What Is A Landing Page?

A business website is one of the best ways to increase leads and sales online in this day and age as you are able to leverage digital marketing to generate high quantities of valuable traffic to your website. One way that you can take this a step further and turn your website into a lead & sales-generating machine is by using landing pages.

If you are reading this article, there is a good chance that you have heard the term “landing page” somewhere, most probably while diving deep into a topic such as “conversion rate optimization” and decided to look into it.

Lucky for you, you have landed on the right article as here, we will cover everything that there is to know on landing pages.

With that said, let’s move on to the first section of the article.

What Is A Landing Page?

A landing page is a specific standalone page on your website that you design, usually with a specific offer to get potential customers to convert at a higher rate. A landing page has limited information and is only about a single product or service. Meaning that there will be no other information on any other product or service on that page.

Usually, traffic to a landing page is generated through digital marketing methods such as ad campaigns and email marketing campaigns. This means that a link to such a landing page cannot be found on the website’s navigation, a visitor will only land on such a page via an external link like on an ad.

The Main Purpose Of A Landing Page

As you may already know by now, the main goal of a landing page is to get potential customers/clients via different methods of digital marketing to land on these landing pages and get them to convert by persuading them to take a specific action such as purchase a particular product or become a lead for a specific service via a phone call CTA or lead form fill out without any distractions. Therefore, increasing the leads and sales flow online.

For example, imagine you have a business website that sells mobile phones via your website and you are running ads online. Also, let’s say that a potential customer is searching for an iPhone 12. Here, you offering a general mobile phone page with all the phones in your stock or your homepage will not be effective as there is no relevant information about the product the customer is searching for.

Instead, you can create a separate landing page for potential customers of iPhone 12 and direct them to a page that provides all information about iPhone 12s in your stock with clear CTAs to order online.

Which do you think will work best? Of course, it will be the landing page as it caters to the exact need of the potential customer.

The Difference Between Homepage And Landing Page

As you be able to guess by now, the main difference between a homepage and a landing page is “purpose”.

Homepages are more focused on providing all the information about your business. This means that homepages are a bit visual element-heavy, contain a lot of links to different sections of your website, and display all of your services and products, not just one. This will distract the website visitor as they are able to visit any section of your website, break their focus, and not convert.

While on the other hand, a landing page only displays one specific product or service with very limited links or none at all with a very simple and clean design to keep the potential customer or client focused on the product that they are interested in and persuade them to convert into a lead or sale.

Types Of Landing Pages

When it comes to landing pages, there are mainly two types;

· Lead Generation Landing Pages

As the name suggests, a lead generation landing page is specifically designed to improve your leads from your marketing efforts. They are also sometimes known as “lead gen” or “lead capture” pages.

Lead generation landing pages have very strong CTAs, usually with an offer such as filling out a lead form that includes a potential customer or client’s name, email, and or phone number to get a free eBook. This is only one example, there are several other effective offers when it comes to lead gen landing pages and the information you ask from your potential customers in a lead form is not limited to the above-mentioned fields as well.

After a lead is captured successfully, you are able to get your sales team to follow up on them and convert them into a sale.

If you are a business that mainly runs on lead-to-sale conversions, we recommend you use lead-generation landing pages whenever possible as it works like a charm if done right.

Image Source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/429319776978566753/

· Click-Through Landing Pages

Click-through landing pages have a different goal than lead generation landing pages as click-through landing pages focus on sending (redirecting) users to a different page. While lead-generation landing pages capture the user’s information then and there on the same page, click-through landing pages send users to a different page to complete a desired action via a CTA button.

For example, software companies use these click-through landing pages to offer free demos of their software. They create a landing page with all the relevant information about the software and add a CTA button such as “book a free demo” redirecting users to a page to live book the demo.

The same is done by most E-commerce websites as well. They design a landing page for a specific product and eventually send users to a checkout page to finish the action.

Click-through landing pages are a good fit if you have a product that you need to offer a bit more information on before getting them to opt-in for direct purchases.

Image Source: https://www.deskera.com/blog/click-through-landing-page/

Importance Of A Landing Page

Apart from increasing the conversion rates of your digital marketing campaigns (as we talked about earlier), landing pages have several other benefits that it brings to the table as well. Some of them can be identified as:

• Increase Business Credibility – As landing pages offer very clean designs and offer on-point information to users on what they are looking for, it will establish some trust in your business in the user’s mind. Not to mention, you are able to add more trust factors such as testimonials, reviews, and display bigger brands you have worked with to improve your business credibility furthermore.
• Improve Your Brand Awareness – Improving your business brand is very important. Especially for businesses in today’s world with the heavy competition in each business sector. With that said, as you are able to design your landing pages to convey your business brand, and since you are driving high-quality traffic to those landing pages, your brand awareness is guaranteed to increase.
• Generate Leads & Sales – This is a topic that we touched on a bit in the above sections as well. But since we are talking about the importance of landing pages, this point has to be included. The main aim of your digital marketing campaigns is to get your target market to engage with your business and get them to convert into a lead or a sale. Since landing pages help you do just that but with a higher conversion rate, your ROI will increase.
• Increase Website Traffic – Did we mention that a landing page can be used for SEO purposes as well? A landing page can be ranked on Google if a correct SEO strategy is implemented. This will help you bring in a huge amount of free website traffic over a long period of time.
• Able To Offer Targeted Messaging – As landing pages have very specific messaging, you are able to communicate with your target markets more effectively. For example, if you are selling high-end watches, you are able to offer your landing page messaging in a more up-scale and elegant manner to match that target audience again improving the credibility and if done right, conversions as well.
•  Provide A Good UX – It is not a hard thing to believe that landing pages offer good UX as the content on the page is on point, web page performance metrics such as page loading speed in on point, very clear CTAs and very limited distractions on page keeping the user’s focus where it belongs. Users nowadays like these type of landing pages as it saves their time and offers them a seamless experience.

As you are able to see by now, landing pages are very important for your business and are guaranteed to improve your online business performance if done correctly. Thinking of why we emphasized the words “if done correctly”? You will be able to know why in the next section.

Common Landing Page Mistakes

Although landing pages are simple in design, actually designing them is not so simple. There are a lot of factors that you have to consider here and you must have a solid landing page strategy in place to design one correctly and effectively. Here are some of the most common mistakes that most website owners do when it comes to designing landing pages.

· Weak And Unclear Headlines

Landing pages are meant to be straight on point in terms of messaging. We have seen several landing pages with headlines that are irrelevant to the topic of the page or the intent of the users. This is really a big mistake as this will make your landing pages not effective in converting.

For example, imagine that you visit a landing page on buying a pair of headphones and the main H1 heading of that landing page says “Highest Quality-Products For You”. This topic does not talk about the headphone, it is just a general headline that almost all tech businesses use making the very first interaction for a user on your landing page ineffective.

Also, there are landing pages that use a lot of technical terms or in other words use jargon that normal users don’t understand. This will discourage any users to take action on the landing page as well.

Therefore, make sure to use strong headings that directly influence the users to take action with clear messaging and easy-to-understand language and tone to grab the attention of the users right at the very beginning of the landing page.

· Too Much information

Using too much information on landing pages is another big mistake we see most website owners/digital marketers make. Remember, landing pages are meant to be simple and on point. Using too much information will make the landing page over complicated and boring to the users breaking their focus and eventually leading to lower conversion rates.

Here, make sure to use only the most important information about the product or service on the landing page. See some examples of landing pages from your competitors if you want to get some ideas on what information you should include. Either way, make sure to use only the information relevant to the product or service on the landing page without any other unnecessary information.

· No Proper CTA

The main goal of a landing page is to get users on that page to convert into a lead or a sale. Without a strong CTA, you are really messing up your chances to do that. A CTA allows users on the landing pages to quickly know what the next step they should take in order to proceed with the product or service. Therefore, without a proper CTA on the page, your website visitors will be lost on the action you wish them to take and your conversion rates will go down. Also, not to mention, having no proper CTA will affect the UX of your landing pages as well.

With that said, make sure to have an effective CTA in places where they belong such as one in the header, one in the hero section, one right after the trust factor, and one at the very end of the landing page. This will make it easy for the users to take action anywhere on the page and clearly indicate to them the action you want them to take.

· Slow Loading Pages

This is an obvious mistake and doesn’t need much of an explanation. Slow-loading pages affect the overall UX of the landing page. This will make users bounce from your landing page without taking any action or even waiting for the entire page to load as internet users nowadays have zero patience for slow-loading websites because it wastes their time.

In order to overcome this mistake, make sure that your landing pages fully load in under 3 seconds, and if it exceeds that time frame, you got some optimizations to do. First, make sure that your images on the landing pages are compressed and correctly sized. Next, eliminate any unused JavaScript and CSS on the page, this will make the landing page weight a lot lower on the server making it faster.

If you are interested in learning more about how to make a landing page faster, here is a detailed article: https://unbounce.com/landing-pages/increase-landing-page-speed/

· Irrelevant content

Just like the point we discussed on adding too much information on a landing page, having irrelevant content will also make your landing page ineffective. Especially if you are driving users to the landing page via advertising campaigns, it will be a huge waste of money as you do not convey the messaging of your ads that are getting people to click through to your landing page.

Therefore, make sure that the content on your website talks only about the product or service that you offer via that landing page without any other information that is not relevant. This will help you align the messaging of your ads and the landing page to get the users to engage more effectively and get them to convert.

· Cluttered Design

Despite saying landing pages should be simple in terms of design at every chance we get. We see that there are still some website owners and digital marketers that use very graphic-heavy and animation-heavy landing pages. This will distract the users and, in some cases, offer a bad UX as well. As the main goal of a landing page is to get users to convert into a lead or a sale, having too cluttered a landing page design that distracts the users from the action you wish them to take will really affect your conversion rates.

With that said, make sure to design your landing pages with very limited animations and with only the necessary number of graphics and images that will not overlap any important text. This will make sure that your landing pages are clean and simple for the users to take action.

Keep in mind that we do not mean not to use any visual elements such as animations, images, and graphics here. Visual elements are very important for a landing page as it shows the product or service in action. We only mean to not overuse them to the point where it becomes a distraction to the users.

Also, make sure that the text on the landing page is easy to read by using good typography and using text alignments correctly.

The below image shows a badly designed landing page that is cluttered in terms of both text and design.

Image Source: https://www.justinmind.com/blog/the-7-worst-landing-pages-ever/

Best landing page practices

Now that you are aware of the most common mistakes most people make on landing pages, now it is time to see how you can guarantee the success of your landing page with some best practices.

· Have Different Landing Pages For Different Segments Of The Target Market

As we mentioned time and time again in this article, a landing page is designed for one specific product or service. This is another common mistake that we see most website owners make as well.

You will have different types of target markets for different types of products and services you offer. Therefore, the messaging you offer for each target market has to be different. If you offer a single landing page for all these target markets your messaging will not be clear or incomplete and your landing pages will fail to perform at their full potential.

As this is the case, it is always best to have different landing pages with clear messaging for each of your target markets to direct traffic to. This way, your landing pages will perform better and your conversion rates will increase as well.

· Optimize Landing Pages For Mobile View

Did you know that 86.29% of internet users conduct their online activities on mobile? Yes, this is a true fact according to a study conducted in April 2023. With such a high number of internet users on mobile, your landing pages must look good on one as well.

If your landing page is not mobile responsive, users will get a bad User experience and bounce from your landing page without taking any action. For example, would you take action on a website or landing page that does not look good on mobile? Absolutely not. You will not feel confident in engaging with that business. Therefore, having a non-responsive landing page will affect that business’s credibility as well as its conversion rates.

With that said, make sure that all your landing pages are mobile-friendly before you drive traffic to them. Also, make sure to test out the landing pages on different mobile types such as Android and Apple to ensure there are no issues whatsoever on any device type.

· Have Tracking Codes And Metrics Implemented

If you are running online advertisements such as social media ads and Google ads, having tracking codes set up on your landing pages is crucial. Tracking codes allow you to track the users on your landing pages and the conversions which are two very important metrics to track when it comes to digital marketing. The information you collect via these tracking codes will allow you to retarget your audience more effectively and improve your overall conversion rates.

Implementing tracking codes is simple and the codes will be provided by the advertising companies such as Google, and Facebook for free. The only thing you have to do is to add it to your landing pages and the tracking process will start automatically. If you don’t know how to add tracking codes, you can always seek the help of your developers to do it for you.

· Have A CTA Above The Fold

Having a CTA above the fold is one of the best “best practices” to implement on a landing page. Above the fold means the top part of a landing page that is visible on the screen before a user scrolls down. To put it more simply, above the fold means the first section of the landing page a user sees.

Having a desired CTA above the fold means that the users who visit your landing page are able to quickly identify the action they must take in order to proceed. This is a technique that most digital marketers use as is proven to be very effective.

Also, make sure to have a very strong CTA here such as a call button or a lead form capture with a clear message (most likely with a strong offer). This will increase the chances of the users converting a bit more.

· Have As Much Trust Factors As Possible

Trust factors as the name suggest refer to the elements of trust that you display on a landing page such as reviews, testimonials, previous clients/customers, etc. These trust elements help establish confidence in the mind of a potential client or customer and persuade them to convert. Would you buy something from a business that has no previous track record of offering good products and services? No, as you don’t trust that business.

As landing pages are specifically designed to get users to convert, having as many trust elements as much as possible will eventually increase your chances of increasing the conversion rates. We also recommend implementing a strong CTA right after you display the trust elements and you are able to persuade the users to take action right after they gain some trust in your business.

· Have A Good Visual Representation Of Service Or Products

Having good visual elements of the product or service you offer is another crucial element of a landing page. People first scan a webpage before they even start reading the content on it. Having good visual elements will help the users to scan the landing page while at the same time influencing their actions.

Here, make sure to have high-quality images and videos. Otherwise, your business credibility is at stake if you offer low-quality (unclear) images and videos. Another thing to keep in mind here is the file size of images and videos. Having bigger sizes on these files will affect the landing page’s loading speed. In order to overcome this, make sure to compress the images and videos more effectively without harming the quality and use techniques such as lazy load on the landing pages.

· Use Check Points And Bullet Points

The content on the landing pages must also be properly optimized in order for the landing page to perform at its full potential. If the landing pages have huge blocks of text that do not look good, are hard and boarding to read, the UX will be affected. This will lead to lower conversion rates.

Here one of the best options is to break the content up into different paragraphs and add as many bullet points as possible. This will break up the blocks of text and make it easy and interesting for the users to consume the content. Also, with bullet points, you are able to clearly specify some characteristics of the product or service you are offering to persuade the users a bit more to get them to convert.

Image Source: https://instapage.com/blog/landing-page-design-inspiration/

·         Provide At Least Two CTA Options With The Same Goal

When it comes to CTAs, there are several types that we can implement on a landing page. There are lead-generation CTAs, and there are sales-specific CTAs. Under each of these types of CTAs, there are specific types of CTA elements. For example, for lead generation CTAs, there are lead generation form fill-outs, call buttons, etc. And for sales-specific CTAs, there are buy now buttons, try book a consultation forms, etc.

The users you drive to your landing pages are not all the same, there may be some that like to call a business than fill out a lead form and there may be some that like to do this the other way around. Therefore, having two different CTA elements that come under the same CTA type will be a good thing to have on a landing page. For example, if your main goal is to generate leads via the landing page, have both a lead form and a call now button. This way you cater to all the types of users that we talked about above.

· Always Test And Adapt

As there are a lot of moving parts in a landing page, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to design a perfect landing page right from the start. All the best-performing landing pages went through a process of trial and error to come to that final stage and so does yours.

Always keep track of your landing page performance, make changes, and test things out until you find the best landing page design that works well.

Also, don’t blindly follow what your competitors are doing. They might not be converting as much as you think from their landing pages. Therefore, always do your own testing and follow strategies that are proven to work well.

Conclusion

There you have it. All the things that you should know about landing pages in one article. As you now know the importance of a landing page to your digital marketing campaigns, what to do in terms of your landing pages, and what not to do, we hope that you will use that knowledge to better optimize your landing pages and get your conversion rates through the roof.

If you have any questions or have any insights that you wish to share, please do so in the comments section below.

Until next time, cheers!