When you work in digital marketing it’s very easy to start throwing around technical terms and not realising that people don’t know what they mean. I’ve found recently I need to stop and explain the term landing page as it’s used commonly now, but you might now know how powerful they are.
What is a landing page?
Basically, a landing page is a page that was created to carry out a specific purpose. If you were a garden shop/plant nursery business, for example, and you want people to go to a page that has your array of plants perfect for planting in summer then you should have a landing page that answers that purpose and helps them convert and this is done instead of taking them to your general website. Your website will still have your array of summer plants somewhere in your menu but it’s harder for a user to find quickly and not entirely suited to the purpose.
How do you start planning a landing page?
Creating a landing page isn’t difficult, it just comes from that first thought – what should a user get out of this page? You want to answer their problem.
Taking that example, if you had a page where when you land on it, the first image is a collage or slider of eye-catching pictures of summertime flowers and plants, then you can see images underneath of individual plants with a description of each, a price and a buy now button, then you get text explaining what plants are best to buy and grow in summer, a picture and link to a blog post about how to care for your plants etc.
Then underneath there are more products displayed to help with tending your garden etc. and space below to say ‘if you have any questions or want to find the best plant for you, give us a call.’
Hopefully, you can see that this layout is quickly solving your user’s queries all on one page. The user knows what to do, there are call to actions to do something relating to the goal throughout the page. That is the making of a good landing page.
How do you make a landing page?
You can still make this a page on your website, but make sure to be specific with its intent – it needs to match the goal you set for the page at every angle, and assume that people may come to this landing page from a link on your social media posts or from a paid advertisement and might not go anywhere else on the website other than what you point them to on this landing page.
So if you feel you need to describe the business and more about what you do to inspire trust, that needs to be included on the page. If you feel like it needs to have reviews or case studies included to get that people-buy-what-other-people-buy effect, then you need to have those within the page.
Or you can always use an external landing page builder to keep it separate from the rest of the website. We like using Landingi for it’s quick and easy drag and drop features and how easy it is to make sure that both the desktop and mobile versions of the landing page look and work as needed.
TIP: Make sure not to neglect your mobile users! You’ll find now that most websites are visited by users on mobiles than desktops now, so if your landing page takes too much scrolling before they get to something that inspires them to click on a call to action, you may be losing out on that conversion!
How do you measure the results?
The difference between making a landing page and making a successful landing page is measuring the results. If you expect more customers buying your summer plant range and associated gardening tool, then you need to check your product and sales reports from your website or google analytics to see if that is the case. If you want more people to call you, then you should be trying to ask customers who give you a call how they found you and see what avenues they mention.
You can also analyse how people interact with the page, and how to make that landing page more effective. Using a tool like google analytics isn’t always as effective on a landing page because if that page doesn’t lead anywhere else then google will think that people have bounced off the page.
Try using a tool like Hotjar or Crazyegg instead, you can get free trials for both and they will actually show you a heatmap of where people are clicknig on the page and what they view. If you’re trying to figure out what products people before, see which ones they are drawn to on the heatmap and rearrange the landing page to make it even easier to reach that product.
This type of result measuring can even help on your own website, as you start to see how people navigate the page and if there are any places that make them stop and engage, perhaps a scrolling slider of testimonials or a gallery even.
If you want to know more about making a landing page a success you can book a FREE 121 session or find our more about our Total Digital Marketing service that is transforming the marketing of hundreds of businesses.