What is a landing page and do I need one?
Landing pages are probably one of the least understood marketing tools in advertising.
If you’re familiar with marketing, you may already know what a landing page is—it's the page a user lands on after they click on an ad.
This is partly true, but there’s a little more to it.
The purpose of a landing page is to turn traffic into conversions. Not all landing pages do this effectively—they must be optimised so that they generate a return on investment, otherwise you will be spending money on a page that does nothing (except lose money) for your business.
Consider the following scenario:
You want to buy a pair of blue skinny jeans, so you open up Google and type ‘blue skinny jeans’. The first result you see is titled “Buy Blue Skinny Jeans Online", so you click on it.
The link leads you to the homepage of a website that sells pants. Not just blue skinny jeans but every single cut, style and colour of pants that exist, including sweatpants.
Most visitors in this situation aren’t going to stick around to find those elusive blue skinny jeans.
Not when they have 30 other tabs open on their browser.
This is the landscape we live in, and as a business you really want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy from you.
A landing page should always reflect the intent of the visitor. If you're running ads, don't take your visitors to your homepage. Take them to a dedicated page instead, and be sure to optimise it to make purchasing not just easy, but intuitive.
The same can be said for landing pages for ads on Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.
A landing page is designed to get a visitor to perform an action; like entering their email address or purchasing your product, therefore it needs persuasive copy, and a clear direction (e.g. download my eBook, take my course). There should be no confusion whatsoever on the part of your visitor.
As for the question "do I need one?"—if you're running any advertising, a well-designed and copywritten landing page is essential.
You'll need one if you're:
Trying to grow your email list
Trying to increase conversions
Selling a product or service
You might think you need a developer to create a landing page for your website, but the good news is that you can do it yourself even without any knowledge of coding.
There are a number of landing page builders on the market, including Instapage, LeadPages, Unbounce, GetResponse and so many others. A landing page builder allows you to create your landing page using templates and you can perform A/B testing easily.
Everything is managed through your dashboard, where you can see your analytics and conversion data. I use Instapage when creating landing pages for clients and for myself - it's very easy to use and they have a large library of resources to help you.
If you’re looking to set up your landing page or improve your conversion rate, I can help you. Just send me an email or fill out my client questionnaire and we can get started.