So you’ve done your inbound marketing and placed the right ads at the right places, all with the hope of getting people to your website. But you don’t want some online tourists to your site. You want visitors who will convert. To make that happen, what you need is a solid landing page.
Otherwise, all your efforts will be in vain. High-functioning landing pages are what convert your visitors to potential leads for your business. If your website doesn’t generate leads, then it’s the online equivalent of window shopping for your visitors. You spend all that money on your website and… nothing happens.
So, why does nothing happen? To begin with, most marketers don’t realise the importance of landing pages. They don’t understand that landing pages are central to lead generation, especially for B2B businesses.
A survey found out that almost 44% of B2B companies direct their visitors to their business’s homepage instead of guiding them to a specialised landing page. What about those businesses that have landing pages? Well, more than 60% of them have six or fewer.
You know the situation is bad when even the businesses that are doing it aren’t doing it enough. But before we get to why a landing page is so vital to lead generation, let’s first understand it.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a web page whose only purpose is to convince your visitors to take a particular action. You can create landing pages to get your visitor’s information through a lead capture or conversion form. You can create it to let your visitors avail of a special offer, coupon, or trial.
You can also use a landing page to give a free demo of your product or service or release an exclusive version to select users. Or you could let users download case studies, ebooks, white papers, or reports.
Where do these visitors come from? They could be directed from your pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign, social media posts, email newsletters, etc. What’s important is that it’s not random traffic. It’s a specifically targeted set of users. If you’re in B2B, this means you’re getting quality leads.
How is a landing page different from a website?
Technically, landing pages are not part of your website. So, you won’t be able to navigate to your landing page by clicking on a tab on your site.
Secondly, websites attract all kinds of audiences. You could find users interested in your product or service or users who’re merely browsing with no intent to take any action. A website carries information on your company, management, products and services, and how to get in touch with you. Not to mention those exceptionally interesting “mission” and “vision” sections.
These could attract all kinds of visitors.
A landing page is created for a specific set of consumers. Through a targeted ad campaign, you usually use a lead magnet or specialised offers to attract those users. These consumers are aware of your category and are attracted by your solution and any offer you may have.
Thirdly, and this is the most important part, landing pages are created to convert.
While homepages and websites are designed to provide information, landing pages have only one goal. The content, text, design, and layout of a landing page are created to encourage visitors to take a particular action. It could be to sign up for your newsletter, download an ebook, register for a webinar, or to fill a form.
You could look at it this way: Your website is more like an online directory for your business. Your landing page, however, is an active lead generator.
What this means is that no matter what business you’re in, whether you’re a freelancer, run a small business, or in charge of marketing at a multinational firm, landing pages are significant. To convince you, here are six reasons why you should be focusing on them.
6 reasons why you need landing pages for lead generation
Generate relevant leads
A website exists primarily to interest users, invite them to check out your product or service, and turn them into leads. While the first two are more sedate goals, the third one is linked to business growth because that’s how you grow your consumer base.
A landing page isn’t there to give information. It exists to help you generate relevant leads, and convert those leads into customers. The keyword here is “relevant.”
There’s no point getting hundreds of thousands of users to your website if the lead generation is abysmal. The primary reason that happens is that most site visitors aren’t interested in your offerings.
Since the landing page gets targeted visitors, its content can be created and laid out to answer their specific concerns and offer compelling incentives.
In other words, you don’t have to talk about your company history or your management team.
To convince them to take the desired action, you have to remove the roadblocks in front of them. The landing page is the perfect solution to clear their doubts and offer irresistible value to help convert them.
Analyse data
Landing pages also help you keep track of data and to analyse it to refine both your marketing campaigns and your content. This will help you optimise both your digital marketing and your product offerings.
At the marketing end, a landing page will tell you where your prospect has come from. This will let you know which tactic is working better than others. If a significant proportion of your visitors are coming from your PPC campaign, now you can invest more on that and reduce your spending elsewhere.
Secondly, it will also tell you what marketing message is working better than others. Maybe it’s the one with images and text as opposed to those with just text. Or maybe it’s the one with the offer.
At the content end, it will tell you how long the visitors are staying on your landing page, the bounce or exit rates, and the conversion rate. Importantly, it also allows you to compare the different landing pages your business may have. You can take the best practices from the high-performing ones and implement them on others.
As a marketer, one of the most effective things you and your team can do is to routinely analyse the performance of your landing page and make the necessary changes.
Optimise your page
If you track the data of your landing pages, you’ll also get enough information on the content and layout. The data will reveal whether the content on your page is compelling enough to keep visitors interested, what needs to be tweaked, and what has to be added or deleted.
To begin with, a landing page shouldn’t be seen as static and permanent. Your regular analysis should be intended to optimise it. To do that, you can change various aspects of the page to know which one is delivering and which one is underperforming.
To find out which main headline performs better, you can run an A/B test. Along with that, you can also change the sub-headers, images, and their placement. While changing your text is one idea, another could be to change how it’s laid out.
You could run block paragraphs for a while and change them to bullet points and see which one gets users to spend more time on your landing page. You could change the colour scheme too to find out what works better.
If you do it routinely, you’ll hit upon the right content and layout that will convert your visitors. Remember that a landing page is only as good as what you learn from it.
Get the form right
Your form on the landing page will decide how much the page converts. Those marketers who do everything else right but see minuscule levels of conversion often forget the ingredients and the layout of their forms.
In all likelihood, if you’ve just copied a form from another page or used the one that came with the template, it needs a revision.
Here’s rule number one with landing page forms: Go minimal. Ask for only the information that you need. Think about your objective and demand only the information that’s necessary for it.
If you don’t plan on calling the visitors, don’t ask for their phone number. That will feel intrusive and discourage people from filling up the form. If you want to know what industry they work in, don’t get into unnecessary details.
Create a marketing hub
The traditional marketing approach viewed marketing offers as just another component of your website. But with landing pages, you have an opportunity to bring them up front, and create focused pages for each of your offers and see which one performs better.
Importantly, a landing page lets you create and direct user journeys with the marketing offers leading the way.
It gives you enough bandwidth to test and refine your offers. Probably a bundled offer is better than a price discount. Or topical discounts work far better than offers than run throughout the year.
This means that you will be able to not just create more effective marketing schemes but also spend wisely on them. As you regularly analyse their performance, you’ll see which ones outperform others, which gives you the freedom to shut down schemes that don’t work.
Landing pages also give you inputs on what products or services to create. If there’s more demand for an ebook, as opposed to an exclusive webinar, you could focus on more ebooks and think about ways to monetise them.
Finally, they’re probably the best places to offer social proof through testimonials. If you’ve got favourable responses to any of your products or services, the common practice is to shelve them somewhere on the website.
But when you put them on your landing pages, your marketing becomes more potent. If you can smartly showcase the testimonials, you’ll be able to convince visitors to sign up or buy from you.
Get prospect information
A landing page isn’t there to merely convert although that’s its primary objective. It also functions as a market research wing.
Whenever someone fills up your form, they’re also giving you valuable information about who they are. This is another reason why your form should be focused on getting the right information and not too many unnecessary details.
When you get the relevant demographic information about your prospects, it becomes easier to categorise them. You’ll be able to create the right strategy to engage with your leads when you know more about them.
That information will also help you design products and services that are more relevant to your users. With every visitor who signs up, you’re knowing more about your target audience. Over time, this will lead to a more effective sales funnel.
Conclusion
If you want your landing page to get you the right leads, you should treat it as the start of a conversation. Your website tells the world who you are. Your landing page tells them what value you can add to their lives. If you create it with the right offers, content, layout, target it well, and constantly learn from it and optimise, you’ll be making user acquisition easy.
You should also create several landing pages with schemes, discounts, bundled offers, and exclusive content. That will create momentum and give you opportunities to segment your products and services. It will also give you ideas on how to better monetise your offerings. All these will happen when you get serious about landing pages.
