What is a Landing Page? | Why a Quality Landing Page Matters

What is a landing page? And why is it important for your business website?

A landing page is different from your website’s home page. While your home page is the ‘front door’ to your website, a landing page – otherwise known as a lead capture or destination page – is a standalone web page that a person lands on after clicking through from an email, ad, social media post, or another digital source.

A landing page aims to capture information from a lead (potential customer) in exchange for something of value, like an eBook or a voucher. This will let you build up a repository of leads that can be nurtured with personalised campaigns via paid advertising, emails, or other targeted campaigns. A landing page may also be used to prompt a visitor to buy a particular product or service.

Landing pages aren’t included in your website’s navigation; they exist for a specific purpose, and sometimes for a limited time, as part of an advertising or marketing campaign.

A landing page is an essential tool for your marketing efforts, providing everything you need to convert visitors into customers.

How a Landing Page Is Different From a Homepage

Now that we have learned what a landing page is, here are some key differences between a homepage and a landing page.

1. Fewer Links

You can usually find at least 10 links on a typical website home page. These include a navigational menu at the top, links in the web page footer, as well as many in the page’s content. A landing page, however, may have just a single link: one that allows your landing page visitor to take action (convert).

2. Narrower Purpose and Audience

Often, people who land on your home page are browsing to see what products and services you’re offering. However, those who visit your landing page are responding to a marketing or advertising message, and they’re coming because they’re already interested in what you’re offering. These visitors are deeper into the customer journey and are more likely to convert.

3. Targeted Call to Action (CTA)

Your home page acts exactly as an information hub for your online visitors – they can use it to find what they’re looking for and navigate to all corners of your website from there. Because it’s a navigation tool, the content and messaging are more generic – like ‘find out more’. A landing page wants visitors to take a very specific action, so the messaging and call to action reflect this – ‘get your free voucher’ is one example.

Examples of Landing Page Offers – Types of Landing Pages

There are many different reasons for creating a landing page. Most of them are click-through landing pages that direct visitors to other pages where the actual conversion is taking place.

Here are some common landing page examples used in advertising and online marketing:

• Free content. Examples include an eBook, email newsletter subscription, or white paper.
• Free trial. Suitable if you’re offering a free demo of your product.
• Event registration. An event landing page is used for promotion and to register attendees for an upcoming event.
• Online course enrolment. Useful if you’re in education or offer skill-based certifications.
• Product launch. Provides visitors with information about a product or service.
• Promotion. Often used together with paid advertising. Visitors get more information about what’s promoted in the ad and are presented with a call to action.

7 Benefits of a Strong Landing Page

The goal of a landing page is to persuade visitors to take a specific action. Here are some benefits of a landing page.

1. Increased Conversions

A targeted landing page that is directly linked to an offer provides clear value to your customer upfront. They have seen your advertisement or marketing message and have clicked and come through to your landing page because they’re interested. All you then need to do is allow them to fulfil the required action as seamlessly as possible.

A landing page on your website works like a portal that converts your leads into high-value customers.

2. Good Quality Lead Generation

Many businesses invest a lot of time and money communicating with their customers and potential customers using emails, paid advertising, and social media campaigns. However, they often fail to capitalise on the traffic that’s generated through these interactions.

While a website visitor might be distracted when visiting your website home page, they will usually respond in a more focused way to an offer they’re presented with on a great landing page. This means you’re likely to get a much higher conversation rate.

Lead generation landing pages focus on including a contact form that allows to collect contact information such as name and email addresses. 

3. Increased Subscriber Lists

Visitors are usually prepared to provide at least their email and name in exchange for content offered on your dedicated landing page. Using landing pages, you can set up a lead magnet or an enticing offer that captures a visitor’s contact info in exchange for valuable content or resources.

This will help you grow your email subscriber list, so you can reach out to them with further content or product and service offers.

4. Better User Information

When a prospect visits your landing page and follows the call to action you present them with, you can capture a lot of valuable information about them. Your sales and marketing team can then use this information to follow up with them in a more targeted way. This is a great remarketing strategy as people respond better to highly personalised communications, which in turn drives a higher conversion rate.

5. Detailed Marketing Insights

In the same way that a landing page lets you gather important personal information about a potential customer, it also lets you gather valuable marketing data about how your current and prospective customers feel about what you’re promoting. This data can then be used to improve your product and service offerings and fine-tune your wider marketing campaigns.

Landing pages work as a good opportunity to test various offers and designs to see which ones perform best with your target audience. It’s also lower risk to test out a new landing page, rather than making significant changes to your website.

6. Improved Customer Segmentation

Landing pages typically let you segment your customers and potential customers by customising the landing pages you direct them to. For example, you might be offering a similar product to both men and women, and you want to fine-tune the offer according to each target audience. Segmenting your audience with different landing pages can also help you target your offer to the right set of customers – for example, a discount for new, versus existing, customers.

7. Better Brand Awareness

A well-designed landing page containing a good offer can impress potential customers and turn them into leads. A well-planned landing page will also show your customers you understand their needs and have their interests in mind. Even if a particular visitor doesn’t immediately convert, a good landing page will provide good kudos for your brand and help nurture them for future sales. 

Elements of an Effective Landing Page

While you might be driving visitors to your landing pages using paid advertising, an email, a social link, or another digital source, it’s also important to make the pages attractive for search engines using search engine optimisation (SEO). This will make them more visible in organic search results, which can help boost traffic and conversions.

Here are some landing pages best practices:

• Build fast page loading speeds
• Write compelling headlines
• Use Landing page copy that aims for long-tail keywords
• Place your call to action (CTA) above the web page ‘fold’
• Use visual cues to highlight your CTA
• Provide your contact details
• Make content on your landing page shareable 
• Earn backlinks 

All of these tips will help you get more traffic to your landing pages.

You can create landing pages through a landing page builder (where you have ready-to-create landing page templates) or by using a website builder that has landing page creation functionality. For example, WordPress themes like Astra, e-commerce-ready site builders like Shopify or simple drag-and-drop software like Wix.

How Digital Estate Can Help You With Effective Landing Pages

Building an effective and successful landing page for your business takes knowledge and expertise, so it may help to engage with professional landing page experts like Digital Estate. We offer digital design services to build an impactful landing page and digital marketing services to drive traffic to it, resulting in greater conversions.

Get in touch with our team to find out how we can help.