A landing page is a web page that exists to achieve the specific goal – most often this goal is collecting its visitors’ contact information, via a form that is present on it.
What Is a Landing Page
There are a lot of landing page definitions floating around the Net. Some people call any web page where visitors can “land” a landing page. Others define it by checking it against strict criteria. The criteria also differ depending on who you ask.
Google Ads and Google Analytics use the term “landing page” to refer to any destination page a visitor can land at.
This post on Neil Patel’s blog, a person who Forbes called one of the top 10 marketers, states that a landing page may drive:
- Sales.
- Email list sign-ups.
- White paper downloads.
- Software trials.
- Webinar sign-ups.
And this HubSpot post by Corey Wainwright gives a landing page definition like this – a landing page is a standalone web page that meets these two conditions:
- It has a form to capture visitors’ information.
- It exists for only one purpose – capturing visitors’ information via that form.
You can send visitors to a landing page from anywhere – your social media post or Google ad, a link in your (or your referral’s) newsletter, or from someone else’s website.
People can also arrive at it “organically” from Google Search results if you’ve done your landing page SEO right.
By its definition, a landing page needs to be very specific and appealing. There is a lot of sense to make a separate landing page for every target audience that a business wants to sell to.
What Do You Need a “Landing Page” For
Here is what you’d want to use a special page for:
- Use a landing page if you run paid ads and you want to bring people to a concise, dedicated page that would have a decent conversion rate.
- Use it to promote a webinar, free or paid, a masterclass, or a lecture and get people’s registrations to it.
- Use a landing page to enroll people into your newsletter.
- Make a landing page if you want visitors to sign up for a free trial of your product.
- Use it to sell your book or a course.
These goals need specialized web pages to give the best results.
Types of Landing Pages and What Landing Page Is Not
Points #2, #3, and #5 from above would do better with different types of pages than a landing page though. And that brings us to the next fact: there are many variations of the landing pages out there, based on different goals and specifics of the businesses.
In general, they fall under one of two archetypes:
- Lead generation landing pages.
- Clickthrough landing pages.
Read more about it in this post: What Landing Page Is Not: Landing Page vs. Opt-in Page vs. Sales Page vs. Webinar and Event Pages vs. Thank You Page
Lead Generation Landing Pages
This is the type described at the beginning of the article: a landing page that has a form to collect visitors’ contact information, like email and name.
Lead generation landing pages help build lists of subscribers, drive sign-ups for free trials for SaaS or courses. They work great for businesses that sell expensive products as part of lead nurturing strategies.
Click-through Landing Pages
This type of page usually has a single button with a call to action and sends the visitor straight to a sales page or a checkout flow.
Like the lead gen type, clickthrough landing pages are also popular with e-commerce and B2B marketers.
Landing Page Fundamentals
What are the fundamentally necessary elements of the landing page? Most of the marketers agree that a landing page done right should have:
- A single offer.
- A single conversion goal – CTA – a call to action.
- A hero image or video.
- The benefits of your offering.
- Some form of social proof.
Most landing pages out there would reflect this list one way or another. The ready-made templates available in the builders (Wix, Leadpages, Instapage, GetResponse) would prompt you to use such elements and more.
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Landing Page Best Practices
Digital marketing has gone a long way and just having the fundamentals there is not super effective. So how do you actually apply fundamentals in a way that works?
This is where landing pages’ best practices enter the fray.
- One main call to action.
- Minimal to zero distractions, like links or pop-up offers, on the page.
- Show clear and concise offer.
- Use clear CTA – call to action. Place the first one above the fold, then place some more throughout the page.
- Use concise and bold headline.
- Utilize clear, concise, and on-point copy that explains the benefits of your offering.
- The copy should match the ad your visitors clicked to get here.
- The design should be a simplified version of the website’s design.
- There should be testimonials or reviews from review websites like Clutch or Trustpilot.
- No clutter – less is more in this case. If you need to have more text/images/video, make sure it does not clutter the landing page.
- No navigation.
Summary
It is easy to build a landing page, and there are a lot of great tools designed to help with it.
The catch here is how good it converts.
You’d want it to convert as many visitors as possible, because the higher the conversion rate, the more money you earn in relation to the amount spent on traffic and other marketing things.
For those small and medium businesses that do not have hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars in marketing budget, the recipe to getting a higher conversion rate on a landing page has 4 simple steps.
1) Build a landing page by incorporating the best practices.
2) Use tools like Instapage or Leadpages to get the best end result from using the above practices.
3) Test the result.
4) Repeat from step #1, but build a landing page that is different from the previous one.