Us page was created to tell visitors about the website owner. Websites, on the other hand, let visitors know exactly where they are with as little text or images as possible. Then there are product pages to showcase products, 404 pages to let people know that what they want to see doesn’t exist, and the list goes on. The main page is one such highly specialized page. Its primary purpose is to be a landing page—the page people come across when trying to reach your site through an ad, link, search result, or social media. When people stumble upon your landing page, it should be designed to get them to take a specific action, usually signing up, making a purchase, or otherwise moving further down the funnel.
Both landing pages and home pages are designed to be the first point of contact a visitor has with your website or online presence in general. While you can certainly use your website to do specific things, such as getting people to check out new products in your store, you often can’t take it away and focus as much as possible on an informative landing page. The site requires at least navigation. Main pages do not.
The same goes for microsites – while they are certainly useful for creating small sections of a site that are very separate from the main site content, they can be overused and not very effective at driving leads. The intense focus of landing pages on a specific task is what sets them apart from other types of pages and why they are indispensable.
What Kinds of Landing Pages Are There?
There is no such thing as an official ranking of landing pages, and you’ll quickly learn that there are more than a few reasons for using landing pages. But depending on the goals you want to achieve for the people who achieve them, you can divide them into two broad categories.
The first is to click on the main page. The most visible element on these pages is the call-to-action button. Everything else on that page—text, image, or video content—is designed to get visitors to click the call-to-action button and move through the funnel.
Another type of landing page is a lead generation landing page. The purpose of using these pages is to get information from the visitor and get leads from them. These pages usually have a form that allows visitors to leave their email or any other information that you think is important.
Why Would You Use Landing Pages?
You should now understand the value of your landing page. They are performance oriented assets, easy and cheap to build, versatile and with some good design decisions, very effective. Landing pages are often used to grow email lists, improve conversion rates, and gain valuable insight into your target audience.
However, their benefits do not end there. It’s fairly easy to set some performance metrics on your landing pages, and because they’re inexpensive to create and implement, landing pages are one of the most testable assets you can have online.
If you want to know how differences in a single word can affect a page’s ability to convert, landing pages give you the best testing ground to find out. It’s also hard to underestimate how many different scenarios or strategies landing pages should be used for. Want to start a newsletter? Create landing pages. Want to push your new eBook? Create a landing page for it as well.
Do you have a sales class, new product or event? You guessed it – get people to sign up or buy with your landing page. You can offer a trial, get people to download your app, or let others know your band is on tour—all from your landing page.
What Are Some Landing Page Best Practices?
Landing pages are great and useful, and you’ll probably get a lot of practice creating them. But why not learn a thing or two about creating landing pages before you get started? Here are some things to keep in mind when creating landing pages.
Give Landing Page Builders a Go
We mentioned earlier that landing pages are easy to create and implement, and they are, but only if you use the right tools. Creating each landing page from scratch can be a tedious process and can cost you time like testing.
However, this is WordPress and you can rely on WordPress plugins or even templates to make the process easier and faster. Of course, you still have some important design decisions to make, but a good landing page builder can do much of the hard work for you.
Keep It On Point
There are many more ways to create a landing page wrong than right. Your copy may have failed, or you may have too many or too few. The form may have too many fields, or your CTA may be crowded with other images on the page.
Master pages don’t have many elements, each element should serve the same purpose as much as possible. That’s why it’s important to have a good image and good copy so that they both follow the same solution – filling out a form or clicking a CTA button. All the “extras” don’t belong there.
Use Different Ways to Drive Traffic to Landing Pages
How do you get people to visit your landing page? Give them access to any other page on your site in the same way. You can use search engine or social media ads to drive traffic to your landing pages. You can also have a variety of organic sources as well as emails and referrals.
You can have different landing pages for different traffic sources or use different sources to target different audiences. You can do lots of fun things by mixing and matching landing pages and traffic sources. So be prepared for it, create a system and remember to keep track of who’s coming from where.
Track Performance
It goes without saying that everything that happens on a landing page can be tracked, and most things that can be tracked should be. Whatever tool you use to monitor performance and collect metrics and metrics should connect to your landing page and capture all the data you can use to improve page performance later.
Let’s Wrap It Up!
Landing pages are an invaluable asset to any type of website – your bakery may have an associated blog, shop or business website, and sooner or later you will find a use for a landing page. Because they’re so efficient and easy to set up and go live, it’s easy to get carried away and publish a landing page without thinking. Don’t fall into this trap – make sure you know what they are, how to use them and how to create them. Setting up tracking allows you to at least learn from your mistakes and improve your landing page game.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
