What Is a Landing Page and How Can It Help
A landing page is not to be confused with your website's homepage. You only have one homepage, and it is a gateway to all other areas of your site. It also contains a variety of information to help visitors get an idea of who you are and what you are all about. You can have any number of landing pages. These pages concentrate on only one subject and are meant to feature one product or service. Landing pages are not found in your site's menu but are arrived at through individual links. Potential clients can click on these links through ads or on social media.
Purposes of a Landing Page
Landing pages serve one of two purposes, determined at the time of website design or updating:
1. To Gather Leads.
The goal of the landing page is to promote interest in a potential product or service. While some companies offer gifts and other incentives, it is to send you to a lead page to collect contact information. With this contact information, you can then follow up with a mailing list or personalized email nurturing. For example, you may offer a free e-book on your subject of expertise to people who follow you on Facebook. You post a link directly to a page set up to get them to join your email list. The landing page gives details of the free e-book and contains a sign-up form.
2. Move Visitors Closer to Purchase.
This type of landing page features one of your products or services. Rather than the previous page, this page goes into more detail than a brief description. It may offer a special discount or announce new details that can get interested people closer to making that important buy. Say you sell jewelry and have just added a new line featuring amethysts. You send out an email telling them a ring in this new line is on sale. The email includes a link that goes to a landing page featuring the ring. This page would then go into further detail on the ring sale.
How Landing Pages Help
Landing pages are important to anyone who wants to sell, whether you have a product or a service. Let's explore how including landing pages in your website can benefit your business.
1. Create Targeted Lists
When people sign up for your newsletter on regular website pages, you know they have some interest in what you offer but not specifics. If you sell plenty of products, it helps to know exactly which one a particular visitor is most interested. By creating service or product specific landing pages, you get a better idea of this. Which, in turn, helps you target your emails to particular groups, increasing your chances of gaining a purchase.
2. Temporary Offer Home
Your special offers aren't something you want to keep going indefinitely. Landing pages are easy to set up and easy to take down. Which means that you don't have to do significant coding to change your entire site every time you turn your special offer. A Landing page does not have a link in your permanent navigation. By creating the page, you have a way to direct people to your offer without them having to wander around your site. People like simple, and if they are coming to your site for the offer, they immediately want to arrive there.
3. Testing Ground
The temporary nature of landing pages makes it easy to try different marketing tactics, different content, and even different website design on the page. This helps you know what is working and what isn't in regards to your marketing efforts. It is much easier to change an ineffective landing page than it is to change everything on your site because "something" isn't working.
4. Information Gathering
Your landing page is an excellent place to find out information about your visitors. Not only can you use links that will help determine where the majority of your visitors are coming from; you can also find demographic information based on the information you ask for on any other form. The more information you have, the better you can target your marketing efforts.
5. Being Found
Search engines love content. The more landing pages you have, the more chances you have of being found by the search engines. The nature of landing pages makes it easy to add new information regularly. Also, when you first embark on the website design process, you picked some keywords by you hoped to be found. With landing pages, you can be even more specific about keywords and can add even more. You further increase your chances of being discovered through a search engine search.
Final Thoughts
Any help you give your marketing efforts is good, but landing pages make those efforts greater than many other methods. You can have a decent site design and still get visitors. But with the addition of landing pages, your site design becomes exceptional, and you have a greater chance of success.
