With digital marketing on the rise, traditional business owners are likely to encounter a set of new concepts, landing pages being one of them. A landing page isn’t just another typical web page; it is one of the first original points of contact between the user and the brand. Optimization is vital in increasing the chances of conversion for different types of landing pages.
The power of landing pages makes them a secret tool for marketers. Developing an effective landing page can seem daunting at first. Still, Strategic Pete has prepared this blog to demystify the impact of landing pages and their role in inviting customers to associate with your brand.
Understanding Landing Pages and Their Objectives
Landing pages are static pages that give customers a peek into a brand’s website. Consumers “land on” these pages as a result of clicking on an advertisement, marketing promotion, or marketing email. They are also referred to as lead capture pages or destination pages.
By strategically positioning a call-to-action (CTA) element—links, forms, buttons—landing pages allow marketers to direct their leads into conversions. Landing pages fulfill a single purpose and message through a single CTA. Statistics on the effectiveness of landing pages show that landing pages containing more than five CTAs had a 10.5% conversion rate, while those with only one CTA had a 13.5% conversion rate.
Marketers prioritize landing pages to achieve the following:
- Bridge advertisements and the brand: A landing page is intended to introduce and guide the user to a brand and its customer journey. Your landing page copy should match the ad or marketing material used. This way, users know they are in the right place, and a consistent message breeds trust, which is critical in advertising to a cold audience.
- Specificity: Users often seek a response to a specific query. Landing on a homepage will reduce the chances of a user converting simply because they would have to make an effort to search for what they want. Conversely, it is easier to just direct them straight to it via a landing page.
- Segmentation: If a brand offers a wide variety of products and services, a marketer might opt to segment an audience for an optimal conversion rate. This is where user-specific landing pages come in. Segments of your target audience are bound to undertake different user journeys. Coupling segmentation with a change in tone—varying with the target audience—can significantly increase conversions.
An ideal landing page effectively convinces a potential customer that it is worth providing personal details in exchange for what you’re offering. For example, lead generation landing pages offer users items like eBooks, free trials, contest entries, or webinar registrations in return for submitting their contact information. In the next section, we will compare landing pages to websites and explain how they differ.
Landing Page vs Website: Navigating Your Online Presence
Online marketing is becoming increasingly common across industries. Marketing professionals often use landing pages and websites as part of their marketing strategies.
Many startups struggle with the decision of using a landing page or entirely depending on a full-fledged website to establish an online presence. Making a wrong choice regarding both may leave you clutching at straws to attract an audience and scale your business. It is imperative to understand landing page vs. website to make well-informed decisions.
Fundamental Differences Between Landing Pages and Websites
Although landing pages and websites may seem similar, they have separate functions. As mentioned, a landing page is a stand-alone web page designed to increase conversion rates.
It is primarily used in digital marketing, PPC advertising, and lead-generation campaigns. Additionally, it can be used to create ‘coming soon’ campaigns, product sales pages, ‘request a quote’ forms, webinar promotion pages, etc. A landing page can either be a stand-alone web page or a microsite.
In contrast, a website is an online set of connected digital pages detailing a business, organization, or company. This collection of different web pages and sections helps users find what they’re looking for, e.g., products, contacts, insights, and more.
A landing page is a variation of a website page that uses minimal content to achieve a particular purpose. Despite not being primary web pages, they can exist on the same domain name as the corresponding website.
Conversely, effective websites have a simple, user-friendly layout and multiple navigation tools. They act as introductory statements to organizations, telling users about their offerings and background information, such as corporate history, organizational charts, and employee highlights. Standard web pages that users come across include:
- About page
- Services/products page
- Policies page
- Frequently Asked Questions page (FAQs)
- Blogs page
Let’s dive deeper into the distinguishing features that define landing pages and websites:
- Focus: Landing pages help fulfill the goals of a specific marketing campaign or CTA. They communicate a stronger intent to create customer conversion through gentle persuasion.
Websites, however, cover exploration across all aspects of an organization’s online presence, including a company’s origin story, description of products or services, improvement of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, and appealing to customers through mission statements and values.
- Conversion rate: Depending on the strategies implemented, you may report higher conversion rates from one landing page compared to any webpage on a website. Moreover, the number of sales or email sign-ups from a landing page may be higher because its sole purpose is to boost conversions.
- Customization: Landing pages allow owners to customize the pages to match a user’s experience. The owner can display a specific promotion/discount and attract various customers through targeted market segments. Conversely, websites are built on the basis of a general design to cast a net for a larger number of users.
- Target audience: When customized, landing pages allow owners to target a particular audience. For example, an online clothing store can create landing pages specifically for women, men, and kids and can be tailored further by including prices and styles.
Alternatively, websites appeal to a broader audience to be valuable to new or recurring customers. This means that messages are typically generic and lead to other parts of a website for further exploration. Since they aim to inform and direct traffic, it can be challenging to understand each visitor’s unique goal.
- Choice: Landing pages offer fewer choices since they direct consumers to a single option. For instance, a consumer may feel compelled to take action by clicking on an eye-catching CTA button that says ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Sign Up Today’.
On the other hand, websites offer more choices for visitors, inviting them to navigate through tabs or menu drop-downs since their goal is to motivate exploration.
Numerous business owners wonder why they should bother with landing pages when their primary objective is to drive visitors to their websites. Although they fulfill different purposes, they are both significant for growing businesses. Similarly, though there are different inbound lead generation, the we at Strategic Pete believe that lead-generation landing pages are superb for grassroot companies attempting to gain traction in reeling in new customers.
Best Landing Page for Lead Generation, Plus Other Types of Landing Pages
Typically, the conversion rate for landing pages across industries is around 5.89%. However, it is suggested that the landing page conversion rate should ideally be between 10% and 11%. Climbing to this success rate requires business owners to focus on refining their lead-generation landing pages to achieve optimal conversion rates.
Definition and Characteristics of Lead Generation Landing Pages
A lead-generation landing page is designed to capture visitors’ information, such as names and email addresses, for future marketing purposes. Furthermore, these landing pages are used to better understand and engage with potential customers.
The best landing page for fractional consultant vs agency should feature the following for effectiveness:
- A firm value proposition: There should be an enticing reason for customers to share their information, e.g., newsletter, product trial, eBook.
- Audience-relevant offer: Business owners are encouraged to set up site-wide surveys to determine what topics their target audience is interested in. Next, they can curate the marketing scorecard or a newsletter that covers these topics regularly.
- One clear and concise CTA: The CTA copy and design should be clear and focused, prompting users to take action.
- Persuasive copywriting: An ideal landing page should have an attention-grabbing headline highlighting the benefits of users sharing their information. The headline should be written in the audience’s language, and powerful words should be used to inspire action.
- Adaptability for mobile: Approximately 96% of the world’s population uses mobile devices to access the Internet, so your lead generation landing pages must be mobile-friendly.
- Copy for different audience personas: Using audience segmentation, create targeted landing pages based on users’ interests.
- An ask for the necessary information: Lead generation landing pages that are to the point eliminate friction, encouraging users to share their information.
Other Types of Landing Pages
Lead generation landing pages are great for achieving conversions. However, businesses can use a few other landing pages to reach their target audiences.
- Click-through page
A click-through landing page provides elaborate information about an offer to prompt the user to “click-through” to a conversion page. These landing pages usually serve as a middleman between an advertisement and your online store, allowing users to immediately get acquainted with a service or features without proceeding to make a purchase. Alternatively, businesses offer free trials or coupons that will make a visitor continue in their buyer’s journey by clicking through to the next stage.
- Splash page
Unlike most other types of landing pages, splash pages are not focused on conversion but rather on meeting a specific goal. Ordinarily, they’re used as an intermediary page to make an announcement, such as to inform about a conference, event, or promotion. In other instances, a splash landing page asks for a visitor’s age or language preference and then lets the visitor enter the site. Splash pages often have little copy and use a background image.
- Squeeze landing page
Although squeeze and lead generation pages seem similar, the former are typically shorter and don’t use images or much text. While both landing pages have no exit and clear CTAs, squeeze pages focus less on educating about an offer and instead driving transactions. Also referred to as an “opt-in page,” they usually offer ebooks and other downloadables.
Other common uses of the squeeze landing page format include booking appointments for services such as consultations or open house inspections. Furthermore, novice landing page creators heavily favor this page style, as it allows for great results with minimal time investment.
- Thank you landing page
Once a customer fills out a form or makes a purchase, thank them and follow up by suggesting additional offers, products, and services to your visitor. Other business ideas for using thank you landing pages include showing social proof, linking to your blog, and offering discount codes. Statistics show that 12.5% of conversions are contributed by social proof, such as satisfied customer reviews, photographs, and social media posts, compared to 11.4% without social proof.
- Long-form sales page
This type of landing page is preferred for the lowest part of the funnel since you directly ask for payment instead of just an email. You aim to pitch your product with convincing testimonials, quotes, videos, and CTAs that strongly persuade the visitor to make a purchase.
For effectiveness, consider adding a discount code to your long-form sales landing page template to help users commit to that final step. Additionally, urgency and great copywriting can also do the trick. Just make sure to add as much important information as possible.
So far, we have just scratched the surface of the types of landing pages that come in different designs and address different purposes, tackled landing page vs. website, and the effectiveness of lead generation landing pages. We can close by looking at the available tools and resources for successfully building landing pages.
Tools and Resources for Creating Different Types of Landing Pages
As we have discovered, landing pages are integral to marketing and sales funnels. There are also several ways of leveraging different types of landing pages to your benefit.
Developing outstanding landing pages differs from creating a blog post or any other general web page. When done correctly, they can be a game-changer for your sales funnel, especially for startups.
Achieving optimization is a combined effort of using high-converting tools and analytics. Some of the tools that are popularly recognized for building highly converting landing pages include:
- LeadPages: A relatively easy-to-use tool that you can use to build appealing opt-in campaigns. This software is essential for capturing leads and driving conversions. Some of its key features are:
- Mobile-responsive pages
- Incorporation of A/B testing
- Seamless integration with other tools
- Integrable with WordPress
- More than 160+ unique templates
- Unbounce: As its name suggests, this tool is intended to reduce bounce rates and boost conversions. Unbounce allows you to build and test custom landing pages, improve your campaigns, and edit pages to make them mobile-friendly. Additionally, it is a feature-rich tool that enables users to drag elements from the side menu and drop them at a desired place on the landing page. It boasts other features, including an easily navigable interface and user-friendly plugins.
- Instapage: With over 200 cutting-edge template designs, Instapage is one of the best landing page tools. Instapage allows you to curate mobile-responsive pages to capture your visitor’s attention and maximize conversions. Moreover, it is incredibly easy to install and use. Other distinctive features include:
- Drag and drop functionality
- Friendly plugins
- Customizable
- HubSpot: HubSpot is a personal favorite for several reasons. It is an enterprise marketing solution with a range of features for both new and established businesses. It is designed around capturing leads with forms in a simple format. Some of its defining features include:
- A/B testing functionality
- Content creation and SEO optimization
- Availability of simple templates
- Excellent customer support
- Integration with advanced marketing features, such as CRM and email marketing
- Launchrock: Launchrock is another feature-rich landing page software that stands out from other conventional tools. This solution is primarily used to create ‘coming soon’ pages. You only need to pick a theme and edit a message according to your needs. Other additional features:
- Mobile-responsive landing pages
- Customer data and analytics
- Easy-to-navigate editor
- Fully featured dashboard
- Countless templates to choose from
- Wishpond: WishPond is a powerful, feature-rich, user-friendly landing page tool. It incorporates many valuable features, including a drag-and-drop builder, A/B testing, analytics, email automation, live chat support, and unlimited campaigns.
- Shortstack: ShortStack is the poster child for unconventional landing page resources. Using popular social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, you can create incredible landing pages to host contests. Furthermore, ShortStack also enables you to collect user-generated content and automate emails for lead captures.
Likewise, analytics are instrumental in improving the effectiveness of landing pages. Business owners are advised to analyze the time users spend on the page and the bounce rate for each landing page. In the event a landing page reports a high bounce rate and a low average time spent, you can consider altering the content to make it more engaging to reduce bounce rates and encourage users to stay on the page, possibly leading to a conversion.
In conclusion, building a landing page is intricate and requires patience and open-mindedness. While landing pages are primarily intended to increase conversion rates, they also communicate brand awareness to users.
As a startup/small business owner, landing pages can help you improve market penetration, establish a successful business model, and make strides in your industry. Reach out to us at Strategic Pete to learn how to enhance your lead-generation landing pages and familiarize yourself with optimization and analytics resources.
A good next read is our guide to how B2B demand generation works; for hands-on help, read about B2B marketing with Strategic Pete.
