Use a landing page

Let's say that your marketing is driving a consistent flow of traffic (potential customers) to your website.  Great.

How do you get them to do what you want (to buy, call you or leave their contact details)?

What you don't do is send them to your website home page. Instead you need to send them to a tailor-made landing page within your website that is designed to capture the details of this particular audience.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is the first page on your website that your customer reaches when responding to your advertising. It therefore needs to be consistent with the creative theme of the marketing that drove the click to ensure the customer journey is consistent.

See how the example landing page below will:

1. Get the visitor interested, as by putting in their postcode they are shown how little they might pay
2. Encourages them to buy by immediately getting them to get a free quote.

How could you achieve these two marketing goals by using a landing page?

Optimise your landing page

Getting potential customers to leave their contact details

See how each of these landing pages encourages the visitor to leave their contact details.

Work up a plan on how you could achieve the same result.

Guidance on creating a landing page

1. Grab and hold their attention.
2. Mirror the look and feel.
3. Critique your design.
4. Avoid including a navigation bar.
5. Use a readable URL.
6. Improve your prospects' experience by focusing on accessibility...
7. ...and usability.
8. Things to check if you include a form.
9. Ask visitors to opt in to receive emails.
10. Test and measure everything until you know what works.

Pros and Cons

The five best things about landing pages

1. They can be exactly tailored/matched to the advertisement, so there is a logic between the ad's proposition/offer and the content/answer they click through to.
2. They can be tested and optimised. Keep experimenting with the sequence of your pitch, the copy, colour, format, style, images, offers, etc, until your conversion rate exceeds expectation.
3. They are easy to manage.
4. They are friendly to respondents - but only when tailored.
5. They are quick and inexpensive to produce.

The worst five things about landing pages

1. Too much information is crammed into one page. If you’ve got lots to say then break it up into digestible chunks that respondents can choose to access via a link if it interests them. Otherwise keep the message concise.
2. You immediately ask for the respondent to participate/commit. You need to gain their trust/increase their interest before asking them to complete your form, subscribe, get a download or whatever.
3. Segmentation is ignored. Your respondents may not all have clicked on your ad for the same reason. They are unlikely to all have the same needs. Take this into consideration when writing/constructing your page. Don’t try to speak to all the segments with one message. Get them to click through to a tailormade second page, specific to their segment’s needs.
4. Testing the wrong elements first. Get the audience segmentation and the sequence of your pitch right first before worrying about which combination of headline and image works best.
5. Devaluing the brand. Make sure your landing page delivers a positive experience of the brand. They may be quick and cheap to produce, but make sure they don’t look quick and cheaply produced. A brand often doesn’t get a second chance to make a good impression.