If you think about your website as your digital home, building a landing page is akin to adding curb appeal. In both instances, it’s about making your property more accessible and engaging, as well as ensuring a good first impression.

In digital marketing terms, a landing page is a standalone web page built around a single objective, or Call to Action (CTA), that you want a visitor to accomplish. It earns its name by being the place a visitor “lands” after clicking through a digital ad. Because landing pages are so simple and focused, they’re optimized for converting visitors into leads.

But a landing page isn’t digital duct tape; it’s not the answer to all of your woes. Here are some benefits and drawbacks that you should consider:

Pros

• They’re typically faster and cheaper to develop than full websites.
• They’re tied to a specific promotion to maximize conversion rates.
• They’re built for A/B testing and easy to optimize.
• Once you have a good template, they’re easy to replicate and customize.
• Because they’re so focused, they’re incredibly user-friendly.

Cons

• The less focused they are, the less effective they become.
• They’re not good for complex products or services that require a lot of explanation or education before reaching a conversion point.
• Although a visitor has to be somewhat interested in your product or service to click through to your landing page, there’s no way to segment your audience from there.
• A bad landing page makes a bad first impression and creates a bad brand experience.

So What Can a Landing Page Do?

1. Generate More Leads…

How often have you clicked on a link in an email, social media post or a digital banner ad, only to be left to your own devices on a brand’s homepage. Not only is this a huge missed opportunity, it’s a waste of digital ad dollars. If a person clicks an ad, there’s something about what it offered or promised that piqued their interest. It’s up to brands to ensure that the next step your customer takes builds on that interest.

… And Convert Those Leads!

Did you know that using a landing page can increase your conversion rate by up to 55 percent? Because visitors have already shown interest in your offer by clicking through, a curated, call-to-action-centric landing page removes common barriers that prevent a visitor from progressing in their buying journey, like too much information or complex navigation.

2. Get to Know Your Audience…

In modern marketing, data is currency. When a visitor clicks through to a landing page, they’re essentially paying for your offer with their customer data. By simply landing on your page, they give you information about their demographics, location or interests – and every click that happens after helps further flesh out their audience profile.

… And Keep Them Engaged.

In addition to tracking conversions, landing pages help track reconversions, too. Think of a shark circling its prey; a good inbound marketing strategy will encourage leads to interact with multiple pieces of content – like email, PPC, or retargeted digital ads – as they circle their purchase decision.

3. Give Your Marketing Offers a Place to Live…

Not only do landing pages serve as a repository for a specific offer, they can curate content around that offer in order to make it more appealing. As an example, we created a vlog on how get the most out of your email campaigns. In exchange for our knowledge and expertise, we required interested parties give us their email address. The medium that facilitated this whole exchange is a landing page.

…And Help Measure Your Successes.

Each landing page is another data point to track and analyze. Based on audience behavior, you can get a good idea of which promotions work better than others, which mediums perform the best, and over time, be able to follow your customers through key decision points from awareness to purchase – and beyond.

TL;DR

While digital marketing can be an effective (and cost-effective) means of driving traffic, if you’re truly interested in turning that traffic into something more measurable and, quite frankly, useful, then your efforts should be paired with a landing page. Not just that, but each promotion, messaging tactic and channel you engage should get its own landing page. This will help you better define who your audiences are, what resonates with them and where it makes the most sense to allocate your digital dollars.

And, as always, if you need help designing, developing or optimizing your landing page for maximum effectiveness – or just want a little advice on how to make your digital marketing efforts play nicely together – the ZG digital team is always ready to help.

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