Website landing pages are often well overlooked by those outside the search engine and digital marketing communities simply because they have traditionally been used exclusively by those communities to amplify search strategies and advertising campaigns. After all, they’re called landing pages. They are meant to be branded pages where motivated searchers land to find out about your product, service, offering or brand.
Think of it this way, a website is where people land to find out about your business. But landing pages are even more targeted. They are where people land to find out about much more specific elements of your brand, or product or service.
There are three distinct ways landing pages can be used to amplify your marketing and your business. They are:
The Ability to Present Content Specific to Your Advertising Promotion: Typically, when advertising online, it’s important to create a landing page that speaks succinctly to the product, service or special offer you’re promoting. If your business is indeed promoting a special offer, it’s likely your website won’t have a specific page dedicated to explaining its benefits, duration and the way(s) in which people can take advantage of it. One benefit of a dedicated landing page is that it provides a one-stop-shop for that promotion. Most businesses link their ads to their home page or another page on their website. But the benefit of a landing page curated specifically for the advertising promotion is that everything the viewer needs to know about the offer or promotion is right there in one place, including the call-to-action necessary to take the next steps. When the advertising content is completely synergistic with the content on the web page it takes you to (versus a more general website home page), it creates a more curated experience. The prospect sees content designed to react specifically to their interest in the promotion versus more general interest in the company, product or service, which is what a website home page might be more responsive to.
Lower Cost Per Click: Generally speaking, pay-per-click ad platforms reward agreement between the ad language and the language used on the page where the user lands once interacting with the ad. The reason is many “black-hat” advertisers use “bait and switch” practices that basically amount to click-bait, baiting users with an enticing ad title, only to take them to a completely different page offer. This constitutes spam. So platforms like Google and Facebook provide lower costs-per-click when the content utilized in the ad is the same content used on the landing page the ad takes you to. So, when you’re promoting a specific service or product, or a special limited-time-only offer, it’s important that the page your ad takes visitors to spells out the same offer at the very outset (preferably the first couple of lines on the page).
Landing pages allow you to utilize content that is an exact match for your ad, giving you the best possible cost for every click you receive throughout the campaign. Using a home page, or a product page could take them to language that varies even slightly from the ad itself. When that happens, you pay more for every click.
Segmentation: Landing pages are great tools to use when you want to segment your audience. Oftentimes, your ads or online content attract people at different places along the conversion spectrum. That spectrum runs from awareness to interest to desire to action. And depending on where they are, they’ll want to take different actions to further engage with your brand. If they’re only interested in learning more about your brand, you don’t want their experience to be impaired with “Call-to-Actions” to buy now, and if they’re are ready to buy now, you don’t want to muddle their experience with a lot of superfluous information that gets in their way.
Segmentation can help to target the consumer/client where they are along the interest spectrum and allow for the most seamless experience to nurture their interest along the way until they are ready to buy. Creating a landing page for each place on the conversion spectrum allows users to get to the place they need to be to take the next steps most immediately.
Creating that segmented experience can serve as a kind of funnel for your business. Creating a campaign with, let’s say, 4 or 5 different ads that each target users along the various places on the conversion spectrum can help segment your audience. Building out landing pages that comprise custom experience for each place on that spectrum allows for those at the awareness stage to easily learn more about your brand, product or service. A separate landing page developed to nurture the interest garnered at the awareness stage can also be developed to support knowledge of the benefits of engaging with your brand now. Likewise, another landing page can be developed to allow the customer to take action now, perhaps with a sense of urgency.
At each stage the customer’s experience is not muddled with a lot of information they don’t need or calls-to-action they are not ready to pursue.
In the world of digital marketing, websites are seen as generic models used to inform your intended audience about your brand. Landing pages are meant as curated content designed to nurture the interests of a very targeted audience, with the ultimate goal of converting them. Never use the two interchangeably. Understanding when and why you should use a landing page can help grow your business dramatically.
If you’d like to learn more about how landing pages can help grow your brand, contact the Proctor Digital team at 773.664.5819. We love to help catapult businesses above the fray in today’s digital marketing landscape.