The Beauty Of Landing?Pages.

Landing pages, what are they? Do you need one? Who should use one, and what makes a good one?

I’m pretty sure most of us have heard this phrase floated about by marketing gurus and bloggers and may have even encountered an Ad promising to build you and your business the ‘best’ landing page.

So what Is A Landing?Page?

A landing page is simply the initial point of contact between a business and a potential customer, usually following an ad or email campaign. Imagine it like the hotel entrance or even the welcoming staff at a restaurant.

The whole point of a landing page is to get your prospects through your funnel as efficiently as possible.

Because landing pages are hyper-focused, every piece of content, from the copy to the graphics and videos (if ones included), must be coherent and interconnected, part of one whole that directs visitors toward a CTA (Call To Action). Achieving this consistency is where most companies and brands fail. Even some self-proclaimed ‘Funnel-Hackers’ (sigh) fail miserably at this.

What Makes A Good Landing?Page?

Focused & Simple

The whole point of a landing page is to get prospects and customers from the top of your funnel to the bottom, and keeping things simple and focused is the best way to do this.?

Let's think of the restaurant analogy I mentioned before.?

I previously compared a landing page to the welcome desk at a restaurant because, just like a restaurant, you enter the premises as an inbound prospect (literally). They know why you’re here, and so do you. All that’s left is to seat you at the table (The Meeting) where they’ll ask you if you want refreshments (The soft sell in the meeting) and finally the close.

A bad scenario would be an unstructured seating process full of long waiting times and incorrect drink orders. This frustration would cause some people to leave and never come back, or even worse, leave a horrible review.

A landing page should be simple, with clear directions towards a singular destination. The prospect must do as little thinking as possible. More thinking leads to less justification, which leads to higher bounce rates.

Answering Questions

A good landing page should have all the information a visitor needs, solving all of their pain points while putting to bed as many objections as possible.

For example, as a service-based business, you can look at the types of questions your sales team encounters throughout the onboarding process.

If you’re selling a product, look at your support enquiries or ask your close network what types of reservations they’ve had about your product or line of products.

You can use this information to craft portions of your copy.

Audience Research

Understanding your audience will help you write copy relevant to your prospects’ current situation and pain points.

Have a deep understanding of what type of person would visit your landing page. You should know this way before you start building your page or hiring a specialist to build one. Every business owner, even novices like myself, must take time to understand their target market. It would help if you had a grasp of their interests, dislikes and personalities. I know this sounds very deep and daunting, but it’s not. It’s just time-consuming.

One sure way to get a close representation of your target market is by getting to know their professional habits, such as the types of industries they work in and the roles they’ll usually hold. Then layer those with other data points such as what apps they use or the hobbies they enjoy. This way, you can get a good feel of their temperament.

I reckon we can all agree that you wouldn't write copy targeted towards agency owners in the same emotive style you would for a homeowner.

Explainer Video

Not all landing pages use explainer videos, but I believe they can be crucial in increasing the number of visitors that convert.

Video content is a brilliant way to connect with prospects and give them a ‘seemingly’ deeper insight into your offer. Studies have looked at visual learning compared to reading, and the written word usually wins across the board, but when it comes to sales and marketing, people sometimes prefer to view video content from a brand than the copy.

Clear Call To Action

Make sure your CTA is clear, visible and positioned well. Placing your call to action at the bottom of the page gives you the added benefit of having visitors scan through the information on your landing page, increasing the chance that their questions get answered.

The two main types of CTA’s you’ll see on landing pages are.

‘Click-through’, is usually a lone button leading visitors to a separate page.

The second is a ‘Landing Page Form’. Essentially a standard contact form you’d see on a regular website. The only differences you may find are that these forms are usually much more focused and sometimes contain multiple steps.

Benefits Of Landing?Pages

Memorable

Landing pages can be memorable when made correctly. Not because of branding per se, but the information presented. The more focused and relevant a landing page, the higher the effects on the prospects.

Perfect for Lead Capture & List Building

Landing pages give you, as a brand, a place to collect a high volume of warm leads to retarget. You can also build massive lists for the same purpose. The best thing about this is that it’s largely automated.

High Conversions

Landing pages have an average conversion rate of 10% across all industries. However, this depends on how well the landing page and corresponding campaigns fit together. And because you’ll usually be relying on an ad campaign that 10% relative to the size of the audience is quite substantial.

Efficient Explanations

Using a landing page, you’ll be able to explain everything a prospect needs to know to make a purchasing decision or reach the end of your sales funnel.

Analytics

I see this as one of the best selling points of a landing page. Most landing page software comes with analytics reporting that allows you to track visitor behaviour on your page, which you’ll use to refine your page, constantly optimising it for higher success rates.

SEO

Landing pages are great for increasing your Google footprint. They can complement your other SEO efforts with keywords and backlinks. You’ll also be able to drive a lot of traffic to your landing page using SEO, and this is great because it allows you to offset some of the costs from your other campaigns.

Streamlines Your Sales Funnel

As we mentioned before, the hyperfocused nature of landing pages can increase efficiency up and down your sales funnels.?

By making a landing page the centre of your sales process, you can take a lot of pressure away from other efforts, knowing you have a well-structured sales funnel that’s bringing in consistent results, all while running on autopilot (for the most part).

Closing

Landing Pages can be a great asset to a business, but they come with some struggles.

These issues are related to poor planning and execution born from the dominant view of landing pages as just websites with one page. This type of thinking causes people to simplify landing pages, making them overlook some of the things I mentioned here.

Websites have their place and come with many benefits that I don’t think I need to mention here. But when it comes to sales, they can underperform because they’re usually overflowing with information or links to other pages, links going off the site, and sometimes multiple pieces of high-attention content like videos and blogs sprinkled with CTA’s.

But making a good landing page can be difficult when one ignorantly writes them off as overhyped “one-page websites”, thinking like this will open you up to traps that could cost substantial amounts of money and time. That’s why having a dedicated in-house or out-of-house team to build and manage your landing page is crucial.

If you’re a business interested in getting a landing page built and managed for you but are still unsure if it would be the best fit for you, feel free to DM us.

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Casey Willow