What is a landing page?
“In digital marketing, a landing page is a standalone web page, created specifically for the purposes of a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s where a visitor “lands” when they have clicked on a Google AdWords ad or similar.”
Most of the digital projects that we provide also include landing pages – and honestly, most clients are pretty skeptical at first. But what if I told you that companies have seen “landing pages outperform their generic pages by 115%”? Yeah… 115%, so take the leads you’re currently making, double it, sprinkle a few more leads on there for good measure – that’s the number of leads you could be getting if you implemented landing pages for your marketing campaigns. And that number only grows if you’re creating 10 to 15 landing pages for your individual campaigns, voices, and clients. (Increase by an additional 55%*).
So why is that? Why are landing pages crushing regular websites when it comes to conversions? The answer is simple – they are more targeted. Who wants to show up at a website that has very little information directly related to the ad they just clicked on? No one. You want an excellent customer experience and the way to get that is to create a custom landing page to provide information and drive people to action. Whether you want them to RSVP to an event, sign up for your newsletter, or download a whitepaper – your CTA (call-to-action) is only going to enhance the landing page experience.
A few months back, New England Dental Center approached us to create a series of marketing campaigns, each would feature a targeted Facebook campaign, pay-per-click campaign, email marketing, and a corresponding landing page. The client was a bit skeptical about landing pages so we moved forward with the Facebook & PPC campaigns by sending the links directly to the website. The intention was to get people to book their dental appointment online and in order to do this, we created a roadblock that would entice people to schedule their appointment directly from the home page. We quickly found that the roadblock wasn’t performing as expected and moved forward with our landing page strategy.
Within the first month after launching our teeth whitening landing page, we received a 1000% increase (yes – one thousand, we could hardly believe it ourselves) in conversions over the initial pop-up.
What goes into a good landing page?
- You only have 8 seconds* to impress someone with your headline. Most people will bail from your landing page prior to 8 seconds if the headline doesn’t shine, you can forget that 1000% increase in leads.
- Have a clear message. Offering people a ton of information on irrelevant things, as much as you might want to tell everyone about your business, they’re really only interested in the offer or service they clicked on, the less extraneous info the better.
- More than 90% of people who read the headline will also read your CTA* – so make sure the action item is in line with your headline and content. This should also be in line with you ad copy.
- We touched upon this a bit before but – the fastest way to get someone to bail is if your ads don’t match the landing page. Make sure its a clear, concise message from ad to landing page, to downloadable content or email marketing. Every tactic you’re using should compliment the others in concept, style, and content.
- Make it POP. Landing pages can be more fun than your website, obviously don’t get too crazy with it, but make sure you’re really grabbing attention with the layouts, colors, and styles of your landing pages. They should most definitely reflect the style of your brand but should also be just a teeny bit LOUD.
Sources:
Impact
KissMetrics
InteractiveMarketing Inc