Landing pages are an important way of reaching digital marketing success. They can encourage visitors to engage with different aspects of your site, potentially increase sales and improve your brand awareness. But in order to get the best out of your landing page, it needs to look professional and include interesting, engaging content.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a stand alone page that is used as a “landing” point for a specific purpose, such as digital marketing or advertising campaigns. It is where a visitor will end up after they click a link in an email or digital advertisement.
Whilst they are similar to a website’s homepage, there are a few fundamental differences that sets them apart. Unlike a website’s homepage, which typically has many goals and encourages exploration, a landing page is designed with a single focus in mind – to convince the audience to complete a Call to Action (CTA).
A homepage tends to have multiple potential distractions in the form of links to other pages on the website. Landing pages don’t have this, as they don’t want to distract the visitor from completing the CTA.
There are two different types of landing pages, with slightly different goals in mind.
Click-through landing pages
Click-through landing pages are designed to encourage visitors to learn more about a company’s offerings and click through the landing page via CTAs. These types of pages sometimes have multiple CTA buttons, such as ‘Explore’’, ‘Sign up’ and ‘Learn more’.
Lead generation landing pages
Lead generation landing pages have the specific goal to collect personal information about visitors – such as their name, email address, telephone number, etc. – to use for marketing purposes. These pages are simple, clean and easy to navigate. Visitors know the purpose of the page as soon as they click on it.
These pages tend to only have one CTA button, to avoid distracting users away from the primary goal. For this reason, lead generation landing pages often don’t include any additional information or links that could navigate away from the page.
PPC landing pages
There are a lot of landing pages that are made specifically for pay-per-click advertising. A PPC landing page is a purpose-built page where visitors land after clicking a link on a PPC ad. Similarly to lead generation landing pages, a PPC landing page has one clear purpose – to persuade visitors to convert.
These pages often continue on from the ad messaging, and tend to include a discount code or other lead magnet to encourage the user to complete the CTA.
Benefits of a landing page
There are several benefits of using a landing page. Because they are more flexible than a homepage and other static content, you can tailor them to a specific audience. This means that you can make these pages more personal and, as you will often have separate landing pages for each campaign, you can speak directly to the target audience for that specific campaign.
Landing pages can help to improve your conversion rate. Studies have shown that effective landing pages can double the conversion rate and using more than 30 landing pages can generate seven times more leads than sites that use fewer than 10.
Landing pages can also provide valuable data to help you to find out what is driving people to your website. This feedback can be used to improve your on-site content, blogs, newsletters and ads.
What makes a great landing page?
There are a few different components that contribute to an effective landing page. These factors may change depending on your specific goal for your site.
Branded colour scheme
Of course, you want the visitors to your landing page to know that they are visiting a page that belongs to your business. For this reason, your landing page should match the rest of your overall branding, and include your brand colours and logo.
You can create campaign-specific content, but it is important to ensure that the overall tone of voice is the same as the rest of your branding in order to keep things consistent and easy to understand for your audience.
Video or animation
Landing pages are meant to be engaging, so the more interesting content that will encourage your audience to stay on your site, the better. We know, through the rise in popularity of social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram Reels, that short video content is a good way of engaging an audience.
Including an entertaining, informative video on your landing page can improve the conversion rate by 86%. Videos are a quick, easy, engaging way of demonstrating the key points of a product. In fact, in a recent survey, almost 75% of people said that they had been convinced to buy something because of a product demonstration video. They are also easy to share, so you can generate passive advertising by allowing your customers to spread the word about your business once they have visited the page.
Minimal but exciting copy
When it comes to content on a landing page, the fewer words the better. You don’t want to distract away from the main aim of the page, which is to encourage your visitors to complete your CTA.
However, the visitors have to understand why you have sent them to this landing page. Regardless of whether this page has been set up to collect customer information, encourage newsletter sign ups or to boost sales, use a clear call to action.
People have short attention spans. Use engaging headings and bullet points to break up the text. Keep the tone conversational and in keeping with your brand identity. Be sure to include your USP and inform your visitors why they should use your products or service.
No points of exit
You’ve spent a long time creating an eye-catching, engaging landing page – why encourage people to leave it? The goal of the page is to push your viewers to your CTA, so avoid putting too many distractions or points of exit on the page.
Do you want support with making a compelling and engaging landing page to help your campaigns fly? Our team of web designers are here to help. Get in touch to learn more.
