What is a landing page?
In marketing terms, a landing page is a web page that encourages visitors to take one specific action. This might be to sign up to an email list, to submit a contact form, or to register for a webinar. The term landing page can be a bit confusing as it can have different meanings. Pages within your website that are expressly designed to contain content related to a keyword are also a kind of landing page. However for purposes of this discussion, we’re talking about landing pages that attempt to convert a visitor to take an action.
Where do visitors come from?
This question is oddly skipped over in most discussions of landing pages. Where in fact does your visitor land from? In order to fully understand the concept of landing pages, we need to have an idea of how the “landing” takes place. In most cases it will be from a paid ad, but doesn’t have to be. A landing page can be a referral page from a social media post or a blog post as well. In any case, the purpose of it should be apparent to the visitor before they arrive. Let’s say you really want to build your email list. You might post on social media that anyone who signs up to your webinar today will get 10% the first product they buy. When you provide the specific url to that page, the visitor is expecting to see a registration form.
Why have landing pages?
Depending where your clients or potential clients are situated within your marketing funnel, you may have different reasons for implementing a landing page.
Here are three common types of landing pages:
1. Lead Capture Page.
A lead is simply someone who declares they are interested in your business, either through a mailing list signup, or some other kind of opt-in. The point is that they are giving you their contact information so you can keep in touch with them. This is the first step toward a possible sale in the future, hence why you hear so often how important it is to build your email list. The content of these pages should be straightforward and contain these four elements:
a) Your offer;
b) Benefits of the offer;
c) How your offer will address a problem your visitor is experiencing
d) A simple call to action.
It used to be that simply asking visitors to sign up to a newsletter was enough to pique their curiosity, but nowadays an incentive is your best bet. This might be an Ebook, audio file, video series, tutorial or mini-course offering. In any case, your incentive should address an immediate need, and offer clear-cut options that your audience can use right away to address some sort of problem.
An SEO checklist or Ebook on course creation might be appropriate for experts in their field who want to monetize their knowledge online. If your audience is already familiar with you, a free coaching call or bonus pack might be something that would interest them.
Another hallmark of a good landing page is a lack of navigation links. With no other links to take visitors off your landing page and onto something else, you have limited their options to one: responding to your call to action. You don’t want your visitors getting distracted and going off to browse your site at that moment. There is a time and place for that, but it’s not when you’re looking for them to act immediately. You’ll also want to keep social media account links off of these pages for the same reason.
2. Sales Page.
Typically, visitors will be in the final stages of the buying cycle, have done their research, and are now looking to be convinced that your service is right for them. You’ll want to include testimonials, awards, videos, and very detailed benefit statements, including a money-back guarantee. A clear call to action to ‘Sign up’ or Buy Now’ should be sprinkled throughout the page.
3. Click-through page.
A click-through landing page is a sort of interim page that a visitor can view prior to completing your call to action. An example would be a product details page. In this case, your visitor may have come upon a page that contains an image and description of a product you want to sell. But your visitor might not be quite ready to buy, so you link it to a details page that covers more details about the product or service. Another example might be a testimonials page. Your visitor has read your lead capture page but if they need a bit more convincing before booking a call, a click-through leading to a page of 5-star reviews might be just the incentive to convince them to take action.
Now let’s look at how best to drive traffic to your landing pages. Of course, you can investigate paid PPC ads with Facebook or Google, but first let’s focus on free avenues to create traffic to your pages.
1. Social Media Marketing
If you have a following, social media is a perfect medium from which to send followers to your landing pages. For example, if you have social media followers who are not on your mailing list yet, a free offer can entice them to sign up. Facebook Lives and YouTube webinars could lead to either a click-through free trial page or to your sales pages.
Social Media sharing strategies:
-Encourage your team to share your posts on their accounts
-Consider social media platforms that you hadn’t tried before such as TikTok and Reddit
-YouTube videos and webinars containing links
-Podcast audios on established podcasting sites like Spreaker.com and Podbean.com
2. Email Marketing
Ways to send viewers to your landing pages via email campaigns:
- A welcome email sequence following a newsletter sign-up leads to a click-through landing page offering a discount or free trial
- An email tutorial series leading to a sales page at the end of the series
- Your email lists can be segmented so you can market directly to people who are new, familiar, or have purchased from you before.
- Foster further engagement by responding to email replies
3. SEO
It can be difficult to search engine optimize a stand-alone landing page, especially a click-through or lead capture page, simply because there is not much content on the page compared to a sales page. Having a blog on your own website can boost SEO for your page through links to it at the end of each blog post. But you can enhance your SEO for your landing pages even more by establishing yourself as an authority in your field through link-building and exposure on external websites.
Providing guest blog posts gives you exposure in other related markets, and you can keep an eye on social media postings, blogs, and forums dealing with your area of expertise and strategically offer input.
How to SEO your landing pages:
- Use “long tail” keywords on your landing page. Short popular phrases will be difficult to rank for, so stick to the particular purpose of the landing page as your primary keyword phrase.
- Check your page load speed. The faster your page loads, the better for SEO purposes
- Build authority and backlinks by posting on other websites (being mindful of their posting policies)
- Utilize SEO tactics such as title tags, meta descriptions, H1 through H6 headings, and adding alt tags to all images on the page. For an extra SEO boost, be sure to include keywords in the URLs of your image files.
If you’d like some help designing a digital marketing strategy for your business, book a call and let’s talk about it: