Why do businesses need landing pages? Results!
They’re laser-focused web pages on specific topics that help to
(a) bring in more visitors or
(b) convert visitors into leads and sales.
Landing pages are optimized for conversions, meaning the leads you send to these pages give you a better return. Higher conversions means more signups and more sales for your business.
Companies who increase landing pages from 10 to just 15 see a 55% increase in lead generation, according to a HubSpot report that analyzed the effectiveness of marketing benchmarks for 7,000 small businesses.
Benefits of Landing Pages
- Landing pages provide the opportunity to increase ‘content specificity’, which can also help increase your organic search (or SEO) performance.
- Pay Per Click (PPC) performance can also improve because you’re able to accurately match an ad’s value proposition and messaging directly with what visitors are seeing on your page.
- Sales-focused pages get the added luxury of being able to expand on concepts, using storytelling that’s critical to persuasion. Typically that includes expanding on a value proposition or unique selling proposition. Also, providing supporting material like images or video, which can show the product or service in use. Then following up with credibility indicators like testimonials, seals of approval, and more.
- Last but not least, dedicated landing pages also give you the ability for experimentation.
Landing page effectiveness is best summed up by the top marketers in the business:
With 50 links on your homepage, your attention ratio is 2%, compared to 100% with a single CTA.
Examples:
Lead Generation
Click Through
The Power of Message Match
Message match is an essential part of why landing pages can be so successful. Message match is the ability of your landing page to reinforce the messaging presented on the link that was clicked to reach the page.
Most visitors are impatient and will leave your page within a few seconds of arrival if you don’t reinforce their intent with a matching headline and purpose (quickly and clearly).
This example shows a comparison of good and bad message match on a landing page used for a pay-per-click campaign:
Ad Source
Target Landing Page
Not only is the copy perfectly matched here, but there is also a very strong “design match”, where the visual treatment of the landing page has been incorporated into the banner, helping to further reinforce the connection between banner and landing page.
TAKE AWAY
Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic. As we’ll see, this separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting & testing a simpler task.
Maximizing Conversion Scent
In this short presentation, Rand Fishkin – CEO of MOZ.com, uses some examples to illustrate this concept perfectly, showing how to do it right and also how to do it very wrong.
