Why landing pages might be the best thing that happened to your business
The mighty landing page
If you offer more than one product or service or you're trying to reach different customer segments, a landing page is a solution for you.
When running a campaign, be it through social media or Google Ads, you want to carefully consider your goals and audience and send them to a landing page with a narrow focus.
People want you to answer their questions with as little friction as possible. Your landing page should guide people to take an intended action tied to your goal (such as acquiring an email address, downloading a white-paper, or filling out a form).
When people arrive on the page, it should be obvious what you offer and that they have arrived in the correct location. It is best practice to make sure your campaign messaging and creative mirror that of your landing page.
Landing page surveys
Circumstances can change quickly and leave business owners scrambling to explore new services or different ways to meet their needs.
If you've built a community through Instagram, FB, Twitter, or email, driving people to a landing page with survey questions related to your business is an effective way of gathering more information to help you make tough decisions.
Looking at your business, can you think of how surveys could help you gather information or collect qualified leads?
Growing your email list with landing pages
Email is a powerful channel for growing your audience and engaging with your community and previous customers.
Email allows you to segment your messaging to ensure you provide personalized and meaningful content to a given audience.
For example, someone running a sporting goods store may want to send an email about their new winter running gear to people who bought running shoes in the last six months. This message may resonate with people more than a laundry list of updates such as a discount on golf balls.
Email is also a fantastic way to grow your audience and collect potential leads. For example, the sporting goods store could create a free guide about the best running trails in the area and have someone subscribe to their email list to download it.
Now that this person has opted into emails, the sporting store can send emails containing information this person may find valuable, such as a discount on top selling trail running shoes.
Key components for any landing page
Your unique value proposition
Unique features & benefits
Testimonials & social proof
A hero image that draws people in
Call to action (CTA - what do you want people to do?)
Lead capture form (what information do you want to collect)
Consistent creative & messaging
Let's pretend you own a bakery serving all sorts of cakes, pastries, and specialty desserts.
If someone is looking for a birthday cake with home delivery, it isn't the best use of their time to land on your homepage and sort through your scones, muffins, and lattes.
If they are googling birthday cake delivery, they probably want to get this cake ordered and check it off their list.
Wouldn't it be ideal if there was a way you could send them to a page specifically tailored to birthday cakes and highlight your delivery service?
Good news, you can! That is the magic of the landing page. ✨
It is essential people can understand what you offer within the blink of an eye. To mitigate any confusion and increase the likelihood of conversion, you want to make it very clear a potential customer has arrived in the right place.
For many companies, this part gets a little tricky because messaging hasn’t been ironed out yet. For help defining what you do, your benefits, and why people should choose you, visit this article.
Note in the examples below that the campaign creative and messaging is cohesive across channels.
Instagram & Google Ads campaign example
Google Ads and landing page example
Landing pages, paid search traffic & quality score
Furthermore, when using tools such as Google search ads, price and likelihood of your ad showing are tied to quality score.
Quality score is a component of Google Ads Campaigns and is related to the quality of your keywords, your ads, and your landing pages. Google wants to give people the best possible search results. You can't simply throw more money at Google than your competitor.
You need to create a holistic experience that shows Google your services or product best meet the search query's intent.
Your landing page should be relevant to the keywords you are bidding on. As a general rule, you don’t want to send paid search traffic to a homepage. Instead, you want to send paid search traffic to a page with a goal and narrow focus - a landing page.
To learn more about growing your business using Google Ads and landing pages, visit this article.
Landing page resources:
Looking for more information regarding landing pages? Get started with this best practice guide from Hubspot, The Ultimate Guide to Landing Pages.
Instapage also provides a blog covering 25 of the Best Landing pages, breaking down each component and detailing why the page does well.
If you think landing pages will be a big part of your marketing mix, you may also want to try out tools like Unbounce & Mailchimp.
