What is a landing page? Why do you need one on your website? These questions have been answered in the first two parts of my landing page series, but we haven’t broken down when.
You know that landing pages benefit your business – whether you need more sales, email leads, or to build a relationship with your prospective clients.
If you’re selling products online, it’s a no brainer that you need unique transactional pages for each item. Single offer landing pages can increase conversions by 266%.
But you also need landing pages to capture leads, get online bookings, give away a sample or free trial, build trust and relationships and even nurture your leads through laddering your sales funnel.
In this article, I break down three tactics for when you should use a landing page on your website. Use them for long term pages, each inbound marketing campaign, and for segmenting your markets.
Long Term Landing Pages
I love the long term landing pages. While they may not be highly tailored, segmented and specifically designed for a single marketing campaign (as we’ll see soon) – they work.
Long term landing pages are perfectly suited for:
- Free content (such as ebooks)
- Free trial offers
- Get a quote
- How-to guides
- Newsletter sign-ups
- And more longer term offers
I think of these types of landing pages a bit like fishing nets. You throw them out onto a unique, stand alone page on your site and periodically bring in your lead capture.
Ebook landing pages are effective methods to generate emails through your website:
Yes, you still need to use optimization techniques, like:
- Writing a clear headline
- Including a strong list of benefits
- Making your Call-to-Action button easy to see and highly enticing to click
- Using SEO methods like keywords and header codes
(See more landing page conversion tips)
You should still take action on these pages, even after you’ve created what you think is the ideal landing page: A/B test your pages. Hey, sometimes even the smallest of changes that you’d never thought of can increase conversions. In other words, with a little effort on your part you can get way higher returns.
You can still use this lead capture content to drive traffic from social media, online advertising, emailed newsletters and so on. Give something away for free to get the emails you need.
Unique Inbound Marketing Landing Pages
If you’re more of an inbound marketing purest and you have a passion for building landing pages (or optimizing your own using simple landing page templates), develop a landing page for each inbound marketing campaign you run.
Google AdWords
I particularly love this method for Google AdWords campaigns.
Why? Matching.
Building a unique page for each PPC ad campaign gives you the opportunity to create cohesive copy on your pages. Not only does Google like a super accurate page/ ad match, but your PPC clickers will too. Your visitors have high expectations. You need to meet their critical expectations in 5 seconds or less or that viewer is going to leave, and you’ll lose any potential for conversions.
Here’s what I’m talking about:
Additionally, this method is conducive to using dynamic keywords for increasing conversions. And it makes it much more streamlined to track, measure and optimize results.
Social Media
If you really are a landing page nerd and your competitive nature needs to go for the win, use unique landing pages for each social media marketing campaign or even platform.
Facebook:
Make a lead capture landing page specifically designed for your Facebook Fans. Use the same image on your page as you use in your Facebook updates and Facebook Ads. Word your landing page copy in the same tone and sentence structure (i.e. short, fun and shareable). Place a social share button – only for Facebook. Be sure to include enough “what’s in it for me” information and enticements – you have limited text to make optimal Facebook updates – so give them the goods on your landing page.
Do the same method for tailored Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+ pages.
Use unique landing pages for an email campaign. Tailor it for your market (and even segment it, as you’ll see next). The beauty of email is that you can familiarize your customers with your landing offer already. Use an email automation campaign to send out progressively more persuasive copy building up to your landing page ask.
Your landing page should reflect exactly what you’ve promised in your email – and use the same images and headline as your inbound linked message.
Example of the GAP’s email campaign to drive traffic to a matching e-commerce product landing page.
Segmented Landing Pages:
If you’re marketer who loves to build campaigns that specifically target a segmented niche, you likely have tons of segmented landing pages. They’re amazing at getting conversion results. Why? You can speak directly to each of your demographics.
Your landing page, after all is the heart of your online marketing campaigns. Build a landing page for each of your customer groups and drive traffic to them with separate and specific marketing flows.
For example, let’s say you market for a pizzeria. Your customer base is likely pretty broad and diverse. Using landing pages, you can promote your pizzas, specials and discounted coupons to specific demographics.
I’ll show you what I mean:
Joe’s Pizza wants to drum up take-out business by offering a 20% discount for one month. He could make bulk flyers, get them printed and do a general postal mailout. This is time consuming, costly and doesn’t give Joe a lot of trackable, measured results. Instead, Joe knows his market is always online and the best way to reach them is through clever online marketing.
He also knows he can target his customers much better online by creating segmented marketing campaigns to specifically target and resonate with his patron base.
He makes two distinct landing pages: one to reach the high school market and one to appeal to his family buyers.
By segmenting his promotional campaigns, he can run targeted Facebook ads, send out segmented emails, use retargeting tactics and other inbound marketing for each page. He can measure everything about his online marketing campaign, from click-throughs, demographics (as detailed as consumer like and interests), landing page conversions and ultimately sales from his coupon campaign.
Through segmented pages, you can resonate with your consumer by creating messages to directly connect. It also streamlines your conversion tracking, allowing you to test, tweak and optimize every aspect of your online sales funnel (from ads, social media, email and your landing page).
Conclusion
Landing pages are the heart of your online marketing campaign. There are so many strategies and tactics to employ that will increase your conversions and start bringing your business the results you deserve.
If you haven’t employed the methods above, start with one or two, test them out and always keep getting better results!
Here’s a few more landing page resources:
- Why Should I Use Landing Pages on My Website?
- What is a Landing Page?
- 21 Ways to Generate Leads from Your Landing Page
- 7 Landing Page Call-to-Action Formulas for Higher Conversions
- Landing Pages: The Fundamentals and Conversion Principles
What do you think? Do you have landing pages on your website? When do you use them?
wishpond