How to Best Use Landing Pages for Your Business

Landing pages offer many advantages to small businesses, but their main objective is to convert visitors into leads or sales. Whether you are selling products from your website, want customers to make an appointment or consultation, or are trying to drive people to your brick-and-mortar location for a sale, a landing page can help you entice customers to perform a specific action.

How to Create an Effective Landing Page

A landing page is a standalone web page separate from your main website that is designed to focus on one subject with a singular objective, such as filling out a quote form, calling to register for an event, or signing up for marketing emails. Rather than directing visitors to your website (where they may struggle to find what they’re looking for), you can send visitors to a page that is designed specifically to persuade and guide them to the action you want them to take.

Creating an effective landing page is much different from crafting an effective website page, which is typically full of things like site navigation buttons and links to other information that can distract visitors’ attention and take focus away from the action you want that person to take. A landing page is completely focused on a single goal—which is step one of creating an effective page. Set a specific goal (for example: you want people to fill out a contact form), as well as expectations you’ll use to measure the page’s success (like a certain number of forms filled out).

Once you’ve established a concrete goal for your landing page and have determined how you’ll measure success, follow these guidelines to help maximize your landing page’s success:

• Create a Strong Call-to-Action | Coming up with a clear call-to-action is the most important part of building an effective landing page. Your call-to-action should be directly tied to your goal and should be supported by every single element on the page, from the headline and copy to the images and design layout.
• Keep It Simple | Going along with the tip above, every element of your landing page should serve your goal, otherwise don’t include it. You want to keep the page streamlined in every way: minimal, concise copy, simple design and layout, and no unnecessary navigation elements. That being said, the design of your landing page should still echo the design of your website to keep branding consistent.
• Match the Rest of Your Campaign | Most digital marketing campaigns drive traffic by targeting a set of keywords or promoting a special offer. When a visitor clicks on your ad or link, they expect your landing page’s message to match the ad’s copy. If they don’t see exactly what they’re expecting, many visitors will leave your page within a few seconds. Make sure your landing page matches the look and feel of the rest of your campaign, while reinforcing your branding.
• Only Ask for Vital Information | If you’re using your landing page to collect information, create a form that requires as little information as possible from a visitor. The more lines you put in a contact form, the less likely someone is to fill out the entire thing. So, if you just want visitors to sign up for your email newsletter, only ask for their email address. If you want them to buy something, make purchasing the product as easy as possible. Once you have someone’s email address, you can always ask them for additional information later.

When to Use Landing Pages

Now that we’ve established some important characteristics of an effective landing page, let’s talk a bit about when to use one. As previously stated, when visitors click on a campaign ad or link, they should be led to a page that meets their expectations (i.e. it should match the look, feel, and messages from their previous destination). If they are confused whatsoever, most will exit out almost immediately. This is why sending visitors to your homepage—or even an on-topic interior page of your website—doesn’t provide enough clear focus to significantly reduce visitor bounce rate.

Therefore, you should strongly consider using a landing page for all of your inbound marketing campaigns to direct your visitors to the exact action you want them to take. Use a landing page to:

• Collect information from people who see your PPC ad.
• Drive people to your event or sale.
• Enroll people in your email newsletter.
• Promote your new product launch, webinar, or online store.
• Give away a free downloadable e-book, coupon, trial offer, how-to guide, or guest pass to an event.

A final note on landing pages: once you’ve created one, the job likely isn’t done. Crafting an effective landing page is often a process of trial of error. Test different versions of your page to try to get better results.

While your website is a powerful lead-generating tool, there are times when a more focused approach is needed to get visitors to perform a specific action. With custom landing page design, our digital marketing experts at Triton Commerce can create high-quality, compelling pages that help you get the right message in front of the right people. Contact us today for more information!